While city voters traditionally skew Democratic in national elections, this is not true for local elections, and the mayoralty appears as nonpartisan on the ballot.
No one has been elected to the White House, or even received a major party nomination, directly from the mayor’s office, although Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, with a population of about 100,000, he came closer than most in the 2020 Democratic primary, winning Iowa and coming in second in New Hampshire, but slipped and fell before Super Tuesday.
Miami, with a population of approximately 450,000, gives Mr. Suarez a considerably bigger starting point. But Miami’s mayoralty is a part-time, largely ceremonial job.
Mr. Suarez can veto legislation and hire and fire the city manager, but he has no vote on the five-member City Commission, and in 2018 he failed to convince the voters to give him strong powers as mayor. After clashing with city commissioners, he began to distance himself from day-to-day legislative matters.
The national profile of Mr. Suarez began to rise after he became one of the first elected officials to contract Covid in March 2020. He documented his illness in online videos, giving people a look at a virus that most, at the time, I knew very little. .
Later that year, when a venture capitalist tweeted the idea of moving Silicon Valley to Miami, Mr. Suárez answered, “How can I help?” – an answer that launched him onto the tech scene and a broader conversation about how leaders could better market their cities.
He soon emerged as a cryptocurrency enthusiast and beloved of tech workers who moved to Miami during the pandemic. Even before the crypto industry plunged into crisis last year, critics accused him of being more interested in traveling the country to speak at conferences than in addressing the city’s most pressing issues, such as unaffordable housing.
