Mucarsel-Powell is a candidate of firsts. She’ll need another one to beat Gimenez.
Miami Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell has built her short political career on a list of firsts. The first South American elected to Congress. The first non-Cuban to represent her district since the 1980s. And, after her 2018 election, part of the first Congress with more than 100 women members.
Jill Biden, wife of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, highlighted those accomplishments during a recent campaign event with two other first-time, Latina congresswomen, Texas Reps. Sylvia Garcia and Veronica Escobar.
“You’re all first,” Biden said. “The first Ecuadorean-American and South American member, and the first two Latinas to represent Texas. And you’ve shown such courage during your time in the House, demanding accountability, raising up the voices of the unheard, and demonstrating a kind of sisterhood we don’t see enough of.”
But unlike Escobar and Garcia, who represent safe Democratic districts in El Paso and Houston, Mucarsel-Powell will need to make another first if she wants a second term. She’ll have to defeat an opponent, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who has never lost an election in a political career that stretches back to 2004.
And that’s likely to be a fight all the way to Election Day. Polls indicate that the election to represent Florida’s left-leaning 26th Congressional District, which includes Miami’s western and southern suburbs along with the Florida Keys, is tightening, making it an outlier nationwide among districts represented by first-term lawmakers.
But Mucarsel-Powell — even with recent polling showing that Cuban-American support for President Donald Trump and Republicans has grown since 2016 in South Florida — isn’t abandoning her strategy of sticking close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and charting a more partisan course than many of her fellow Democrats in competitive seats.
“The story, or what I’ve heard, is that I follow the line of the left, radicals,” said Mucarsel-Powell, shrugging off comparisons to left leaning first-year lawmakers like Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, who considers herself a democratic socialist. “I’m a 49-year-old woman, a mother, wife. I’ve had a successful career. I have my own mind. I don’t follow anyone. And so I find that amusing as a woman that I’m following or I’m being dictated upon.”
And yet she has mostly followed the Democratic party line on important votes, fueling Republicans’ claims that she’s too liberal for her district. While some of her Democratic colleagues spent recent weeks grumbling about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s determination to stand firm on COVID relief legislation after Republicans stopped negotiating, Mucarsel-Powell stood next to Pelosi in front of the national media.
In turn, Pelosi has publicly supported Mucarsel-Powell, most recently as part of her weekly address on Sept. 17: “Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is a powerful voice for the urgent need for sufficient testing.”
Mucarsel-Powell has also consistently backed Pelosi’s push for the broad COVID relief bill called the Heroes Act — even as other Democrats have tried to get piecemeal legislation through more quickly with an eye on the November election. The Heroes Act was passed in the House in May without Republican support, with Democrats since then using the bill as evidence that Republicans are uninterested in passing additional aid.
“We know what we need to do to be able to crush the spread of coronavirus and get people back to work and make sure that parents feel safe to send their kids back to school,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “All of these answers lie in the Heroes Act, which provides us with the tools needed to act aggressively and comprehensively in this moment. It gives us $75 billion for the testing capability that health experts have recommended for months.”
The relationship with Pelosi has helped Mucarsel-Powell to carve a path in Washington despite her first-term status.
She managed to get the last spot on the high-profile Judiciary Committee after Pelosi backed her over a more experienced lawmaker who opposed Pelosi’s bid for speaker. And that position has given Mucarsel-Powell national airtime in high-profile hearings, such as President Donald Trump’s impeachment, when she sparred with big-name Republicans like Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz.
She made more news during a July Judiciary Committee hearing on the Portland protests with Attorney General William Barr, Mucarsel-Powell compared his handling of the demonstrations to violent crackdowns in Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.
“We have seen violence in Venezuela at the hands of Maduro,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “But it’s hard to distinguish those photos from the events and what we’ve seen by U.S. federal police in Portland teargassing and breaking the bones of a peacefully protesting U.S. Army veteran. Very similar.”
Her line of questioning with Barr led to a social media squabble with Miami Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.
“I am shocked that she is unable to distinguish between the actions of the honorable men and women in law enforcement who risk their lives to defend the rule of law, and Maduro’s thugs...” Diaz-Balart tweeted.
Mucarsel-Powell tweeted back with a video of Jordan asking during the hearing whether the video was shot in the U.S. or Venezuela.
“Um, actually Mario Diaz-Balart, it was your colleague Jim Jordan who found it hard to distinguish between Trump’s America and Latin America,” Mucarsel-Powell tweeted. “And that was the point. Troll elsewhere.”
Diaz-Balart and his brother, former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, used to represent much of Mucarsel-Powell’s current district, part of a 30-year run in which a half dozen Cuban Americans took turns serving Miami’s majority Hispanic suburbs. Republicans think presidential-year turnout will help them in the district this time, noting that while Trump lost by 16 points in the district during the 2016 election, the Republican running for Congress at the time, Carlos Curbelo, won by 12 points.
Mucarsel-Powell is the first non-Cuban to represent Miami-Dade’s southern and western communities since the late Claude Pepper held a congressional seat back in the late ‘80s that encompassed most of Miami-Dade County, before Miami-Dade County was sliced up into five congressional districts due to population growth.
“No one thought that we were going to be able to take the establishment, the Republican, Cuban establishment that has taken a hold of Florida politics for more than 20 years,” Mucarsel-Powell said during a campaign event in August.
Republicans swiped back at her.
“At a campaign event, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell apparently thought it was a good idea to attack Cubans when many of her constituents are...Cuban,” the National Republican Congressional Committee said in a statement.
Mucarsel-Powell has clashed with Republicans during her two years in office. She complained when former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, the Republican she defeated in 2018, was invited by Democrats to testify last year before the House Ways and Means Committee while weighing a bid for his old seat. Mario Diaz-Balart has declined to co-sponsor legislation with her.
“From the moment I took office, this seat has been a target for them,” Mucarsel-Powell said of local Republicans. “It’s clear that they get messages from the top to not work with me. There have been many Republicans that have worked with me and continue to do so even more now that they’ve gotten to know me.”
But to some extent, she’s drawn fire from Republicans through her own actions, especially by joining the Congressional Progressive Caucus, giving Republicans fodder to say that she’s aligned with high-profile leftists like Ocasio-Cortez, who is also a member of the group, even though the two do not have a close relationship.
Mucarsel-Powell said she thinks her constituents will reward her for taking votes that she says are based on principle, even if they hurt her when it comes to bipartisanship.
She recalled a vote during her second month in office after one of her top legislative priorities, a bill that would have required universal background checks for gun purchases, was poised to pass the House.
Minutes before the final vote, Republicans executed a legislative maneuver that added a requirement to the bill saying border patrol agents would be notified if an undocumented immigrant tried to buy a firearm.
In the end, 41 Democrats voted for the change to the bill but Mucarsel-Powell was not among them. She later voiced concerns that Democrats who represented much safer districts than hers defected to vote with Republicans.
“The Republicans have been using undocumented immigrants as a wedge issue to divide and that was a really tough moment for me,” Mucarsel-Powell said.
But in recent months, Mucarsel-Powell broke ranks three times to vote with Republicans on changes to legislation, even though she had previously argued that Democrats should stick together.
In March, she voted for a Republican amendment, along with 41 other Democrats, on a bill that changed working conditions for Transportation Security Administration agents. In July, she again voted for a Republican amendment, with 38 other Democrats to change a major infrastructure bill. And in September she did it again, voting with 65 other Democrats to alter a bill that grants funds to schools to investigate discrimination.
Gimenez, her Republican challenger, said Mucarsel-Powell is “sprinting to the middle” now that Election Day is approaching, though Mucarsel-Powell insisted that she doesn’t play “political games” with her votes.
And yet Gimenez and other Republicans also tried to brand her as too liberal, pointing out that Mucarsel-Powell does have one thing in common with Ocasio-Cortez: using their initials as a brand. Ocasio-Cortez embraced the moniker “AOC” shortly after her 2018 election.
In recent weeks, Mucarsel-Powell has taken a similar approach.
“My name is Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and you can call me DMP,” Mucarsel-Powell said in her first 2020 ad. “Which as long as I’m in Congress stands for don’t mess with my people.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 3:55 PM.