Leading Off

FL-28

Businessman Hector Mujica announced Thursday that he would challenge Republican Rep. Carlos Gimenez in Florida’s 28th Congressional District, a Miami-area constituency Democrats hope to put in play if Donald Trump continues to alienate Latino voters.

Mujica, a longtime Google employee who most recently headed its Americas Philanthropy program, previously launched a bid for Senate last fall. That campaign didn’t generate much attention, but he’s predicting he’ll have much better luck in his new endeavor.

A day before he switched contests, Mujica’s team publicized an internal poll showing him trailing Gimenez by a 46-40 margin. That relatively narrow spread would represent a huge turnaround from 2024, when Gimenez defeated Navy veteran Phil Ehr 65-35 as Trump carried the 28th District 62-37.

But the two firms that conducted the poll early last month, EDGE Communications and MDW Communications, argued that Gimenez would be in for a very different race this fall. In a memo, the pollsters wrote that the congressman’s “nominal lead” was “built on a fragile foundation: a politically toxic environment for Republicans and a district where the defining issues — affordability and corruption — favor a challenger.”

Mujica, whose parents emigrated from Venezuela, is also counting on Republicans suffering a huge reversal with Latino voters in South Florida after years of dramatic gains.

The denizens of what’s now the 28th District, which includes Miami’s southern exurbs and the Florida Keys, were anything but Trump fans when he was first on the ballot in 2016.

The area, which is home to a large Cuban American electorate as well as voters who trace their ancestry to Central and South America, had in fact moved to the left during the Obama era, and that trend initially continued even after Trump won the GOP nomination for the first time. Hillary Clinton would have carried the 28th District ​​56-40, according to data from the Voting and Election Science Team uploaded to Dave’s Redistricting App.

Trump, though, made huge inroads with Latino voters across the country both during his failed reelection campaign and later in his 2024 comeback, and those gains were especially strong in and around Miami. Trump would have carried the 28th by a 53-46 margin in 2020, which then ballooned to a 25-point victory four years later. That stinging defeat left Democrats with little cause to be optimistic for a snap-back.

But Gimenez, a former Miami-Dade County mayor who had his own down and then up relationship with Trump before his 2020 election to Congress, has warned his party for months that Trump’s anti-immigration agenda is harming his constituents.

In July, he informed reporters after a meeting with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, “We told her why we are having issues with what they are doing with Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians living in Miami-Dade County. That’s why you’ve seen some degree of difference in President Trump’s tone.”

Whatever tonal shift Gimenez detected last summer, though, didn’t mean much in terms of actual policy changes. He’s since spent the last year warning of a brewing nationwide backlash among Latino voters that could soon see the GOP pay a dear price.

“Politically, it’s hurting our chances at the midterms—and I’m just being frank about it,” he told the far-right outlet Newsmax in January. “And the most important thing we have to do is actually keep the majority, because if not, we’re going to go back to the policies of President Biden and open borders, and that’s the last thing we want to do.”

Mujica, for his part, is arguing that voters have no reason to turn to Gimenez for his help.

“After decades of the same leadership, people are working harder and still falling behind,” Mujica says in his launch video. That statement is accompanied by a photo of Gimenez taking the oath of office as mayor of Miami-Dade County 15 years ago, as well as an image of him being sworn in for another term in Congress by Speaker Mike Johnson last year.

Mujica joins Ehr, who announced a second bid for this seat back in February, in the Aug. 18 Democratic primary. Any other prospective candidates have until June 12 to file.

No one’s sure, though, what the 28th District will look like by then. Gov. Ron DeSantis has called a special session of the legislature to address congressional redistricting on April 20, but the GOP-dominated state government remains preoccupied with the much more urgent matter of breaking a bitter impasse over the state budget.

To make matters worse, Republicans in Florida’s congressional delegation were already wary that DeSantis’ gerrymandering drive could backfire even before Democrats scored a pair of upset victories last month in special elections in legislative districts that Trump carried in 2024.

Those results sparked a new round of angst for Sunshine State Republicans—including Gimenez, who has warned legislators to pay attention to those special elections.

“They need to be really careful,” he told Punchbowl. “They should look at what happened there. By trying to create more, you may end up with less.”