“Vote por Papi por favor”—that was the endearingly direct pitch Francis Suarez said he made at two years old in a late-’70s political commercial for his father, Xavier. At the time Xavier was running for a city commission seat—and lost. But six years later he became the first Cuban-born mayor of Miami and a major local figure whose career went on to straddle four decades. Now Suarez himself is the mayor of Miami, the Kennedy-esque heir to a political dynasty and an ascendant force. The Kennedy analogy, tired as it is, is still hard to avoid. Like John F., Suarez is young, good-looking, energetic, and speaks in generational terms. And like President Kennedy, who steered away from the ward politics of his father, Suarez has charted a distinct course. Xavier was known as a “pothole” mayor focused on constituent services, but Suarez has staked his reputation on reinventing Miami as an entrepreneurial hub to rival Silicon Valley.
The Kennedy analogy ends at political parties. Suarez is a Republican and has pursued an avowedly conservative agenda: pro-business, pro-technology, lower taxes and reduced regulation, pro-police and tough on crime. Say what you want about his politics, but it’s hard not to admire the energy and enthusiasm he brings to his cause. Suarez has bounded from coast to coast and from social media platform to social media platform extolling Miami as open for business (even in the midst of a historic pandemic) and positioning it as a safer, cheaper, more business-friendly alternative to San Francisco and New York City. In December, in response to a tweet about bringing Silicon Valley to Miami, he tweeted, “How can I help?”—four words that drew thousands of likes and hundreds of retweets.
Suarez credited the enthusiastic response to the fact that businesses and technologists were surprised to find a mayor who sees the role of government as a “facilitator, not an obstructer. Who thinks of himself as a public servant...Who wants to serve people and help people succeed as opposed to [getting] in the way of that success, which oftentimes a government does.” Weeks later he rented a billboard in San Francisco that simply said, “Thinking about moving to Miami? DM me.” More than 4,000 messages flooded in, including, per Suarez, one from Mayor London Breed of San Francisco that read (jokingly, he said), “Hands off my techies.” Despite his good relationship with Breed, he hasn’t kept his hands off; a slew of technology and investment companies—Blackstone Tech, SoftBank, and the Bitcoin-trading platform FTX—have expanded their presence in Miami, and an untold number of tech employees have relocated to the city in the era of remote work.
All this has made Suarez a rock star among a certain class of conservatives. Daniel Garza, the head of the conservative Libre Initiative, described him as “a true visionary.” Dave Rubin, the conservative YouTube star, couldn’t stop himself from gushing at least three times during a recent interview with Suarez that Miami is “blowing up,” and Ben Shapiro, himself a recent transplant to South Florida, stopped by Suarez’s own video show to compliment the mayor on his stewardship. In turn, Suarez’s name has been bandied about for higher offices ranging from governor to vice president—speculation that Suarez has done little to suppress.
His popularity with the conservative intelligentsia is matched locally. Suarez won his first mayoral run in 2017 with almost 86% of the vote, and according to local political analysts, he has managed to remain popular with all of the discordant constituencies that make Miami an “electoral powder keg.” It’s not that his term has been without challenges—a push to expand his mayoral powers sparked strong opposition from the powerful city commission and was rejected by voters almost two to one. Then there was the controversy over the proposed “David Beckham Stadium” in Freedom Park, and even the arrest of a trusted senior aide for battery and transmitting pornography to a minor. But his public approval has survived these problems. His popularity, and his roughly $3 million campaign war chest, have thus far kept all potential challengers on the sidelines, and he’s considered a prohibitive favorite for reelection in November.
None of that assures success going forward. The tragic building collapse in neighboring Surfside is a reminder of the huge challenges facing South Florida, and Miami itself is often thought of as an ungovernable mix of young and old, Black and white, Cuban and Haitian, and many other groups with competing interests. And as Francois Illas, a prominent political strategist in Miami, put it to me, “it’s also the only city in the country with its own foreign policy,” and nothing good can come of that. Miami takes skill and charm to manage, and Suarez has those in spades. But it also takes a fair amount of luck, and even the best strategist can’t predict how long that will last.
The success of Suarez with his diverse constituencies, especially Latinos, should make Republicans giddy. And indeed, he’s part of a growing bench of conservative candidates who have shown an ability to capture large chunks of Latino voters, leveraging pro-business, anti-socialist, and conservative messages. Recent successes—including the mayoral race in the border town of McAllen, Texas, where Republican Javier Villalobos pulled off a massive upset in an area long considered reliably blue—have suggested to some experts that Republicans could extend their gains with Latinos, especially in Florida and Texas.
The problem, though, for everyone, is that Suarez is an ill fit with the bombastic, nativist party created by Donald Trump. Suarez, the son of immigrants in a city of immigrants, has recoiled from the racist dog-whistles routinely employed by Trump and his acolytes, and he famously didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. He has equally clashed with another bold-faced name of the new Republican Party, fighting with Florida governor Ron DeSantis over COVID restrictions and declining to support him against Andrew Gillum in 2018.
In this, he has taken a different path from other next-gen Republicans like Marco Rubio and George P. Bush, who have tried to navigate the crosscurrents of the Trump era, leaving them open to the label of sellout, or worse. Bush’s campaign for attorney general in Texas, in particular, is a test case for the challenges of this era. Bush, who is half Mexican, could well capture a high percentage of the Latino vote, much as his uncle George W. did first in Texas and then nationally, and as his father, Jeb, did over three gubernatorial elections in Florida. But to do that, Bush must first survive a primary against incumbent Ken Paxton, whose indictment on securities fraud and series of office scandals have not stopped him from becoming a Trump favorite. Bush’s transparent efforts to curry favor with Trump resulted not only in a Trump endorsement of Paxton earlier this week, but a backhanded swipe at the “foolish and unsuspecting RINOs that are destroying our Country.”
Therein lies the dilemma for Republicans. Off year results have buoyed the notion that they can succeed when they focus on a range of issues attractive to the very large group of center and center-right Latinos: supporting businesses (especially small businesses), lowering taxes, and promoting stances that are appealing to Catholics and evangelicals. That spells opportunity for the 2022 midterms, but on the national level, the party remains hobbled by the looming presence of Trump. The former president’s approval rating among Latinos stands at 32%, according to the latest YouGov-Economist poll—rather good considering race-baiting and the insurrection and all that, but far below, for instance, the 67% approval rating earned at one point by George W. In 2020, Trump topped out at 32% of the Latino vote, a number considered a triumph but still well under what the party might do if it gave space to candidates like Suarez.
At least outwardly, Suarez was philosophical about the tensions between him and the Trumpists, telling me, “[What] I learned in those 41 years around politics is [that] you have to be yourself. There are things that are in your control...And then there’s a variety of things that are not in your control. If I had told you in 2013 that the president of the United States was going to be Donald Trump, you probably would have laughed at me, right? You would not have even conceived of that. Politics is a pendulum that swings constantly. It’s really hard to say what’s going to happen in four years or in two years or in one year.” In the end his strategy may, as one local analyst told me, need to be to wait out the current wave and try to push a more inclusive agenda should the Trump phenomenon ever ebb.
Which is more a shame for Republicans, because when it comes to Latinos, Democrats continue to leave the door open. The post-2020 election consensus was that Democrats took Latino support for granted and treated them as “get-out-the-vote targets rather than audiences for persuasion,” to quote The New York Times. Democrats swore to do better—a good inclination considering Latinos are key to their coalition of the future. But interviews with a string of political experts across Florida and Texas suggested Democrats have reverted to form, assuming that Latinos will naturally gravitate to Joe Biden’s racial-equity agenda and its proposals to broadly expand government programs. Natasha Altema-McNeely, a political scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, told me that the arguments of the vocal left have not landed well with the large portions of the Latino audience more focused on border security, crime, and economic growth. Dario Moreno, a political scientist at Florida International University, observed that the administration hasn’t “really done anything that would cost them votes, but they haven’t done anything that would gain them votes either.” That may be a charitable view. Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s numbers have faded since the inauguration, according to YouGov-Economist tracking polls. Approval has declined, albeit modestly, since January, and Biden has lost eight points with Latinos on the key indicator of “care about people like me.” None of the numbers are necessarily bad, and they’re certainly better than those of the national Republicans. But they’re not where Democrats want to be if winning 70% of the vote is the benchmark.
By all rights, Latinos—the fastest-growing large group of voters in the country—should be avidly courted by both parties. But some Latinos feel that the parties are obsessed with other constituencies, to the detriment of their community. Garza of the Libre Initiative commented to me that it’s a “black-and-white argument going on. Any time there is a discussion on race on TV, Latinos are barely mentioned.” He went on to tell me, paraphrasing the writer Richard Rodriguez, that it’s like “Latinos are in this sort of motel room, and they’re hearing through this thin wall a black-and-white argument. Like we’re there but we’re not really there.” It may take new faces like Suarez’s to bring Latinos into the room, and whichever party does it first and best will reap significant returns.
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