Jesse Scheckner
Democrat Daniella Levine Cava made history four years ago, when she became the first woman and Jewish person to win the Miami-Dade County mayoralty.
Now she’s looking to make history again by being the first such person re-elected to the post.
Six challengers stand in her way. A couple of them — Miami Lakes Mayor Manny Cid and social media influencer Alex Otaola, both Republicans — carry large enough war chests and name ID to threaten her incumbency.
But few, if any, would disagree that she’s strongly positioned to repel them.
She’s the only mayoral candidate to qualify for the race by petition, a feat she accomplished twice. Her fundraising has been jaw-dropping: $6.3 million since she took office, a sum more than seven times that of her opponents’ gains combined.
Nearly 75% of the county’s municipal Mayors are backing her, as are close to two-thirds of city Vice Mayors and more than 90 other current and former local leaders and a myriad of union and advocacy organizations. She also has the support of many local community leaders, including Miami music icon Luther Campbell.
She can also tout the county’s sub-2% unemployment rate, record-smashing airport and seaport business, green initiatives like the shore power program at PortMiami and a federally funded electric bus fleet, and an administration that netted 75 Achievement Awards from the National Association of Counties last year.
She received national attention for her response to the Surfside condo collapse in 2021, when she also led the county through the second year of the pandemic as her administration distributed more than 300,000 at-home test-kits to residents and more than $80 million in emergency rental assistance to prevent the eviction of thousands of families.
Levine Cava, 68, worked as a lawyer in Miami helping at-risk children for more than a decade before launching a nonprofit today known as Catalyst Miami to assist low-income families.
Her ascendance to the county’s top elected office in 2016 came six years into her tenure on the Miami-Dade Commission, where she distinguished herself as a labor-friendly, eco-focused policymaker.
As a Commissioner, she passed forward-thinking measures requiring new parking lots to be built with underground wiring for future electric vehicle charging, established the Infill Housing Program to build affordable dwellings on county-owned land and created a “float-o-voltaic” solar panel array on an otherwise unused waterbody near Miami International Airport (MIA) — an idea state lawmakers adopted in 2022.
But as her opponents are quick to point out, she’s made a lot of mistakes and questionable moves in the past four years. In 2022, she attended a trip to Qatar, funded by the country’s authoritarian regime, which at the time had her chief political adviser on its payroll.
Last year, her administration’s failure to renew a local gas tax caused a $17 million county shortfall. Levine Cava publicly played the flub off as an impromptu tax holiday while quietly suspending her Budget Director.
She caught heat in January over deferred maintenance at MIA that shut down the hub’s interterminal SkyTrain, forcing travelers to walk up to a mile to their gates. In a statement, she blamed her predecessor’s administration.
More recently, Levine Cava has attracted negative headlines for backing a now-canceled plan to purchase a half-empty office complex in South Miami-Dade at a rate higher than market value and a $2.5 billion bond proposal she similarly nixed after it proved unpopular with voters.
Cid, 40, said those missteps and others prove Miami-Dade is in the wrong hands. Everyday county residents just aren’t living better under Levine Cava than they were four years ago, he argued, pointing to still-shadeless Metrobus stops, increased trash collection fees, parking fees at taxpayer-funded parks and an arduous permitting process that has incensed at least one other Levine Cava challenger this year.
Under Levine Cava, Miami-Dade’s government workforce has grown by 9%. County employees, thanks to new union agreements, are getting raises that are expected to increase Miami-Dade’s already growing budget by $250 million over three years.
Cid is proposing something of a U-turn. If elected, he said he’ll cut county spending while also slashing countywide property taxes by 10%, which alone would remove about $200 million per year from the budget.
It’s not necessarily a radical idea; U.S. Rep. Carlos Giménez, who preceded Levine Cava as Mayor, made an even larger cut in 2011 near the end of the recession that resulted in the termination of hundreds of county jobs and, for the public servants who survived them, pay reductions.
Of note, property values were falling then; they’re rising now.
Cid said some of the downsizing would come just by eliminating roughly 3,000 positions that are already vacant, plus several senior-level jobs Levine Cava created that he views as superfluous, including the soon-to-be obsolete Chief of Public Safety.
He’d also take a close look at how, how much and to whom the county pays for outsourced goods and services. A recent staff report revealed that one out of every five contracts Miami-Dade approved last year was a no-bid deal.
“The bureaucracy is just way too big,” he told Florida Politics.
With a victory this year, Cid said he’ll eschew donations from companies with existing contracts with or seeking contracts from the county. “How can I be an administrator when people I’m supposed to hold accountable are giving to my campaign?” he told the Miami Herald last year.
That might’ve been a knock on the incumbent, whose campaign gains include ample donations from real estate developers building in the county, $500,000 from billionaire Ken Griffin, who announced plans two years ago to relocate his Citadel hedge fund to Miami, and $135,000 from intercounty rail company Brightline and its parent company.
Cid, a restaurateur and educator who cut his political teeth working for nearly seven years as a Florida House legislative aide, has enjoyed consistent electoral success since winning a Miami Lakes Town Council seat in 2012.
He has served as Mayor of the 30,000-resident municipality since 2016, when he secured 77% of the vote. He won re-election to the weak Mayor post — which unlike the Miami-Dade Mayor job confers him a vote on the Council, which he leads, but no managerial powers — without opposition in 2020.
Between when he launched his campaign in September 2023 and Aug. 2, Cid raised close to $528,000, with large donations coming from real estate, health care and technology businesses.
He also carries endorsements from Associated Builders and Contractors, the Christian Family Coalition and Miami Young Republicans, a Florida GOP affiliate.
Otaola, 45, doesn’t have the institutional support Levine Cava and Cid enjoy, nor does he have many big-name backers — aside from Roger Stone, who has worked to help his campaign.
Rather, he has an army of online supporters who have made more than 13,000 small contributions, mostly through his “Hola! Ota-Ola” show on YouTube that centers largely on Cuba and communism — both major focuses of his campaign.
Many of Otaola’s donors live outside Miami-Dade. But many also live here, leading some to posit that he may outperform Levine Cava’s other challengers in a county with the world’s largest Cuban diaspora population.
A first-time candidate, Otaola was born in Cuba and emigrated to the U.S. in 2003 by visa, working various jobs before being cast in telenovela and Spanish-language comedy shows. County records show he was a registered Democrat from 2012 to 2020, when he switched to the Republican Party while riding a wave of popularity for his show’s ardent support of ex-President Donald Trump.
Otaola’s campaign website lists several objectives, from reducing traffic and boosting business with tax incentives to safeguarding schools and supporting police. At the top of his list is making “Miami-Dade a communist-free zone.”
Not-so-coincidentally, that’s the name of an electioneering communications organization that has raised $67,000 in support of his campaign. Otaola has separately amassed $311,000, including a $23,000 self-loan.
If elected, Otaola said he plans to use county resources to rid Miami-Dade of corruption and communism by empaneling specialized commissions to investigate businesses and “frontmen” that are funneling laundered money back to the oppressive regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
He’s offered little to no evidence such activities are taking place. Levine Cava’s campaign blasted him for the accusation that she’s allowing it to happen on her watch.
But the voters, Otaola said, “are asking for us to step in.”
“The communist penetration has been long coming, and there has been no one at the county level willing to take on these things,” he told Florida Politics through a translator.
Otaola says he understands English, but prefers to communicate in Spanish.
During the 2020 election cycle, as Otaola’s popularity soared along with his YouTube subscriber count (now at 377,000 and rising), a resurfaced video of him hosting his show in blackface made headlines, drawing accusations of racism. He said he regrets the incident.
Four other candidates are running in the technically nonpartisan Mayor’s race, though none has much of a chance at making it past the Primary.
There’s Republican Carlos Garín, a 59-year-old Spanish-language actor and broadcaster who ran for the Miami-Dade Commission in 2018, placing last in a four-way race that Democrat Eileen Higgins won.
Since filing to run on Jan. 31, he’s added $27,000 to his campaign account, most of it his money.
Another Republican, 45-year-old businessman Shlomo Danzinger, gained political prominence in 2022, when he unseated Charles Burkett for the Surfside mayoralty. Burkett won a rematch in March after months of unflattering headlines about Danzinger, whose bellicosity at government meetings led to frayed relationships with others at Town Hall.
Danzinger had endorsed Levine Cava prior to his ouster. Two days after he announced his candidacy for Miami-Dade Mayor, he rescinded the nod.
He has since raised about $12,000.
Candidate Miguel Quintero inarguably has the most unique day job of the seven people running; he’s a trapeze artist and runs an at-home circus business called Miami Flying Trapeze.
He might still be solely focusing on that endeavor today were it not the subject of numerous code violations and citations since 2021. Quintero said he’s been the target of a vendetta by county zoning personnel, and his campaign is as much an effort to call attention to the issue as it is an earnest attempt to increase police accountability and government transparency.
He sued the county twice this cycle, once last year over the code citations issue and again this year so that he could use his nickname, ‘el Skipper,” on the ballot.
A former Democrat, Quintero now serves as Vice Chair of the Miami-Dade Libertarian Party. He raised $6,000 through early August.
In last place, moneywise, is first-time candidate Eddy Rojas, a 39-year-old independent who owns a valet parking company.
He raised just $2,400 since filing in January and spent all but $100 on the race’s qualifying fee.
To win outright, a candidate must receive more than 50% of the vote in the Aug. 20 Primary. If no one does, the top two vote-getters will compete in a runoff culminating in the Nov. 5 General Election.
