After running as a moderate, Carlos Gimenez votes to overturn electoral college result

In his final speech as Miami-Dade mayor, Congressman-elect Carlos Gimenez offered some words of advice to the county commissioners he was leaving behind on his way to Washington.

“It’s all about collaboration and results,” Gimenez, a 66-year-old Republican, said during the Nov. 6 farewell ceremony at a PortMiami terminal. “People want their elected leaders to work together for the greater good. They don’t want us to get stuck in partisan, broken potholes.”

But in the first consequential votes of his nascent career in the U.S. House of Representatives, Gimenez voted Wednesday and early Thursday to support President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s victory in several battleground states — taking a position that even some members of his own party have cast as an overtly partisan attack on democracy.

Gimenez, who would not speak to the Miami Herald for this story, said in a statement Thursday that he voted to sustain objections to the results of the presidential election in Pennsylvania and Arizona due to changes in election procedures made by those states’ administrations without the approval of their legislatures.

“Though I acknowledge my objections to these particular slates of electors would never have changed the outcome of the election,” Gimenez said, “it is my duty as a member of Congress to exercise congressional oversight powers in order to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

But regardless of his reasoning, Gimenez’s votes — taken only hours after a pro-Trump mob forced its way into the U.S. Capitol building and interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump — seemed to cement his transformation from veteran Miami technocrat to partisan Washington operator.

“All I can tell you is I would have voted differently,” Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who held Gimenez’s seat in Congress until 2019, said Thursday, though he said he wasn’t directly criticizing Gimenez. “Regardless of any legitimate concerns people might have about how states handled their elections, to vote to de-certify the results promotes the lie that the election was stolen. And it ends up promoting the type of activity we saw yesterday.”

When Gimenez first announced he was running for Congress a year ago, Curbelo was among the Republicans who believed the mayor’s decades of public service spent outside the polarized atmosphere in Washington would help him win and govern. Gimenez timed the announcement of his congressional run to an endorsement by Trump — with whom he’d experienced a hot-and-cold relationship over the years — but he was best-known as a fire chief and administrator in the city of Miami and a thrice-elected county executive.

During his campaign against Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the Democrat who then represented Florida’s 26th congressional district, Gimenez navigated the COVID-19 crisis during a hyper-partisan atmosphere, and was booed by Trump supporters during a political rally in Opa-locka. When he succeeded in his race two months ago, he said his victory was a win for moderates.

“Today was a rejection of extremism,” Gimenez said. “Today was a rejection of partisanship.”

But on Wednesday, as other Republicans said voting to reject the results of states’ presidential elections would harm the country and make it further divided, Gimenez stood with Trump. Days after telling CNN he would keep an open mind and “vote my conscience,” he cast his late-night votes about 20 feet from the spot where a pro-Trump rioter was shot and killed by police while attempting to storm the House chamber.

“Today a woman died here,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said Wednesday evening, after voting to certify the results of the election in Arizona, warning other Republicans against using their votes as a means to send a message to voters. “Today, police officers were hurt here. And now is no longer the time for that kind of message.”

Rubio voted against invalidating Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electors while Sen. Rick Scott voted in favor of invalidating Pennsylvania’s electors but not Arizona’s. Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart joined Gimenez in objecting to both sets of electors, along with 13 of Florida’s 15 House Republicans who voted.

Vice President Mike Pence, a majority of Senate Republicans and all Democrats in Congress ultimately rejected the challenge and certified the election.

Gimenez’s own family had been divided by the question of whether to reject states’ electors. Appearing on a public affairs show Thursday, a daughter-in-law of the congressman, Democrat Tania Cruz-Gimenez, described heated exchanges between family members on election disputes.

“Being in a Republican family, the lone Democrat, you have these family group chats,” Cruz-Gimenez, a lawyer and candidate for Coral Gables commission, said during Andrew Korge’s Community Newspapers show. “Without naming names... it’s all the family arguing amongst each other. From the very hard-right Trumps, to the more moderates. It was incredible what was being said. Here’s the thing: There is a faction of the country that really believes that the election was stolen.”

Cruz-Gimenez said the congressman was not on the chat.

Political ramifications of Gimenez’s votes — if any — aren’t likely to be felt for months. His district, like the entirety of Miami-Dade County, swung dramatically toward Trump in the 2020 election. Any potential Democratic opponents or Republican primary challengers are months away from announcing their 2022 plans.

“He’s never been known within conservative circles,’‘ said former Florida Republican Party chairman Al Cardenas, a Trump critic. “My sense is that he saw if he didn’t vote that way, he would get primaried by a pro-Trump person and he would have had a hard time with that primary.”

Gimenez’s predecessor, Mucarsel-Powell, criticized Gimenez Thursday and said “the hypocrisy of saying he was running as a bipartisan was completely debunked yesterday when he took that vote.”

“I think that it’s very important for people to believe who individuals are when they tell you who they are,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “Carlos Gimenez entered the race for Florida’s 26th district embracing and supporting Donald Trump.”

Miami Herald Tallahassee bureau chief Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this report.

This story was originally published January 7, 2021 at 4:00 PM.