Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami submits application Paperwork for a presidential campaign on Wednesday, helping him join an increasingly crowded field of candidates jockeying to overtake former President Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination.
Cuban-American, 45-year-old Suarez, overwhelmingly elected twice to head one of Florida’s largest cities, is presenting himself as a new face for an already struggling party. difficult for three consecutive elections when voters in the general election were not happy with him. . Trumpet. I expect give a speech on Thursday night at the Reagan Library in California.
The Republican field has grown to nearly a dozen hoping to compete with the leader, Mr. Trump, who was impeached this month. a federal case involving classified documents. Mr. Suarez is also facing off against Ron DeSantis, the governor of his home state, who has always been Mr. Trump’s top rival but is also far behind in existing polls.
But Mr. Suarez is little known outside of his state and he is facing emerging charges of using influence on behalf of a real estate development company to sell goods.
Mr. Suarez grew up in Miami politics, with his father, Xavier L. Suarez, serving two terms as mayor in the 1980s and 1990s. Mr. Suarez was later elected to the Miami-Dade County Commission, where his terms coincided with that of his son.
The younger Suarez served as a Miami city commissioner before being elected mayor in 2017 with 86% of the vote. In 2021, he was re-elected with 79% of the vote.
Although the city’s voters traditionally lean Democratic in national elections, that is not the case in local elections and the mayor’s office is listed as nonpartisan on the ballot papers. ballot.
No one was elected get into the White House, or even get the nomination of a major party, directly from the mayor’s office — though Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., population about 100,000, has come closer than most elections Democratic Party’s 2020 primaries, won Iowa and placed second in New Hampshire, but failed and dropped out before Super Tuesday.
Miami, with a population of about 450,000, gives Mr. Suarez a significantly larger starting point. But the mayor of Miami is a part-time and mostly ceremonial job.
Mr. Suarez can veto legislation, hire and fire a city manager, but he has no vote on the five-member City Committee, and in 2018 he failed to convince voters to give him powerful mayor power. After clashing with city commissioners, he began to turn away from day-to-day legislative matters.
Mr. Suarez’s national profile began to emerge after he became one of the first elected officials contracted Covid in March 2020. He documented his illness in online videos, giving people a glimpse of a virus most people knew very little about at the time. about it.
Later that year, when a venture capitalist pitched the idea on Twitter to move Silicon Valley to Miami, Mr. answered, “What can I help?” – an answer that put him in the tech field and a broader conversation about how leaders can best market their city.
He soon emerged as a crypto enthusiast and the darling of tech workers who moved to Miami during the pandemic. Even before the crypto industry fell into crisis last yearCritics accuse him of being more interested in traveling the country to speak at conferences than dealing with the city’s most pressing problems, such as overpriced housing.
This spring, Mr. Suarez was criticized for reports that he had been paid large sums of money by a company seeking help to promote a luxury condominium project. In a series of articles reported by The Miami Herald, Mr. Suarez received at least $80,000 to advise the developer, Location Ventures, and then the developer paid him $170,000 “to help remove red tape and secure critical permits.”
This month, The Herald reports that the FBI is investigating the developer’s hiring of Mr. Suarez.
