‘A huge missed opportunity.’ Democrats fail to challenge Miami’s only House Republican

When South Florida Democrats couldn’t find a candidate to challenge Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a nine-term Cuban-American congressman from a prominent political family, they ensured that Miami’s only Republican will remain in Congress until 2023 — even though his district only went for President Donald Trump by a slim two-point margin.

That could prove to be a costly mistake, Democrats and others now say. If Trump’s support continues to sag in swing states including Florida, Democrats would have been in a position to capitalize on a potential blue wave in November that could carry even little-known, down-ballot candidates — the kind they might have fielded against Diaz-Balart — to unexpected wins.

“There’s a huge missed opportunity now because of what you’re seeing at the national level ... depending on how this presidential election turns out,” said David Perez, a Democrat who unsuccessfully sought a state Senate seat in 2018 that overlaps with Diaz-Balart’s district.

Kyle Kondik, who handicaps House races around the country with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said getting a candidate on the ballot is “a baseline responsibility for any political party” and noted that elections in 2006 for Democrats and 2010 for Republicans swept some unlikely challengers into Congress.

That’s the case, he said, even in Diaz-Balart’s district, where the incumbent has locked up support for close to 20 years and a Democrat’s chances of winning would be low.

“You can’t win if you don’t have a candidate, even with whatever small chance Democrats would have had in the district,” Kondik said. “It wouldn’t shock me at all if this district voted for [Joe] Biden.”

The inability to recruit a candidate to run against Diaz-Balart underscores the Democratic Party’s struggles in northwestern Miami-Dade County, where conservative Cuban Americans continue to wield considerable political clout at the ballot box. The area continues to produce powerful GOP politicians, but Democrats have had few success stories in the area since the mid-2000s, when Raúl Martinez was Hialeah mayor and Alex Penelas was mayor of Miami-Dade County.

But Miami-Dade Democratic Party chair Steve Simeonidis said the local party is focused on winning elections for offices where they think they have the strongest shots: state legislative seats, county commission seats and electing a Democrat as Miami-Dade mayor in 2020. Defending incumbent Reps. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala and helping likely presidential nominee Joe Biden are also top priorities this year.

“We’re very focused on districts and areas where we thought we would be able to win,” Simeonidis said.

Diaz-Balart did face a serious challenge in 2018, his first in a decade, from former Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Mary Barzee Flores. But Barzee Flores was recruited to run from the Coral Gables area, and Diaz-Balart easily defeated her by 21 percentage points.

That big of a Democratic loss “may have scared some folks off” in a possible race against Diaz-Balart, said Democratic state Rep. Cindy Polo, who flipped a Republican-held state House seat in 2018 that overlaps with Diaz-Balart’s district.

But Polo, whose district also includes portions of Democratic-leaning Broward County, said challenging well-known Republicans must be part of a long-term plan for local Democrats. That means getting candidates to run in districts like Diaz-Balart’s, even if they lose.

“We need to be making sure we have somebody running,” Polo said. “I think in that particular congressional district, including my [state] House district ... for the most part has not had a historical experience of bringing folks through the ranks. The Republicans have done an incredible job of grooming since preschool who’s going to run for a particular seat in 20 years.”

Polo said if Democrats are serious about winning elections in northwestern Miami-Dade, including longtime Republican strongholds like Hialeah and Miami Lakes, they have to play a long game, building political infrastructure like phone bank operations, candidate recruitment and Democratic clubs.

And even without much of that, there can be upset wins. Polo acknowledged she didn’t think she’d win when she filed to run for office, because of a lack of institutional support.

“I got into it thinking we can continue to chip away and maybe in 2020 someone [else] will come along and flip [my] seat,” Polo said. “Since we flipped my seat, I’ve been having very honest conversations about brave people that want to run and say, ‘You’ve got to be in this for the long haul.’ ’’

Simeonidis, the Miami-Dade Democratic chair, defended the party’s strategy of focusing on seats with a strong likelihood of a win: “We have a fantastic slate of candidates poised to win numerous seats throughout Miami-Dade County.”

Just not in Diaz-Balart’s district. The geography of the district, which stretches across the Everglades to include rural Hendry County and portions of heavily Republican Naples, makes it nearly impossible for Democrats to beat him, Simeonidis said.

“We’ve seen districts in our state and all around the country where the geographical lines make no logical sense,” Simeonidis said. “The only reason they were drawn that way was to give the GOP an advantage.”

Former Republican state Sen. Rene Garcia, who is running for the Miami-Dade County Commission in 2020, said Diaz-Balart’s constituent service makes him popular among independents and moderate Republicans, making it harder for a Democratic challenger to win voters who may stay away from Trump.

“I think when you have a lack of viable candidate that means the officeholder is doing a good job,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the disorganization of the Democratic Party. Democrats in [Miami-]Dade County are strong, but I really do think it’s the quality of the candidate themselves.”

And Diaz-Balart’s district also has other characteristics that make it less favorable territory for Democrats in 2020, despite Trump’s narrow 2016 victory there.

The district has a heavy concentration of Cuban-American voters, whose support for Democrats waned in 2018, and relative lack of suburban white women, who abandoned the Republican Party under Trump in droves in 2018.

And the Diaz-Balart name is well-known in South Florida. Mario’s father, Rafael, was a Cuban politician and prominent opposition voice to Fidel Castro. Mario’s brother, Lincoln, served in Congress from 1993-2011, and his brother, Jose, is a news anchor for Telemundo and NBC.

Christian Ulvert, a Miami-based Democratic strategist, said the district’s demographic makeup and the fact that the House of Representatives is already in Democratic control make it more important to protect incumbents Mucarsel-Powell and Shalala over challenging Diaz-Balart.

“When you factor all those things together, I’m not entirely surprised [Diaz-Balart’s] district went unchallenged,” Ulvert said. “Nationally, for House Democrats it’s about protecting the majority and it’s more important than ever to have a Democratic Congress.”

But Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster, said handing Diaz-Balart another term without opposition is an error in judgment. Only one incumbent House Republican in the entire country ran unopposed in 2018.

“If the anti-Trump wave in South Florida turns into an anti-Trump tsunami, Democrats may rue the fact they didn’t recruit a candidate who might have just been the beneficiary of being on the ballot as the Democrat running against an incumbent Republican,” Amandi said.

Miami Herald reporter David Smiley contributed to this report.

This story was originally published May 1, 2020 at 12:36 PM.