First, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez woke up to headlines blaring the fact that he failed to qualify for tomorrow’s 2024 Republican presidential debate. (The cutoff is based on polling and fundraising thresholds.) That exclusion is especially notable given that North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (who?) managed to make the cut. Quite an achievement since the entire state of North Dakota doesn’t even have twice the population of the city of Miami.
And a ton of the mayor’s fintech and VC buds just moved to Miami—plus Miami is in a swoon over Lionel Messi, who probably couldn’t find North Dakota on a map. Couldn’t Suarez, the only Latino in the race, leverage enough of that good will to get onto that Milwaukee debate stage? Even raffling off Inter-Miami tickets to donors didn’t seem to help.
Mayor Suarez has previously said that any candidate who doesn’t qualify for the debate should drop out of the race.
Life comes at you fast.
To add injury to insult, now the suntanned mayor is mired in yet another scandal: The Miami Herald reports that an ethics complaint was filed against Suarez for accepting VIP access to various high-profile events, including 2022’s Formula One and the mayor’s trip to Qatar during the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
The most recent: the 2023 Formula One race, which the mayor attended at the invitation of Citadel billionaire Ken Griffin, who recently relocated Citadel’s headquarters from Chicago to Miami. Suarez also attended a dinner at Griffin’s invitation the night before the race.
Though both Suarez—who is prohibited from taking any gifts worth over $100 from lobbyists or companies that send lobbyists to City Hall—and Griffin insist that the mayor covered his costs (and Griffin wrote a letter to the Miami Herald stating such), no paperwork to back up that claim has materialized. The Florida Commission on Ethics is reviewing the complaint.
This is not the first time that Suarez’s ethics have been scrutinized: As a consultant, he accepted $170,000 from developer Rishi Kapoor, who had business before City Hall, which prompted an FBI investigation.
