I Smell An Upset: Joe Garcia over Mario Diaz Balart. By SunshineUnderground

If Joe Garcia wins in his race against Mario Diaz-Balart, then it will be heralded as a turning of the page in South Florida/Miami politics. A Diaz-Balart brother will have been defeated, and that new Cuban-American generation that has been talked about so much will have finally have spoken at the ballot box.

It's not that Garcia himself is new, in fact, it would be hard for someone to be more of an insider. Readers of this blog will know that he was the chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic party and the former head of the highly influential Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), just to name a few of his affiliations. No, what would make a Garcia victory significant, should it occur, would be the nature of the victory, with a campaign focused on domestic and pocket book issues. He is essentially seeking to use his own extensive background dealing with US-Cuban relations to neutralize the Cuba issues, and drag Diaz-Balart into a race fought on terrain where he hopes to have the upper hand – in the domestic and social issues where votes are leaning democrat:

"While I think Cuba is important and I've spent a large portion of my professional life working that issue, I also think that making sure that my daughter has a job when she finishes high school is important," he said during a phone conversation just over a week ago.

"I'm not going to use Cuba has an excuse for not solving the common sense problems that we have in our community, and when you've got the economy heading in such a bad way, when you're got a congressman who's got a 98% voting record of voting with the president on our failed economic polices, then people have to step up."

Stepping up, in this case, will have to mean more than voting. Diaz-Balart can count on the loyalty of many voters who have always, and will always, vote republican. If our comments section is any guide, he has, in his five years in office, brought back enough money for local projects to gain the confidence of some voters, though Congress.org ranks him as the 379th most powerful member of the house, out of 435. To beat him, Garcia will have to out-organize a well-funded opponent, and his campaign as been been aggressively canvassing. Garcia's former field director, Gil Osorio, helped build the operation, before he was picked up by the Obama team after the primaries ended.

A democratic funded poll showed Garcia within the margin of error, but he is, in my view anyway, still an underdog. Let me be transparent here, and say that I don't know Diaz-Balart well enough to suggest that he is a uniformly bad candidate - he does, for instance, support the DREAM act to give the children of illegal immigrants access to college, and while that might be typical for a Florida politician, it isn't so typical for the Republican party. I can say that I like Garcia's nuanced views toward Cuba, and I think, most importantly, a strong democratic majority will be needed for this county to truly address long festering problems in health care, education, and well, just about everything (I'll write more about the issues in this race
later). But that's just me, think what you want. My next post on this race will have the full transcript of my interview with Garcia so you can evaluate him for yourself.
- Sunshi