Citing immigration and Miami's affordability crisis as key catalysts, former South Florida TV news anchor Eliott Rodriguez says he’s running as a Democrat for Florida’s 27th District congressional seat held by Republican Miami U.S. Representative María Elvira Salazar.
Rodriguez's celebrity standing in Miami, as well as his son-of-Cuban-immigrants story, could make this November's 27th election the most competitive it's been in six years.
"People cannot afford to live here," Rodriguez told WLRN, citing longstanding problems like an acute shortage of affordable housing that has created a growing cohort of working homeless in Miami-Dade County.
"Miami should not be a city for just billionaires and millionaires. Working people need help, and I’m going to be their advocate in DC.”
Rodriguez retired as the popular, longtime Local CBS4 anchorman in December. Last month he said he was “seriously considering” a run in this year’s mid-term elections against Salazar, a three-term incumbent who, like Rodriguez, is Cuban-American and a former TV journalist.
Rodriguez then had cited President Trump’s controversial immigration policies as a major driver of his interest in running for Congress.
"I think people are horrified by what we're seeing when it comes to immigration," said Rodriguez, 69, whose parents were Cuban immigrants and brought him from New York to grow up in Miami in the 1960s.
In January Rodriguez had taken part in a video campaign criticizing Miami's Cuban-American GOP Congress members — including Salazar — for not speaking out against the Trump administration's sweeping mass deportation campaign of even non-criminal migrants.
In response, Salazar insisted she has spoken up. She pointed to her co-sponsorship of a bill called the Dignity Act that would put millions of undocumented migrants on a path to legal residency.
Though polls show most Americans disapprove of Trump's immigration enforcement methods, they indicate that nagging high prices are just as big if not a bigger complaint for U.S. voters in the run-up to the November mid-terms — especially in heavily Latino communities like Miami.
In a video released Tuesday announcing his candidacy, Rodriguez says, "My own daughters, like many young professionals, have been forced to move [from Miami] for the simple reason that they can't afford to live here."
READ MORE: Ex-anchorman Eliott Rodriguez is 'seriously considering' a run for Salazar's congressional seat
In that same 2-minute spot, Rodriguez says that as a TV reporter he "had the privilege of telling Miami the truth ... [but] I'm now watching the news ... as a citizen, and I've grown deeply concerned ... that the people we send [to Washington] are focused on political theater and culture wars instead of solutions."
Florida’s 27th District is considered more purple-competitive than the red Miami districts GOP Congressmen Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez represent. But the national Democratic party has put few resources into it in this decade. Rodriguez believes his candidacy will change that.
“This is a seat that Democrats have been looking at for quite a while, and they believe that I am the person who can deliver it," Rodriguez told WLRN.
Rodriguez must first face, so far, five other Democratic candidates in the party’s primary election: entrepreneur Richard Lamondin, accountant Alex Fornino, homicide prosectuor Robin Peguero, former Key Biscayne mayor Mike Davey and, as of last week, former Trump presidential aide-turned-Democrat Lev Parnas.
Because the 27th District includes many Cuban, Venezuelan and other Latino voters whose families came to Miami escaping left-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Rodriguez knows Salazar and the GOP may, as they often have in the past with other Democratic candidates, try to brand him as a "socialista."
"They can call me socialista or comunista, but it won't hold water," he told WLRN.
"I reported from Cuba numerous times, and I always made it a point to first interview dissidents. I was the first [U.S.] journalist to interview [late dissident] Oswaldo Payá when he delivered his [historic] petitions calling for free elections in Cuba ... I was roughed up by Fidel Castro's bodyguards as a result."
When she first ran for Congress in the 27th in 2018, Salazar herself was blasted by an opponent during the Republican primary campaign for having interviewed Castro for CNN en Español in 1995. Salazar won that primary but lost the general election to then Democratic Congresswoman Donna Shalala.
She then defeatd Shalala in 2020.
Although Rodriguez is a political rookie, he definitely carries the heftiest and broadest name recognition into this year's Democratic primary, and is likely considered the favorite as a result.
Given that and "his respected reputation," said former WPLG Local 10 senior political journalist Michael Putney, who is considered the dean of South Florida journalism, "he'll make a formidable candidate."
