Trump cut margins in SD 37. Now, Democrat incumbent falls behind ahead of recount.
More than 215,000 voters cast ballots in the race for Senate District 37, where incumbent Democratic Sen. José Javier Rodríguez is hoping to defend his seat from Republican challenger, Latinas for Trump founder Ileana Garcia.
Now, just 31 votes separate the two. Garcia is ahead.
Late Friday, the final mail ballots with issues were counted, provisional ballots cured and final counts tabulated. On Saturday afternoon, official results will be transmitted from the Miami-Dade Elections Department in Doral to Tallahassee. From there, Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee can call for a recount.
In Florida, home to the most notorious recount in modern history, the law requires an automatic machine recount if the vote margin is less than .5% and a hand recount if it is less than .25%.
Rodríguez began Friday morning 20 votes behind Garcia, but as Miami-Dade election officials counted 24 more ballots in District 37 Friday, her lead widened to 31 votes, or .02%. Garcia gained 16 votes, Rodríguez gained five and NPA candidate Alex Rodriguez gained three.
Friday’s cure process took care of the rest of the mail ballots, leaving only military and overseas ballots to be counted. Those voters’ ballots must be received by Friday, Nov. 13.
In Miami-Dade County, 7,293 military and overseas voters were sent a ballot. All but 1,611 of them had been returned as of this week, but the ballots continued to trickle in Friday afternoon.
Recount is likely next week
The narrow margin of votes means an almost certain recount in the race to represent the Hispanic-majority district, which includes Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, Palmetto Bay and Pinecrest. Rodríguez was elected to represent the seat in 2016.
A recount is likely to begin as soon as Monday or Tuesday, depending on the path of Tropical Depression Eta. The canvassing board has until Thursday at 3 p.m. to finish the machine recount. It has until Sunday at noon to finish the manual recount process.
A small army of attorneys representing Garcia and Rodriguez and their political allies buzzed around the Miami-Dade elections office, in some moments getting into heated conversations about the presidential election that turned to yelling matches, requiring elections department staff to hush the observers.
Robert Fernandez, a Coral Gables attorney representing Garcia, said his team “feels good” about Garcia’s lead and that they trust that a recount will go smoothly under Miami-Dade County Supervisor Christina White.
“We have a good supervisor,” he said. “We have faith. But you never know what you’re going to find.”
Christian Ulvert, an adviser on Rodríguez’s campaign said he feels confident in his candidate, too.
“The process continues to work itself out and as we get ready for the manual recount and every vote is properly accounted for and tabulated, Senator Rodríguez will prevail,” he said.
The Miami-Dade Democrats sent 50 volunteers to knock on doors, and the Joe Biden campaign provided phone canvassers to reach voters county-wide who had problematic mail ballots. Those voters whose ballots had issues like a mismatched signature or insufficient voter ID needed to provide a cure affidavit to prove that they are eligible to vote. Of the 3,764 voters flagged, Democrat volunteers collected 2,961 cure affidavits to bring before the canvassing board, according to data provided to the Herald by Miami-Dade Democrats Chair Steve Simeonidis.
Keeping Rodríguez in his seat has been and continues to be a key priority for Senate Democrats, who pumped more than $300,000 into his campaign to help with polling, research, campaign staff and political consulting.
Garcia, a former television personality, posed a challenge to that goal as she is close to flipping the seat, which would add to the GOP majority in the chamber.
Garcia’s bid for the Florida Senate was backed by Senate Republicans and Gov. Ron DeSantis, and tried to win over voters in the Hispanic-majority district by casting Rodríguez as an extreme or socialist sympathizer, a political tactic that resonated in Miami, which is home to hundreds of thousands of residents who fled Latin American countries led by authoritarian regimes.
In the weeks leading up to the election, voters in the district were flooded with ads from a mystery donor who tried to promote Alex Rodríguez, a little-known third party candidate who did not actively campaign. Rodríguez voted in the 2018 midterm election as a registered Republican, according to elections data.
Alex Rodríguez’s name on the ballot presented an opportunity to confuse voters. He shared the same last name as the incumbent Democratic state senator, and earned 6,377 votes, or about 3% of the vote.
When the mailers popped up, Senate Democrats accused Republicans of coordinating a “dark money effort to siphon votes from Democratic candidates” to “help weak Republican candidates.” Republicans declined to comment on the mailers.
The Miami Herald has been unable to reach Alex Rodríguez over the course of several weeks. A Herald reporter on Thursday afternoon tried to reach him at his Palmetto Bay house, but no one answered the door despite signs of people being there.
Swinging for Trump
The outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Senate District 37 provides insight into how voters shifted to President Donald Trump compared to four years ago, when Rodriguez won the district.
In 2016, Rodriguez won the Hispanic-majority district with a three-point advantage, a significantly smaller margin than the 21-point advantage Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had over Trump in the district that year.
The story was much different this year.
The district swung 9.2% in Trump’s favor, with the support of Cuban Americans and non-cuban Hispanics. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden still defeated Trump in the district but by a much smaller margin than Clinton did.
Recount territory
Next week, with observers from both parties watching closely, the canvassing board will run a machine recount of the ballots cast in the Senate District 37 race. Workers will separate page one, which showed the Senate District 37 race, from page two of the ballot as well as fish out ballots cast for Senate District 37 during early voting, a period in which voters can cast ballots at any early voting locations and not just in the district. Then the machines will be inspected. Once the machines pass an inspection, they will tabulate the District 37 ballots and recount the votes.
If the margin stays close, as expected, the canvassing board will, one by one, try to figure out what voters were thinking when they made choices. This process is what is known as a manual recount.
While the recount could be Monday or Tuesday, White said she may also call it for Sunday afternoon to get ahead of the storm.
White has been in touch with Miami-Dade County emergency director Frank Rollason to get the latest information on the storm, which she’ll use to determine the recount calendar.
“We are at the mercy of mother nature,” she said.
After the chaos of the 2000 presidential recount, Florida got rid of the punch-card ballots — yes, that means no more hanging chads — and also adopted more specific standards for figuring out people’s choices, or known as voter intent.
From the rule:
“A manual review of the voter’s markings on a ballot is required to determine whether there is a clear indication that the voter has made a definite choice in a contest. The canvassing board must first look at the entire ballot for consistency.”
The manual recount will be a crucial aspect of the process, given the similarity of the names of José Javier Rodríguez and Alex Rodríguez. Democrat attorneys say they expect there to be what is called an “over count” of ballots where voters may have initially checked off Alex Rodriguez’s name, realized their mistake, and crossed it out in favor of the Democrat incumbent instead of asking for a new ballot entirely.
Herald/Times Tallahassee bureau reporter Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 2:58 PM.