Jesse Scheckner
Senate Democratic Leader-designate Jason Pizzo won re-election Tuesday in Senate District 37, easily dispatching his Democrat-turned-Republican challenger. Pizzo had every imaginable advantage.
With early and mail-in ballots fully counted and all 116 precincts in Miami-Dade and Broward counties reporting, Pizzo had 58% of the vote to defeat Imtiaz Mohammad, who by Election Day hadn’t raised a single outside dollar and had virtually no offline campaign presence.
“I’m honored to be given the opportunity to continue to serve,” Pizzo told Florida Politics. “While I’ll advocate for good policy, I think it’s also incumbent upon me to initiate a course correction on a number of political issues.”
Mohammad raised just over $2,000, all of it from his bank account and nearly all of it going toward paying the state’s qualifying fee.
Pizzo raised and spent more than $1 million this cycle, though little of it was on his re-election effort.
Even if Pizzo, 48, faced a more politically consistent challenger with backing from the Florida GOP machine, he’d still be heavily favored to win. He’s among the most well-regarded state-level Democrats in Florida.
A former Miami-Dade County prosecutor, Pizzo won his Senate seat in 2018 and won re-election in 2022 without opposition. Last year, party members unanimously elected him to lead them in the Senate for the 2024-26 term.
Despite a supermajority Republican supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature, he successfully sponsored several measures in the past two Sessions to hike penalties for deadly stunt driving and broaden the ability of state officials to examine prison facilities unannounced.
He also co-sponsored legislation to address issues with Florida’s Surfside-inspired condo safety law, which still needs additional fixing. But he criticized the relatively new requirements as tragically tardy.
During a final Senate vote in March, Pizzo noted that he had filed a bill five years ago, before the Champlain Towers South condo collapsed and killed 98 people, that included many of the changes lawmakers later adopted. Pizzo blamed GOP lawmakers for ignoring the measure.
In recent Sessions, he prioritized progress over “pride of authorship,” ceding to other lawmakers bills he originally carried but couldn’t pass. Getting credit for the bills was less important, he told Florida Politics, than seeing them succeed.
An example: After failing to pass a ban on the intentional outdoor release of balloons, which cause significant harm to aquatic life, he relinquished it to Republicans this year, and it passed.
He’s demonstrated time and again a penchant for delivering soundbite-ready comments on the Senate floor and in committee chambers.
Ahead of the 2023 passage of Florida’s permitless carry bill, for instance, Pizzo highlighted what he considered a double standard by proposing an amendment to allow guns in legislative meetings.
After the bill’s sponsor asked for the amendment to be shot down, Pizzo lamented that the law as-is would allow “additional guns in Publix, where my wife and kids are,” but not in the “Thunderdome of freedom” where lawmakers who approved the change work.
“You don’t believe what you’re selling,” he said. “This is incredibly hypocritical.”
In 2022, when Ron DeSantis began flying undocumented immigrants to Democratic states as part of his taxpayer-funded “migrant flights” program, Pizzo sued the Governor and other state officials over the matter.
But he’s far from averse to siding with Republicans on matters he believes in. He was one of three Senate Democrats last year to support lowering the vote threshold for capital punishment after a jury gave the Parkland shooter life imprisonment. He also backed legislation creating a 25-foot no-go zone around first responders, arguing that an even greater distance might be advisable.
Most of his spending this cycle went toward helping the Democratic candidates make their races more competitive in a state where the GOP now holds a more than 1 million-voter advantage.
He gave $1 million to the Florida Democratic Party and its apparatuses at the state and local levels. In August, he kicked $30,000 to Florida Future Leaders, a student-run political committee working to flip Senate District 3 and House Districts 37 and 91.
Mohammad, 58, runs a multisite salon business in Miramar, where he lives. He was a registered Democrat until two years ago and sought seats in the Florida House in 2018 and 2020, scoring 21% and 35% of the vote in each attempt, respectively.
A prior supporter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, Mohammad expressed similar enthusiasm for members of the so-called “Squad” in Congress, including Democratic U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tliab. In 2020, he supported Joe Biden’s campaign for President.
But by mid-2022, he’d had a change of heart, switching his registration to Republican. In a Facebook post on June 29, 2022, he blasted his former party for supporting “homosexuality and same sex marriage,” which he found incompatible with his Muslim beliefs.
In another post after the first presidential debate this year, he argued Republicans are better suited to reaching a peaceful solution to the Israel-Gaza conflict, urging readers to “VOTE REPUBLICAN” because Donald Trump “WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN BY STOPPING WARS !!!!!!!”
Mohammad frequently asserts online that he is “proud to be an American.” But he told Florida Politics in July that he stands by a video-recorded statement he made in late 2018 that America is “run on hate” and “the most uneducated nation in the world.”
SD 37 covers South Florida’s coast from Sunny Isles Beach in Miami-Dade County to Deerfield Beach in Broward County.
The district leans Democratic, according to Florida voter data. Thirty-nine percent of the district’s 267,506 Broward voters are registered Democrats, compared to 29% who are Republicans and 32% who are third- or no-party voters. Republicans hold a 1-point lead in Miami-Dade, of which 51,335 of the county’s voters live in SD 37.
In 2020, the district swung 5 percentage points for Biden, according to MCI Maps. Voters there sided with DeSantis there by a 0.8-point margin two years later, when they also picked Democrat Val Demings over Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio by nearly 3 points.
