Carlos Gimenez, Trump’s ‘warrior,’ aims to flip Miami’s swing seat in Congress
In the midst of managing the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in Florida and running in the state’s most competitive congressional race, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez drove two hours up the coast for a three-second shout-out from President Donald Trump.
Gimenez sat in a crowd of 200 at the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse last month, watching with mostly maskless attendees as the president reeled off the names of Florida Republicans he called “warriors,” running for office to fight House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Gimenez’s name was mentioned last, and Trump mispronounced it: JIM-eh-nez.
But Gimenez (pronounced he-MEN-ez) had gotten what he’d come for. The former Miami fire chief who had never before run for a partisan seat in his 16 years in elected office knew the power of Trump’s favor. He had waited to declare his candidacy for Florida’s 26th Congressional District until Trump flew into Miami in January, banking on the handshake from the president with Air Force One in the background to give him instant frontrunner status in the Republican primary and propel him to the general election to challenge one-term Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.
The airport handshake paid off. Just hours after Gimenez officially announced his run after months of speculation, Trump offered his endorsement hours later via Twitter.
Even though Gimenez’s candidacy is now deeply intertwined with the president’s reelection bid, the Miami-Dade mayor hasn’t always courted Trump or even the Republican Party.
The pre-Trump version of Gimenez voted for Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and was considered a business-friendly conservative in Miami, parlaying his 25-year career as firefighter into city and county government, and eventually elected office — in a non-partisan seat — in 2004.
The post-Trump version of Gimenez — who ordered county jails to comply with the president’s immigration detention requests, supports efforts to repeal Obamacare and who repeats Trump’s rhetoric that Democrats want to defund the police — hasn’t faced voters until now.
Incumbents usually have the advantage but this race is considered a toss-up. Trump’s appeal with conservative voters in the district is a factor but so is Mucarsel-Powell’s voting record that doesn’t stray far from Pelosi’s priorities. And Gimenez’s level of name recognition as mayor of Florida’s most populous county for nine years is something most congressional challengers can only dream of.
“The advantage that I have over my opponent is that I’ve run a large organization,” said Gimenez, who oversees a $9 billion budget and 28,000 employees. “I’ll know what my constituents want and what they need. I know most of it already because I’ve been here all of my life, unlike my opponent who hasn’t been here most of her life. She came here from California and I guess that’s why she’s always agreeing with Nancy Pelosi.”
Mucarsel-Powell moved to Miami 20 years ago from California and has spent most of her professional life in South Florida after moving to the U.S. from Ecuador as a teenager.
Recent polling in Miami shows Cuban-American support for Trump and Republicans is growing in South Florida, and Gimenez, who is Cuban-American, likely benefits from that. The district, which includes Miami’s western and southern suburbs along with the Florida Keys, had been represented by Cubans for 30 years until Mucarsel-Powell won in 2018.
But 2020 is a presidential election, and that increases voter turnout, another factor Gimenez says will help him.
“She won 2018 because there was a number of people that didn’t vote,” Gimenez said. “Well, most people are going to vote again this time around and so what does it mean to Latin[o] voters? I think that Latin[o] voters see that the president holds their values.”
And the embrace from Trump could help Gimenez win over some conservative voters who railed against his COVID policies as mayor, which included shutting down indoor dining and imposing fines on those who don’t wear masks in public.
“The core Republican voter I don’t think is too happy with him,” said Rick Yabor, a Republican lawyer and political commentator who lives in the district and says he is unsure who he will vote for. “The only saving grace for me is that Trump is on the ballot and while they’re there, they just may end up voting for him.”
On policy, Gimenez says if he wins he would take a more conservative track on many issues than the Republican, Carlos Curbelo, who held Mucarsel-Powell’s seat before she flipped it. Gimenez is against limiting the size of magazines in guns, not in favor of taxing carbon emissions and said the Trump administration was forced to make a tough choice when it separated immigrant children from their families when they crossed the border illegally. Ultimately, he said, he thinks the Trump administration made the right decision.
Gimenez praised the president’s handling of the economy and said voters in Miami are motivated to support him based on his anti-socialist rhetoric.
“What did the president accomplish in four years? What he did is he created the greatest economy of my lifetime,” Gimenez said, echoing a frequent talking point of Trump’s. “Unemployment rates for African-Americans, Hispanics and women were at all-time lows. You know what? That’s something that resonates. Also his hard stance on socialism and anti-communism.”
Many Miami voters came to the U.S. to escape countries with authoritarian regimes.
Gimenez’s relationship with the president goes back at least to 2015 when Trump, still a private businessman, donated $15,000 to Gimenez’s mayoral campaign as Trump sought to take over Miami-Dade County’s public golf course on Key Biscayne. He ultimately failed because the county commission rejected the proposal. Gimenez eventually recused himself from the decision — because his son worked for Trump as a local lobbyist in South Florida.
Immediately after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Gimenez ordered Miami-Dade County jails to comply with the Trump administration’s new immigration detention requests as the president sought to end “sanctuary cities,” or jurisdictions that didn’t cooperate fully with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Gimenez’s decision, which he argued was necessary to ensure that Miami-Dade County would get federal grant money, prompted Trump’s first tweet about him.
“Miami-Dade Mayor drops sanctuary policy. Right decision. Strong!” Trump tweeted.
Eight months later, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited Miami to celebrate Gimenez’s decision. A video of his remarks from Miami prompted another pro-Gimenez Trump tweet: “THANK YOU Mayor Gimenez for following the RULE OF LAW! Sanctuary cities make our country LESS SAFE!”
And 2 1/2 years later, when Gimenez announced his congressional run after the Miami International Airport meeting with the president, the Miami-Dade mayor got another Trump tweet: “Carlos will win big, very exciting. Great for Florida, great for USA! He has my complete and total Endorsement!”
Gimenez has at least twice publicly rebuked the president. In August 2017 — before he was running for Congress — Gimenez directly criticized Trump for saying about the Charlottesville protests that there were “very fine people on both sides” during violence at a white supremacist rally.
“It was very disappointing to hear President Trump essentially take back his comments from Monday condemning white supremacists and their actions in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend,” Gimenez said in a statement.
Gimenez also said Trump’s reported remark in January 2018 that immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and other African countries came from “shithole countries” was “unfortunate and shameful” if true. Miami-Dade County is home to the country’s largest concentration of Haitian-Americans.
But Gimenez has also leaned into Trump’s recent handling of crackdowns on protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement around the country. He’s argued that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Mucarsel-Powell want to divert funds away from the police — some of the protests have been aimed at “defunding police” and investing in programs to reduce poverty — and used a recent budget hearing to take shots at one of Trump’s favorite targets: Chicago.
“That’s why we’re not Chicago,” Gimenez said, defending Miami-Dade County’s purchase of software for law enforcement to analyze social media, a move critics said was a waste of money.
Gimenez said his biggest asset if elected is “I know how to keep people safe,” arguing his experience as a firefighter and determining police budgets will win over Trump supporters and some moderate-leaning voters who might have backed Mucarsel-Powell in 2018.
“She’s never served in public safety. She doesn’t know what it takes to keep people safe,” Gimenez said of Mucarsel-Powell. “She’s never been in the streets of the city like I have. Never served as a firefighter, never served as a police officer. It doesn’t mean you have to, but I certainly have and therefore I have much more experience on that.”
Gimenez said he’s “pro-police” and supports Gov. Ron DeSantis’ call last month for a law that would charge protesters with a felony if they block traffic without a permit. Critics called DeSantis’ proposal dangerous and political theater designed to fire up conservative voters weeks before Election Day.
“I think the penalties should be harsh for anybody that’s causing destruction of property and infringing on other people’s rights,” Gimenez said, again echoing the tone used by Trump to describe protesters. “There is a place for peaceful protest. But those that want to create wanton violence, that’s something that I’m totally against.”
But perhaps nothing has tested Gimenez like his handling of COVID in a county where 170,882 people have been infected and 3,284 people have died of the disease as of October 2, according to the Florida Department of Health.
Gimenez imposed fines for mask-wearing and shut down restaurants, but some public health officials said Miami-Dade County should have imposed another stay-at-home order over the summer.
Mucarsel-Powell said Gimenez “never had a clear plan” for managing the public health crisis and criticized Gimenez’s use of coronavirus relief funds passed by Congress in the CARES Act, a massive $2 trillion bill that provided $339 billion to state and local governments.
“He’s leading a county where under his management we became a hot spot for COVID,” Mucarsel-Powell said in an interview last month. “He has failed to really manage the CARES Act funding where mayors from both sides, Republican city mayors and Democratic city mayors have denounced his handling of the pandemic. He never had a clear plan. One day he was opening gyms the next day he was closing gyms, or the other way around, the same with restaurants, the same with bars.”
Gimenez said his priority with COVID recovery in Washington is getting people “back to work” and continuing the economy’s trajectory under Trump’s leadership while trying to also make the federal government “leaner and meaner.”
But Gimenez’s role as local authority on COVID brought him into conflict with Trump this summer. Trump flew into Miami at the height of the second spike of the disease and didn’t wear a mask at the airport, despite a countywide order by Gimenez that required masks in public places.
Gimenez had said publicly, on July 2, that “I believe the president, like every other leader, should follow what the rules are of the locality. And so depending on the locality, if he comes to Miami-Dade, I would expect that he would be wearing a mask because that’s our rules down here.”
Eight days later, Trump arrived in Miami and stepped off Air Force One without a mask. Gimenez, who was wearing a mask, was on the tarmac to greet him. Gimenez later said Trump and his staffers, who also weren’t wearing masks, maintained social distance and are a unique case because they’re tested so frequently.
“It’s apparent the White House requires extraordinary measures,” Gimenez said.
This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 3:51 PM.