Francis Suarez’s after-party – The Washington Post

But Suarez was making a go of it in Iowa anyway, trying to build a national brand as a next-generation fiscally conservative Hispanic chief executive and hoping it would cut through. His goals were humble, he told me: If he could just make it to the first debate, he could leverage that visibility to clear the bar for the second debate, and then manage to make the third debate, on his home turf of Miami, where anything is possible.

His big problem at the moment was that Iowa voters didn’t know him (or already liked someone else better), but the ones in Des Moines really did seem to like the well-groomed, muscle-bound man from Miami. In his speech to Iowa Republicans, the one time he appeared onstage with other primary candidates, Suarez criticized “Bidenomics” and the “porous” border. He warned about China’s cozy relationship with Cuba. He invited the crowd to think of Miami in terms of good-management metrics: Wage growth! A balanced budget! A well-funded police department! And also this: “In Miami, we throw good after-parties.” Later that night, in a dimly lit reception room at the Iowa Events Center, red and blue LED spotlights made the sterile space glow an alluring hue of violet. The candidate stood before a balloon-bedecked “SUAREZ” step-and-repeat banner in his fitted suit, slicked-back hair and Salvatore Ferragamo-looking belt, greeting hundreds of voters who lined up to meet him. Cuban cigars were out for the taking. There was booze. There was a Mexican quartet playing cumbias, and during breaks, Suarez’s people would blare Pitbull and Celia Cruz from their speaker. Paul Pate, the Iowa secretary of state, slapped down dominoes at a plastic table and playfully dangled his cigar between his teeth. “Tonight,” he said, “I’m Pablo Pate!”

And then, suddenly, his White House dream came to dust. Suarez failed to qualify for the first Republican debate. Worse, he thought he had qualified and announced as much, prompting an awkward public correction from the Republican National Committee. Eight other Republicans took the stage instead, and a week later, Suarez suspended his campaign — the first official dropout of the 2024 race, and it was still summer 2023.

The first person to call him, he says, was Trump.

“Frankly, it made me feel valued, if that makes sense, right?” Suarez told me last week, in a Zoom interview. “Like, it made me feel like he understands the value of what I could bring to bear. And that is humbling.”

More than a month later he’s still the only official dropout, even as other longshot candidates failed to qualify for the second debate, scheduled for Wednesday evening. Where does all this leave the value of the crypto mayor’s political currency? In 2024, what does running for president get a Republican candidate who barely makes it out of the gate?

Suarez said he could think of a couple of ways he might be useful to the party as it tries to retake the federal government. “One of them is definitely focusing on those three categories of voters that I think the party can and should grow” — Latinos, young people and urban voters — “and two, obviously, the potential of an endorsement and a surrogacy candidacy. I obviously pledged to support the Republican nominee already through the process, so that’s something that I’m obviously contemplating.”

He had returned to his second-floor office in the repurposed Pan Am seaplane terminal that now serves as city hall, in Coconut Grove, with a view of palm trees dancing in the breeze and little cruiser boats idling on Biscayne Bay. “You reconnect with a part of the country that is the heart and soul of the country,” he told me of his brief campaign, focusing on positives. “You always want to be connected to people that are considered to be the outsiders, not the insiders, you know what I mean?” His affect was a little wistful — he put his hands over his heart and groaned when talking about not making the debate — but he also seemed refreshed, like someone who’d recently come back from a trip to the Bahamas, which is exactly what he’d done after dropping out. He’d also been in Singapore at a summit on Asia, speaking on a panel titled “Capital Ideas: Cities of Innovation and Purpose.” The Miami mayor is a part-time position — there’s also a city manager and a separate mayor of Miami-Dade County — and he’s a sought-after speaker.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R), who became friends with Suarez before the campaign, said he could see Suarez appealing to Latino voters, a minority of whom have been moving to the right in recent years. “He’d be a terrific surrogate for any candidate,” he said.

Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist, took a much dimmer view. Suarez’s strategy for broadening the Republican tent by attracting more Hispanic voters was to focus on warning against communism and telling the story of his exiled parents’ American Dream. But an anti-communist message might appeal only to a relatively small slice of Latino voters, Madrid said — Cubans, mainly, and perhaps some Venezuelans, too. “There is absolutely an economic-populist message that is working with a sliver of the Mexican Latino electorate,” Madrid said. “What we’re realizing is the overwhelming majority of Latinos and Latino narratives and Latino political messaging has nothing to do with communism.”

Suarez held some campaign events in Puerto Rico, whose residents have one more delegate than New Hampshire in the GOP primary but cannot vote in the general. He cast himself as a unifying force on immigration reform, saying that as a Hispanic Republican, he’d be “in a unique position” to solve the “multi-decade, multi-administration” immigration crisis. He didn’t favor a quick path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, he told me, because “there’s a feeling by those who came legally that, hey, we follow the rules, we follow the law.”

In the campaign, Suarez was a Miami Man among Florida Men. His father, Xavier, was also Miami’s mayor. Francis rose up through lower-level city posts in Miami by spreading a next-generation, pro-innovation message that could renovate a wooden local government. A lawyer in the flush real estate industry, Suarez proved to be an adroit fundraiser, handily besting his mayoral opponents in 2017 and 2021 even though none presented a real electoral threat. Last year, a former Jeb Bush adviser introduced Suarez to Barry Bennett, who managed Ben Carson’s 2016 campaign. Bennett flew down to Miami to size him up. Suarez convinced him that he had “something to sell,” so he agreed to be his campaign manager.

“I sat with him one day making phone calls, and he said, ‘I love you,’ to these donors more than my mother has ever said to me,” Bennett said.

At the after-party in Des Moines, in July, Bennett stood by the doors, gingham-shirted and in khakis, holding a beer bottle in his hand. The mood was festive, and he took a moment to offer his thoughts on the campaign he was running. He shrugged off the suggestion that Suarez could be Trump’s vice-presidential pick, saying the former president would pick “someone he thinks is hot” — say, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem or Arizona’s Kari Lake. But even if Suarez didn’t make it far, he said, there was “no downside” to throwing one’s hat into a GOP primary.

Look at where Mike Huckabee had landed, he said of the former Arkansas governor, who made White House bids in 2008 and 2016. Huckabee, long a fixture on Fox News, now hosts an hour-long TV show on a Christian network.

Another 2016 Republican presidential candidate, Carson, ended up serving in Trump’s Cabinet. And what’s Carson doing these days?

“Oh — making millions of dollars,” Bennett said with a twinkle. “Giving speeches.”

Miami’s zany political scene frequently lends itself to candidates repurposing their brands and restarting their careers, even after failing big. It’s a place where anything can seem possible. “Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated,” wrote Joan Didion in 1987. Suarez told me he’s thinking of running for governor, too, but also that he could be more successful in the private sector if he wasn’t in public office at all.

But for now, he’s back to being mayor: balancing the budget, giving a speech at the Miami Yacht Club to raise awareness of homelessness, handing the keys of the city to a pair of Univision talk show stars, participating in fitness initiatives (he likes to run). He’s also under scrutiny by the Herald for alleged conflicts of interest, potential bribes from the real estate developer and the mayor’s ballooning wealth while in office, which allowed him to be extra Miami and buy a $235,000 boat. Because of Federal Election Commission rules, his campaign had to disclose an extensive list of his consulting side gigs.

In June, the Miami Herald reported that the FBI was investigating payments he’d received from a real estate developer as potential bribes, though Suarez says he hasn’t heard from the FBI. “I would admit it merits some level of scrutiny,” he told me, but he said some of the other reporting about him had focused on “somewhat frivolous” things. He also said in a recent local interview that he has followed the law and pointed out that an ethics complaint against him has been dismissed. On Sept. 15, video from the Herald showed him attempting to block a reporter’s phone while she asked questions; he later said he regrets that the incident happened.

“He’s probably better off not having qualified given his challenges,” Al Cárdenas, former chairman of the Florida GOP and now a vice chairman at No Labels, said of the scrutiny facing Suarez in Miami. “This is a time for him to be low-key, not to be on a high profile.”

Suarez still thinks there’s a place for him on the national stage. When it comes to the GOP with attracting those young, Latino and urban voters, he thinks he can turn up the volume.

The best presidential participation trophy might not be to have gotten close to beating Trump, who is dominating in the polls despite facing legal peril, or even to have gotten your ideas out there, but rather to have gotten close to the front-runner in a different way. Everyone’s deciding whether to attack Trump or liken themselves to him in an attempt to steal his voters. Neither strategy is really working for them.

“I’ve gotten to know him,” Suarez says now of Trump, complimenting his Supreme Court picks and his China policy. “He’s a sharp guy.”

There are worse things, for a politician in this party, than having attributes in common with Trump.

“We both come from a real estate world.”

“He had a strong father. I had a father who I think left a good legacy for me to follow.”

And: “You could describe us both as charismatic — we’re both people people, right?”

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