(WSVN) - One of the least predictable districts in our swing state and one of the races garnering the national spotlight is pitting a first-term congresswoman with the outgoing mayor of Miami-Dade County.
The fight to represent Florida Congressional District 26 includes the incumbent Debbie Mucarsell-Powell — who was elected into office for the first time in 2018. She was the first South American to be elected to Congress.
“I don’t come from politics,” Mucarsell-Powell said. “I have spent 20 years of my career here in Florida’s 26th District, most of the time at FIU. I started at the College of Health, and then I became the associate dean here at the College of Medicine working in education and healthcare.”
The Republican candidate is term-limited Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez.
He has never lost an election in his long political career, and his win would restore a Cuban-American to the seat.
“I’m a 45-year public servant,” Gimenez said. “I’m a firefighter, a fire chief, city manager, county commissioner and now, for the last nine and a half years, I’ve been the mayor of this great town.”
They have one major element of their biographies in common. Mucarsell-Powell emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 14 from Ecuador, and Gimenez was about 6 years old when his family came from Cuba.
As for the issues, the coronavirus pandemic impacted nearly everything, including the economy.
Gimenez said the unemployment rate was at 12% when he took office, and that it dropped to 1% before the pandemic hit.
“We need to get people back to work,” he said. “Once you get people back to work, once you have a good-paying job, a lot of things get fixed. If you have a good-paying job, a lot of times you get healthcare also paid for you or you get a reduced cost of healthcare because it’s part of your employer plan, right?”
But with many Floridians losing their jobs and along with it, employer-provided healthcare, Mucarsell-Powell said keeping the Affordable Care Act, especially in the middle of a pandemic, is critical.
“I have been fighting to protect and improve the ACA, reduce premiums for families — they’re paying too much in premiums, reduce the price of prescription drug prices,” she said. “My opponent, on the other hand, is supporting Donald Trump’s fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act.”
The environment is also looming larger this cycle.
“We saw the largest fish kill along Biscayne Bay just a few weeks ago, and he had been warned that if he didn’t take action, this would happen, and he apparently didn’t take the warning seriously,” Mucarsell-Powell said.
“The environment is very crucial here in South Florida,” Gimenez said. “We’re the tip of the spear for climate change and sea level rise, and I’ve had a stellar environmental record here as the mayor.”
Both candidates said the other has failed: On the job in Congress and the job of managing COVID.
“I have passed as many laws here in Congress as she has,” Gimenez said. “She hasn’t passed any laws whatsoever in the two years that she’s been there. Nothing that she has been the sponsor of has been signed into law.”
“In that window of time we asked people to make that sacrifice — to shut down their business, to stay home — that was the moment he had to be a leader and put that infrastructure in place to contain the virus, and he did not do that,” Mucarsell said.
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