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Today, Huffpost profiled Rep. María Elvira Salazar’s increasingly shaky footing in her district.
Voters are apparently growing wary of Salazar’s dangerous allegiance to the autocratic fringes of her party, and see her blatant attempts to lie and take credit for millions of dollars in funding she voted against.
Meanwhile, State Senator Annette Taddeo continues to build real momentum ahead of election day, even prompting a ratings shift from Cook Political. Recent polling shows Taddeo tied with Salazar as Taddeo continues to garner bipartisan support from influential community leaders, including major Republicans like former Florida GOP chair Al Cárdenas.
Read more about the shifting tides in FL-27 below:
Huffpost: Trump’s Coup Attempt Could Cost GOP A House Seat Because Of Autocracy-Wary Latinos
By S.V. Date
Oct 11, 2022
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MIAMI ― Donald Trump’s attempted coup may have driven away just enough Hispanic voters wary about autocracy in South Florida to give Democrats one bright spot on a state congressional map aggressively gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
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House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s super PAC has announced it will spend $2 million to help first-term Republican Rep. Maria Salazar hang on to her seat. The Cook Political Report moved its rating for the district from “likely” Republican to “lean” Republican.
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“I guess they’ve been seeing some polling,” Democratic state Sen. Annette Taddeo told a group of 100 volunteers gathered at her Coral Gables headquarters this week to prepare to knock on doors and make get-out-the-vote phone calls. “Kevin McCarthy knows that if he wants to get the gavel, he’s got to keep this seat.”
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Salazar’s campaign said she had “delivered over $17 million” in projects for her district and that her long career in television news in Miami gives voters confidence in “her commitment to them.”
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“That’s why she defeated an entrenched Democrat incumbent in 2020 and it’s why Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar will win re-election in November by defeating another socialist career politician,” her press office said in a statement.
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Her campaign, however, would not address HuffPost’s query regarding her view of the former president’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021. And, in fact, Salazar voted against President Joe Biden’s legislation that contained the projects she is now taking credit for.
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Taddeo’s campaign is sharing in internal poll that shows a tied race. “We can win, and we can save democracy in the process,” she said, standing atop a desk between U.S. and Florida flags, with the flag of her native Colombia affixed to a wall behind her.
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That presidential vote in 2020, though, took place before the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol that Trump incited as part of his attempt to remain in power despite having lost the election to Biden. And that action, according to Taddeo and her supporters, turned off many residents who had fled and whose families had fled authoritarian regimes in Latin America, including Cuba.
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Her campaign shows results from an internal poll finding that Trump now suffers from a 40-54 favorable-to-unfavorable ratio in the district, with 48% viewing him “very” unfavorably. Biden, in contrast, has a 49-45 favorable-to-unfavorable ratio, with only 37% seeing him “very” unfavorably.
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Carolina Camps, president of Cuban American Women Supporting Democracy, started the group during the coronavirus pandemic but saw membership grow rapidly after the Capitol riot, she said, when Cuban and other Hispanic voters saw Trump ― who had won Florida by accusing Biden of being a “socialist” ― refuse to accept his election defeat. “We know what autocracy is, and that’s where we’re heading,” Camps said.
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But Taddeo, whose current state Senate district includes much of the newly drawn congressional district, said the images from that day still resonate with families such as hers who fled oppression. “We’ve seen those images on the TV, but we thought we’d never seen it in the United States,” she said.
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