The quest to topple the original South Florida Trump
Talking to the man trying to end 40+ years of buffoonery
Welcome to a premium member Thursday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere! We’re taking a trip to Miami tonight to look at a wild city race with national implications.
Things are getting crazy in Miami.
A few weeks back, this newsletter included Miami City Commissioner candidate Quinn Smith on our initial list of municipal candidates worth supporting this November. Yesterday, the Miami-Dade County Democratic Party officially followed suit, providing a late boost to the political newcomer’s quest to unseat Joe Carollo, who has long been one of the most toxic, corrupt, and unhinged figures in American politics.
I interviewed Smith last week, but before we get to that, here’s a very brief summary of Carollo’s long legacy of being a psychopath:
Before he entered public office, Carollo made a name for himself as an out-and-out racist. It began in the Metro-Dade Police Department, where he worked as a public service officer for a few years before resigning after regular reprimands for doing abhorrent things like stuffing KKK cartoons in a black colleague’s locker. After that, he went to work on segregationist George Wallace’s 1976 presidential campaign, which should alone disqualify him from public office.
Carollo, perhaps inspired by the famous bigot, launched his own political career, winning a seat on the Miami City Commission in 1978. He has has held public office on and off in Miami since then, including a stint as the mayor of the city back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Antics like taunting Special Olympics athletes earned him the nickname “Crazy Joe” early on in his tenure, which likely spared him from acquiring an even worse monicker down the line. Carollo became mayor in the mid-’90s, took vengeance on political rivals, went bonkers during the Elián González saga, and was charged with assault for throwing a teapot at his wife’s head in 2001 (the charges were dropped after he took anger management courses). He made an improbable return to public life in the late 2000s and has shown no signs of slowing down.
The District 3 commissioner takes millions of dollars in contributions from real estate interests, targeted individual businesses as political revenge, and is now engaged in political death match with new Miami Sheriff Art Acevedo.
Carollo made an ass out of himself several weeks ago at a hearing about an explosive letter that Acevedo wrote in September accusing Carollo and other commissioners of running a corrupt racket in the city. Acevedo alleged they have tampered with investigations and trying to get peaceful protestors arrested, among other charges, accusations that surprise no one. Carollo, for his part, spent a fair amount of the hearing eating up time by reading out Google search results for Acevedo’s name and critiquing projected videos of Acevedo dancing — Carollo was especially interested in the tightness of Acevedo’s crotch.
The man is a true menace, as venal as he is vituperative. No one likes or trusts the guy, but that’s part of his ongoing power.
“People are afraid of him, voters are afraid of him, businesses are afraid of him, and they openly tell me,” Smith says. “He’s famous for not being reliable, but if you give him enough money, he's someone you can purchase.”
Carollo has spent much of his term trying to punish rivals, using the city’s civilian code enforcers as his own petty payback army, and trying to get people fired. He does, however, suck up to residents of several large senior complexes in the Little Havana neighborhood, where he delivers food and treats and accuses all of his enemies of being communists, a catch-all insult that still has resonance in south Florida.
“Polling shows that that is effective, but it’s effective whenever the other side isn't present in the community,” Smith notes. “It allows Republicans to define us. People will get angry at communism, but people will say it's not personal to you. You have to put your face out there and you can overcome it.”
Note: The above link takes you to our ActBlue page for all of our municipal candidates — choose Smith under “Customize Amounts” or give to all of them!
It’s a point Smith returns to several times. Without the out-of-state developer money and nervous allies Carollo tap, Smith, a lawyer who has been active in the community for years, is out canvassing the district every night himself, braving the Miami heat and humidity to connect with voters.
Everyone there knows all about Carollo, so for Smith, the challenge is in proving there’s a real alternative in a city where most of the commissioners are cartoon characters and/or comically corrupt.
“To me this isn’t a race about how bad Mr. Carollo is, it's more a race about how people are being treated in the district and how people are forgotten and how people are suffering and nothing gets done,” Smith insists. “I don’t want to mobilize people to be just anti-Carollo.”
There are plenty of issues facing Little Havana and the district’s two other communities to talk about. Little Havana in particular is in a rough place, an extremely low-income community in a city plagued by economic stratification, with a median household income of just over $24,000, which is lower than the $31,000 median in all of Miami and $49,000 across Florida, itself the second most economically unequal state in the country.
The average home price in Miami, meanwhile, skyrocketed to $515,000 in May, an increase of 35% over the year prior, before the market began to really crash. As Smith points out, Florida Republicans also continue to raid and defund the state’s affordable housing trust fund, leaving cities on their own to figure out how to help their residents. In Carollo’s case, he only patrols the streets looking for fines to slap on people who he feels have screwed him in business.
“Streets are filthy, piles of trash are on the roads and they clogs up the drains, and then flooding gets worse,” he says. “That's a climate change and qualify of life issue.”
In a way, this race is a kind of test case for how Democrats can respond to some of the worst trends of the 2020 election. They suffered heavy losses among Hispanic voters in both Miami and Texas, especially amongst younger and non-college graduates. While some pundits and analysts think Donald Trump’s bombastic lunacy had a unique draw for those demographics, it may not have been a fluke.
Smith says he’s found Hispanic seniors very open to his message, especially after 18 months of Ron DeSantis’s Covid murder spree, but young people have been much less readily receptive. There’s a draw to MAGA-ism, of which Carollo was an early pioneer, and Democrats must provide an attractive counterargument. Smith is doing his best to show up and promise that things can get better with Democrats in charge.
Note: The above link takes you to our ActBlue page for all of our municipal candidates — choose Smith under “Customize Amounts” or give to all of them!
More Florida Endorsements: Damn, I’m prescient these days. Another one of our recent Florida candidates, progressive State Rep. Omari Hardy, just got a big endorsement from the Sun-Sentinel, one of the largest papers in Florida. Here’s a money quote:
Hardy is truly a young man in a hurry, and that’s exactly what this downtrodden and often-neglected district needs. He’s an unapologetic progressive who’s unafraid to challenge deeply entrenched powerful interests such as the sugar industry. He does his homework, takes forceful positions and is a positive symbol of the future of the Florida Democratic Party.
Sounds good, right? You can donate to Hardy right here!
Sinema Primary Challenge: The most public-facing primary challenge threat against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema raised over $100,000 in just seven days, not a bad figure for a race that is three years away and still has no obvious candidate. I produced a report on what led to the primary challenge and where it goes from here:
I’ll be talking with the folks at LUCHA again soon about their recent protests against Sinema, so stay tuned!
Senate Dunk Contest: Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell granted Democrats a path forward on the debt ceiling disaster, pulling a last minute strategic retreat to inflict maximum long-term damage on Democrats (as if the party wasn’t doing enough of that itself).
By playing the last-minute bipartisan card on a short-term deal, he’s giving Joe Manchin the contrived evidence he needs to justify his ongoing blockade on the filibuster while also forcing Democrats to beg and scream in public again two months from now.
This is so dumb it makes me want to put my head in a blender:
He’s the guy who just insisted on rewriting the voting rights law meant to protect democracy from Republican treachery! He knows he’s full of it! I shouldn’t be upset by this at this point but I can’t help it, why can’t the media call him out on it?!
Virginia: I haven’t focused too much on the elections here, but it’s worth noting and getting angry about the fact that Republicans are sending out really racist flyers against one of our 2019 interviewees, Del. Josh Cole. Trash people.
Texas: Expect coverage of this very soon.
Help Us Fight
Over the last three years, Progressives Everywhere has raised over $6 million for dozens and dozens of grassroots activists, civil rights groups, and Democratic candidates.
And yet, there is so much work left to do. The goal is to continue to help these grassroots activists and organizers, support progressive Democratic candidates, and interview the experts and leaders so we can amplify their messages.
But none of the money we raise goes toward producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out there. Not a dime! In fact, it costs me money to do this. You’re already a premium subscriber, so I can’t ask much more of you… but if you do want to contribute, it would allow me to hire a writer/researcher and start a podcast for this newsletter!
You can either give someone a gift subscription…
Or make a one-time donation to Progressives Everywhere’s GoFundMe campaign, which gets you a shout-out in the next big Sunday newsletter.