Why a Michael Bloomberg candidacy is attractive to core Miami voters | Opinion

Miami just stirred things up in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. But the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good thing.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg could be an attractive presidential candidate for core Miami voters who are as #NeverBernie as they are #NeverTrump — and are unimpressed by the rest of the Democratic candidates.

In political essence and history, these voters are a lot like the man who just endorsed Bloomberg, giving his campaign a major boost in South Florida: Former City of Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, a life-long Democrat who has seldom worn the party on his sleeve, preferring to bridge-build across party lines.

“When people tell me, things are terrible, I tell them: ‘You didn’t live through 1980 in Miami.’ That was really something. Forty years ago, I was fighting these same issues like immigration, xenophobia, and here I am doing the same thing,” Diaz told me in a wide-ranging interview about his new role in Bloomberg’s campaign as policy adviser and surrogate.

When I met Diaz in the 1980s, he was an activist with the Spanish American League Against Discrimination (SALAD) working to increase Hispanic representation in government and to repeal an English-only ordinance passed by the then Dade County Commission. It wasn’t easy, but the English-Plus Movement won the day.

Selling Bloomberg, billionaire media mogul, will be as tall a task.

Michael Bloomberg campaign scores prominent Miami politico as Florida primary nears

This late into the game, do voters know what party-flip-flopping Bloomberg stands for and do they trust him enough to make him the Democratic nominee in a ground game that’s more progressive than centrist?

“That’s going to change and it’s going to change very rapidly,” Diaz said. “This is going to be a very unorthodox campaign. We are going to see somebody we haven’t seen before. We can win if we [Democrats] don’t shoot ourselves in the foot.”

Bloomberg, 77, could be the anti-Trump option that skeptical South Florida voters need.

He has a shot with Democrats and independents who are centrists in a state where, increasingly, everything to the left of Ronald Reagan is cast as suspect by Trump-worshiping Republicans.

For one, Bloomberg has a history of courting Latino voters with sincerity and skill.

When he ran for mayor in 2001 as a Republican, he hired a tutor to not only make him fluent enough in Spanish to discuss his agenda but to address each community in the preferred lingo, whether he was at the Puerto Rican parade or before a Colombian crowd.

And he took his tutor with him everywhere he went.

It’s not a far stretch to imagine Bloomberg on Cuban radio talking some sense into the largest group of Hispanics supporting President Donald Trump, Cuban Americans. As was the case with Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns, one of the first things you see on his website is the Español link.

In Diaz — who will serve as the campaign’s national political co-chair, along with former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, and also co-chair Bloomberg’s Florida campaign — he has found the perfect ally.

Bloomberg, dubbed “the real billionaire,” can certainly take on Trump and even defeat him. But can he win the Democratic nomination in a crowded field tilting left, in larger part thanks to younger voters?

He might, as faithful older voters switch their alliance from Biden to Bloomberg, as Diaz did.

An engaged liberal voter from the Keys put it to me this way: She likes Bloomberg “because he is the adult.”

“Despite living on Social Security, I don’t hold his wealth against him,” she said. “The young people who do are romantic and idealistic and foolish like I was, which is why I ended up with no money. Biden is not smart enough or mean enough to beat Trump unless the millions who never voted before vote en masse.”

Diaz says the campaign is “skipping February” and going all out for Super Tuesday, March 3, which accounts for 40% of the total delegate allocation, and for Florida’s closed March 17 primary.

“Mike will be standard bearer of that centrist position, and then there’s Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders standing there,” he said.

He’s working on policy that will speak directly to all Hispanics.

“I am very much a policy wonk and one of the things I’m working on is developing a broader perspective of Latin America, not just focusing on traditional Cuba and Venezuela,” Diaz said. “Regardless of party, we basically ignore Latin America, and we only pay attention when there’s a crisis.”

He’s talking about something similar to the old Alliance for Progress launched by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to establish economic cooperation between the United States and Latin America. One goal: to nurse “baby democracies.”

As for Cuba policy, he wouldn’t give more specifics than: “It’s not going to be isolation.”

“Sometimes we get very stuck on the political,” Diaz said. “The embargo, not the embargo. At the end of the day, does it mean anything vs. real engagement? Once you talk about those hot-button topics, everyone goes to our respective corners and stop talking about how to help people.”

For Puerto Rico, Diaz said, “the goal would be to make a real concerted effort to help Puerto Rico rebuild by focusing on infrastructure, job creation, and economic development.“

“We are very much about the long-range view to problems,” he said, “not a sound bite to answer a question, but a long-range view on how to build a city or a country.”

For the ultimate win against Trump, Diaz is counting on the vote of his Republican friends who don’t embrace the cult.

They have already told him they’re quite “comfortable” with this New Yorker.