MIAMI — In Miami, ballots should come with family trees.
Tuesday’s election features three mayoral candidates from political dynasties. One candidate, Joe Carollo, is on the ballot along with his brother, Frank Carollo, who is running for City Commission. Another, Xavier Suarez, is the father of the current mayor, Francis X. Suarez.
And the complicated ties do not end there. Joe Carollo, 70, and Xavier Suarez, 76, are both former mayors themselves. They ran against each other in 1997, in a notorious election that resulted in a judge invalidating Suarez’s victory and making Carollo mayor after finding widespread voter fraud. (Suarez was not accused of wrongdoing.)
In a city of often-zany elections, this year’s mayoral race in Miami is especially rich in personal stories and long-standing feuds, with big questions about the city’s growth and affordability — and basic competence at City Hall — at stake.
Thirteen candidates are vying for the part-time job of city mayor, whose powers are limited — unlike the county mayor, an executive with a much broader portfolio. The city mayor has no commission vote but can veto legislation and hire and fire the city manager, who runs day-to-day operations. If no candidate wins more than 50% support, the top two vote-getters will go to a Dec. 9 runoff.
Though the race is nonpartisan, national politics have suffused the campaign in a city where President Donald Trump plans to build his future presidential library. A win by a candidate who is a Democrat could help keep Democrats from becoming irrelevant in Miami-Dade County, which was once one of their strongholds but has leaned Republican since 2022.
Miami, a city of about half a million people, voted 50% for Kamala Harris and 49% for Trump, according to The Miami Herald. Democratic voters outnumber Republican ones by about 5 percentage points, registration data from the county elections supervisor shows.
To the city government’s fiercest critics — some of whom are running for mayor — Miami’s image to the country and the world has been tarnished by corruption and a leadership void created by the current mayor, Francis X. Suarez, who briefly ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023. This election, critics say, is about breaking hard with the backslapping politics of the past.
This article originally appeared inThe New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
