Jesse Scheckner
New internal polling by high school teacher Bryan Paz-Hernandez’s campaign for the Miami-Dade County Commission shows him neck-and-neck with the incumbent he hopes to unseat in three weeks.
A phone survey conducted July 15-21 of 522 registered voters in District 11 found 29.5% plan to vote for Paz-Hernandez. Meanwhile, 31% sided with defending Commissioner Rob Gonzalez.
That’s well within the poll’s 5.5-percentage-point margin of error.
Notably, close to 38% of respondents said they were still undecided. Just over 1% said they’ll vote for Claudia Rainville.
Paz-Hernandez is a past President of the West Kendall Democrats Club. He switched to having no party affiliation last year.
Rodriguez, a lawyer whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the County Commission in November 2022, is a Republican. So is Rainville, an elementary school teacher.
Volunteers and paid callers from Paz-Hernandez’s team oversampled Republicans in District 11 to better reflect its political party leanings. About 60% of those polled were members of the GOP, compared to 24% who were Democrats and 16.5% who were independent.
Respondents were also asked whether they had a favorable, unfavorable or no opinion about each candidate.
From that query, Gonzalez was shown to have the best name ID. Fourteen percent of respondents said they viewed him favorably, while 7.5% viewed him unfavorably and 79% — the lowest share of the three candidates — reported either not knowing how they felt about him or saying they didn’t know enough about him.
Paz-Hernandez, on the other hand, held the best net favorability (12.4%). Thirteen percent said they liked him, while just 0.6% said they didn’t care for him. The remainder (86.4%) offered no opinion.
Rainville held 2.1% favorability and 1.5% favorability. All but 19 respondents (96.4%) either didn’t know enough or were reticent to say.
None of the candidates scored majority favorability among any given age group. However, two-thirds of respondents 30-49 said they held an unfavorable opinion about Paz-Hernandez. Three-fourths said the same of Rainville.
Thirty percent of voters 30 and under reported unfavorable views about Gonzalez. None said the same about Paz-Hernandez and Rainville.
The poll comes weeks after Paz-Hernandez, a former Democratic field organizer, reported that his campaign had knocked on more than 4,000 doors in District 11, which encompasses the neighborhoods of Country Walk, Hammocks, Kendale Lakes, Kendall, Bent Tree, Lake of the Meadows and West Kendall.
He has since secured an endorsement from the Kendall Federation PAC representing homeowner associations in the district.
The Miami-Dade Commission is a technically nonpartisan body, as are its elections, so Gonzalez, Paz-Hernandez and Rainville will all be on the Aug. 20 ballot. If no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote, the two biggest vote-getters will square off in the Nov. 5 General Election.
