Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who declared his bid for the White House on June 15, promised he would drop out of the race if he didn’t meet the Republican National Committee’s fundraising and polling thresholds to qualify for the first Republican primary, which was held Wednesday in Milwaukee. Then he claimed that he had qualified for the debate but, as we all could see, he wasn’t on the stage last week. Since then the question has been, Would Suarez persist with his vanity campaign or drop out, as he said candidates with support as anemic as his should do?
Would Suarez persist with his vanity campaign or drop out, as he said candidates with support as anemic as his should do?
We got our answer Tuesday, when Suarez posted on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, “Running for President of the United States has been one of the greatest honors of my life,” he wrote. “While I have decided to suspend my campaign for President, my commitment to making this a better nation for every American remains,” he added. With the suspension of his campaign, Suarez became the first Republican candidate to drop out of the 2024 race.
If some series of miracles had happened and Suarez had been elected president, he would have been the first Latino president of the United States, a goal Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had when they ran in 2016. Rubio dropped out after he lost that year’s Florida primary to Donald Trump. Suarez didn’t even come close to Rubio’s subpar performance.
Such an awful candidate had no business running for president. What made him so awful, you ask?
Let’s start with the fact that not a lot of people have voted for him. Being mayor of Miami is not a powerful position and, sizewise, Miami (population 460,000 in 2020) is 19 times smaller than New York, eight times smaller than Los Angeles and six times smaller than Chicago. There’s absolutely no evidence that Suarez can win broad swaths of support. Suarez, the son of a former mayor of Miami, won 85.81% of the vote when he ran for mayor in 2017. While that might sound impressive, only 25,471 people bothered to vote. The 21,856 people who voted for him, The Miami Herald noted, represented only 11.3% of Miami’s registered voters.
In 2021, Suarez won with a smaller number of votes and a smaller share of the vote: 21,485 votes and 79% of votes cast. If you’re counting, that’s the son of a former mayor winning a grand total of 43,341 votes in two elections.
The Miami Herald has dubbed Suarez a “Mayor for Hire.” He was paid around $170,000 in about two years by Rishi Kapoor, a real estate developer currently being investigated by both the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The payments, according to reports, happened after the two-term mayor and his staff helped Kapoor and his company write up a new law that would benefit Kapoor’s project. Last month, Kapoor stepped down from his company in what was reported as an “amicable” agreement.
Suarez, who admitted that he was receiving $10,000 a month from that developer, has denied any wrongdoing, telling a local news station that he “is allowed to have outside income” and he has no time for “distractions.” It’s true. Suarez can take on private clients and earn additional money as a public official. Even so, the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust and State Attorney are now looking into what a Miami television station termed the “side hustle” that led to Suarez receiving the aforementioned payments from a developer who wanted the laws changed to benefit him and his company.
Suarez is a real estate attorney. He now has a net worth of $3.4 million, but he was worth much less not long ago. The Miami Herald reported last month that 2022 was “the second year in a row that Suarez has more than doubled his net worth.”
Miami politics is rough and tumble, and an elected official without political enemies doesn’t exist. But as chronicled in a recent feature by Adrian Carrasquillo on The Messenger, Suarez seems to have more than his share of detractors, including prominent Latinos in his own party. They include former Mayor Tomas Regalado, who said the “no-show mayor” would be a “no-show president;” and Rep. Carlos Giménez, a former Miami-Dade mayor who appeared on Fox Business to call Suarez a “complete fraud.”
The Miami Herald reported last month that 2022 was “the second year in a row that Suarez has more than doubled his net worth.” Suarez said in June that he was running for president because America needs “a next-generation leader who has the vision to lead and the character to connect with everyone by looking at them in the eyes and listening to them.” But there are some in the Sunshine State who believe that Suarez wasn’t running because he believes he can be president, but running because he hates Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. As a DeSantis supporter told The Messenger about Suarez, “The guy doesn’t like Trump, but he really doesn’t like DeSantis for a number of policy reasons.” He said, “The guy is a Republican only because that’s his particular family pedigree.” Maybe Suarez was running on the belief that Miami’s Cuban American vote is particularly powerful. It’s true that at the height of the Cold War Cuba policy and the fight against communism helped steer the Republican Party. It’s also true that the Cuban American vote is still active and leans to the right. But almost every other Latino subgroup leans Democratic. But the bigger point is this: Cuban American Marco Rubio couldn’t win a Florida primary in 2016, and he’d previously won 2,645,743 votes in a statewide election. Why did Suarez, with his pittance of votes in Miami, believe that he’d do better? When Suarez was still in the race, none other than Kellyanne Conway named him among Trump’s best picks for vice president, that is, in the likelihood that the candidate with four indictments and 91 criminal charges against him wins the Republican nomination. Conway, of course, gave us the Trumpian phrase “alternative facts,” which is what one needs to rely on to think Suarez has a chance at being vice president — and what he must have been looking at to believe he ever had a chance at the presidency.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. 
