A third Florida man has thrown his hat in the ring for the GOP bid for president in 2024. Francis Suarez, 45, mayor of Miami, announced his candidacy on June 15.
“I’m going to run for president. I’m gonna run for your children and mine. Let’s give them the future they deserve,” Suarez said, in an announcement video, in which he runs in multiple locations around the city, highlighting its economic development.
“In Miami, we stopped waiting for Washington to lead,” he says in the video. “America’s so-called leaders confuse being loud with actually leading.”
The son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro’s Communist regime, Suarez has been called a “moderate,” who rejects culture war politics, talks about climate change and dissented from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Suarez has said that he wrote Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in, rather than voting for Donald Trump, in 2016, and voted for Vice President Mike Pence in 2020. He has also challenged the Florida governor’s clashes with the Walt Disney Company, which he has called “potentially a personal vendetta, which has cost the state now potentially 2,000 jobs in a billion-dollar investment.”
The candidate’s father served two terms as Miami mayor, and Suarez’s cousin is Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.).
In 2018, Suarez visited Israel with Chabad Rabbi Getzy Fellig of Miami. Suarez said visiting the Western Wall filled him “with gratitude for the opportunity I have been given to lead Miami” and gave him “an opportunity to pray, with faith and optimism, for the future.”
On June 10, 2021, Suarez hosted the Israeli consul general at Miami City Hall “to make this clear: We stand in solidarity with the state of Israel,” he tweeted. He noted that Miami was investing $1 million in Israel Bonds. “Israel is our greatest ally in the Middle East, and Miami will never forget that,” he wrote.
