Francis X. Suarez, the two-term mayor of Miami who formally announced his entry into the 2024 presidential race on Thursday, is emerging as a new face in the Republican Party: a 45-year-old in a field led by a septuagenarian . , and a Cuban-American in a party whose elected officials are overwhelmingly white.
In a speech at the Reagan Library in California on Thursday evening, filled with calls to decades-old Republican slogans like George HW Bush’s “thousand points of light,” Mr. Suárez declared his candidacy referring to another and his own. slogan of a Twitter post he made in 2021 in response to a venture capitalist who suggested moving Silicon Valley to Miami.
“I believe that America remains a shining city on a hill whose eyes are upon us and whose promise must be restored,” he said, a day after filing for the race. “And I think the city needs more than a screamer or a fighter. I think it needs a servant. It needs a mayor. My name is Francis Suarez and I’m here to help.”
Here are five things to know about Mr. Suárez
His current job is largely ceremonial.
Mr. Suárez was elected mayor in 2017 with 86 percent of the vote and re-elected in 2021 with 79 percent of the vote, astonishing margins made possible by the fact that he faced only token opposition. (Miami’s mayoral election is officially nonpartisan.)
He’ll be running largely on his mayoral experience, as the only other elected position he’s held was on the City Commission, a job not known for boosting presidential campaigns. But Miami’s mayoralty is part-time and largely ceremonial.
The main powers of Mr. Suárez are to veto the legislation and hire and fire the municipal administrator. He does not have a vote in the Municipal Commission. Shortly after taking office, he introduced a proposal to give himself more power, including authority over Miami’s budget and workforce, but voters flatly rejected it.
This distinguishes Mr. Suárez of other acting mayors or former mayors who have run for the presidency, who were already facing long difficulties. The three leading campaigns for the 2020 Democratic nomination — Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio of New York City — had more authority than Mr. Suarez.
He is excited about Silicon Valley and cryptocurrency.
In 2021, Mr. Suarez made headlines for announcing that he would take his salary in Bitcoin and for suggesting that Miami pay city workers, accept tax payments and also invest public funds in Bitcoin.
He praised a deal in which cryptocurrency exchange FTX, founded by the now-disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, acquired the naming rights to Miami’s NBA arena. (The deal was terminated this year after FTX collapsed.)
He also promoted a branded cryptocurrency called MiamiCoin. Part of the income went to the coffers of the city and Mr. Suarez suggested that he might eventually allow Miami to eliminate taxes. The initial results they were promisingbut the value of the coin soon plummeted, and so did the exchange that had welcomed it suspended trading of MiamiCoin this year.
Mr. Suarez continued to support the cryptocurrency even as the industry crashed last year. “I call them tsunamis of opportunity,” he told the Washington Post. “And we have two options. We can pull out a surfboard and ride the wave like a tsunami. Or we can hide and try to run away from it and pretend it’s not there and potentially get washed away.”
He has been accused of influence peddling.
Mr. Suarez has come under fire over reports that a company seeking help moving forward on a luxury condominium project paid him tens of thousands of dollars.
The Miami Herald reported last month that a developer, Location Ventures, had paid Mr. Suarez, who is a real estate attorney, at least $170,000 to consult on it and “to help cut red tape and secure critical permits.” This month, The Herald reported that the FBI was investigating “whether the payments constitute bribes in exchange for obtaining permits or other favors from the mayor” for a project in the Coconut Grove neighborhood.
Mr. Suarez has denied wrongdoing and dismissed The Herald’s report as the product of political bias. In an interview on Fox News A few days before he announced his campaign, he suggested that his moves toward a presidential bid had prompted reporters to attack him after “13 years without blemish in public service.”
He has sometimes rejected the Republican line.
Mr. Suarez did not vote to re-elect Donald J. Trump as president in 2020. He also did not vote for Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida in 2018; voted for the Democratic opponent of Mr. DeSantis, Andrew Gillum, i he said he was supportive Mr. Gillum called for a higher minimum wage because a “basic standard of living” was “a fundamental human right.”
In early 2021, he criticized Mr. DeSantis to prohibit local leaders from enforcing mask mandates as Covid-19 cases surged, telling CBS News who had tried unsuccessfully to contact Mr. DeSantis and persuading officials to “institute things that we think are common sense, that we think are supported by science, that we can show are supported by science.”
And two years earlier, he co-wrote a New York Times op-ed with Ban Ki-moon, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, highlighting the damage climate change was already doing to Miami. “There is no aspect of our daily lives that will not be affected by climate change,” he and Mr. Bath.
In 2020 he opposed Trump, but now he is defending him.
When other Republicans have changed their minds about Mr. Trump, it has generally been to oppose him after previously supporting him, in the manner of Chris Christie. Mr. Suárez went in the opposite direction: although Mr. Trump in 2020, he has said he will in 2024 if Mr. Trump is the Republican candidate.
He told Fox News this month that he was motivated by “a fear of Joe Biden’s America.”
“It’s an America where the poor get poorer, it’s an America where America gets weaker, and it’s an America where the possibility of China being the sole superpower is something that scares me to no end,” he said.
“What’s changed and what’s happened is that we’ve had a taste of what a dysfunctional government can do to destroy our country in a short period of time,” Suarez added, “and if you take it into the future, it’s incredibly fear”.
When Mr. Trump was indicted in New York this year, Mr. Suárez he told the Miami Herald who saw the Manhattan district attorney’s decision to pursue the case as “a slippery slope.” After the second accusation of Mr. Trump this month went further, saying in a Fox News interview that he “feels un-American.”
Patricia Mazzei contributed to this report.
