Trump blessed Miami-Dade mayor’s run for Congress. Will that clear the Republican primary?
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez won President Donald Trump’s blessing for his congressional campaign, but that may not be enough to avoid a potentially contentious Republican primary in Florida’s 26th congressional district.
Gimenez’s shock-and-awe campaign launch last week, timed to Trump’s Miami visit and an endorsement via presidential tweet, was the kind of roll-out that in the Republican Party can clear out the field. But Omar Blanco and Irina Vilariño, Republicans who launched congressional campaigns months before Gimenez jumped into the race, say they will continue stumping — for now.
In interviews Tuesday, Blanco, a county firefighter with endorsements from four county commissioners, said he’s going to “move forward as planned.” And while Vilariño said she’s evaluating her options, the sharp-elbowed co-owner of the Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine restaurant chain hasn’t stopped jabbing at the mayor’s most vulnerable spot — his vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Both opponents acknowledge that Gimenez’s decades-long political career, his immensely powerful position and his presidential backing make him the immediate front runner and a formidable opponent. But so far, neither is prepared to concede that he is unbeatable in a late-summer primary.
”Perception is not always reality,” Vilariño said Tuesday in an interview. “We’ll have to see. Nobody has a Magic 8 Ball to August.”
In many Republican primaries, a Trump endorsement alone can decide the contest. Gimenez also enters the race at the behest of House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, and with the full enthusiasm of the Republican Party of Florida.
But the conservative Vilariño — who sat next to Trump in 2018 when he held a small business roundtable in Hialeah — is running an aggressive campaign against the mayor even as she weighs whether to continue campaigning. She is running Facebook ads that highlight Gimenez’s disloyalty to the president in 2016, when he said Trump should drop out of the presidential race. She has also blasted the mayor’s administration as “corrupt.”
She believes “voters would appreciate a debate between candidates.” And she said on Twitter recently that Trump’s endorsement of Gimenez — “Carlos will win big, very exciting. Great for Florida, great for USA!” Trump tweeted — shows he was “ill-advised by D.C. insiders who may not have our community’s best interests at heart.”
Vilariño also dismisses the significance of an October poll commissioned by a national Republican organization that suggested Vilariño and Blanco barely register with voters in the district. Memos detailing her own internal polling, which she shared Tuesday at the Miami Herald’s request, confirm that she’s a significant underdog but suggest that she’s much closer to Gimenez than the October poll found and able to beat the mayor with an aggressive campaign.
But to run a successful campaign in a sprawling district requires money, and Gimenez hurt both his opponents in the fall simply by announcing he was interested in a possible run for Congress.
Vilariño’s campaign says she has raised about $440,000 total in 2019, meaning her contributions in the final three months of the year — which should be released Friday by the Federal Election Commission — totaled about $70,000.
Blanco, too, acknowledges that Gimenez has harmed his fundraising.
”You and I both know the minute he got in, I went from raising a hundred grand in 41 days to really struggling to keep that momentum,” he said while declining to release his fundraising totals for the year.
Blanco is also dealing with an additional, somewhat awkward complication: he is campaigning against his boss.
Gimenez, as the county’s strong mayor, oversees the fire department. And Blanco, a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue lieutenant, said he has no intention of going negative against Gimenez, likely making it more difficult to overcome the mayor’s advantages.
Blanco said some of the four county commissioners who endorsed him before Gimenez got in the race have called him in the last week to see how he’s doing.
“I told them, ‘We’ve got a plan,’” he said.
Gimenez, who raised $7 million for his 2016 mayoral campaign, wouldn’t say how much money he has raised in his first week as a candidate, or who he has hired to work on his campaign. But Nicole Rapanos, a newly hired Gimenez campaign spokeswoman, said Gimenez has received an “outpouring” of support that shows he is “one of the most accomplished and best positioned candidates in the country.”
“Gimenez looks forward to the campaign trail,” she said.
Still, while finances appear to be in the mayor’s favor, any kind of drawn-out Republican primary could expose fractures in Gimenez’s Republican base. And, even if an upset is unlikely, it could cost Gimenez money he could otherwise spend in a general election, given the sprawling size of the district and the high expense of running TV ads.
Meanwhile, Democratic incumbent Debbie Mucarsel-Powell says she has raised more than $2 million for her reelection campaign, and will be able to continue stockpiling money without a primary opponent. As soon as Gimenez announced his campaign, she began using his candidacy as a tool to raise money, warning Democrats that a threat was coming.
But for now, at least, Blanco and Vilariño say that Mucarsel-Powell shouldn’t bank on facing Gimenez in November.
“I owe it to the people who supported us, and our voters,” Vilariño said Tuesday. “The process allows them the right to choose which candidate best represents their ideals.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
