UPDATE: Miami's Mayor Tomás Regalado Weights In On Herr Trumpf

Who will stand up to Trump's racism in Miami-Dade? Not Mario Diaz-Balart

Yesterday we looked at how Democratic congressional candidates are running against Trump by tying their foolish opponents to Trump hate-filled messaging. Immediately on top of that reporting from the NY Times seemed to bolster exactly what FL-25 Democratic candidate Alina Valdes told us yesterday about her own campaign against Trump-supporter Mario Diaz-Balart. The Republican mayor of Miami made the point.

Had Republicans nominated Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush for president, Tomás Regalado would have hurled himself into the task of electing their candidate.

“I would have been all in,” Mr. Regalado, the Republican mayor of Miami, said in his office overlooking Biscayne Bay.

Instead, Mr. Regalado, a former broadcast journalist, intends to sit out the presidential race. He considers Mrs. Clinton untrustworthy, but views Mr. Trump as a poisonous candidate who has aggravated racial divisions. In Miami, Mr. Regalado said, Mr. Trump is seen as “a bully, as a person who despises people that don’t look like him.”

Mr. Regalado, 69, said he had been inundated with angry email, some of it mentioning Mr. Trump by name. “Sometimes they say, ‘Yeah, Trump is right, you guys have to all go back to your country,’” said Mr. Regalado, who was born in Havana and emigrated as a teenager. “This is my country. I can’t go back to Cuba.”

Since Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, he has consolidated support from national party leaders and from many in the rank and file. He has pulled nearly even with Mrs. Clinton in many polls, including in Florida.

But the southern tip of the nation’s most populous swing state has been a blazing exception to the trend-- most of all in Miami-Dade County, a densely populated bastion of diversity that cast about a tenth of the statewide vote in 2012.

If Mr. Trump has effectively staked his campaign nationwide on strong support from whites, Florida may present the most punishing test of his strategy, as Hispanics here, including conservative-leaning Cuban-Americans who twice helped George W. Bush carry the state, turn away from his candidacy en masse.

Mr. Trump has trampled local sensibilities in myriad ways, from his belittling treatment of Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush to his personal coarseness, slashing comments on immigration and endorsement of open relations with the Castro government.

In addition to Mr. Regalado, two Republican members of Congress from Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo, have said they will not back Mr. Trump, as has Carlos A. Gimenez, the Republican mayor of Miami-Dade County. All four are Cuban-American.

Early polls show voters in the area resoundingly rejecting Mr. Trump: A Quinnipiac University poll this month found Mr. Trump about even with Mrs. Clinton statewide, but losing a band of southeastern counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, by 38 percentage points.

From a long gone era of self-serving corruption

Miami-Dade has been rapidly trending Democratic. Obama won every congressional district in the county except Diaz-Balart's and last time he came close enough in Diaz-Balart's (1%) to predict that Hillary or Bernie would win it in November. Trump's anti-immigrant/anti-Hispanic hate speech goes over very poorly there. Dr. Valdes: "As a candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in the 25th district and, more importantly, as a Latina, I find Donald J. Trump's statements about Latinos and women extremely offensive. We are a diverse group of people who made America our homes from many different countries but the vitriol and contempt the Republican nominee for president has chosen to use goes beyond reason and common sense. I give credit to the two Republican Cuban-American representatives from South Florida who have stated they could not vote for Mr. Trump for president. However, the third, Mario Diaz-Balart, who currently represents the 25th district, has given his support to the current nominee in spite of his hateful and hurtful words. He is no different than the man he is supporting in spite of the insults he has generally hurled at a large proportion of this district, which comprises from 60-70% Latinos. He has no consideration for the constituents that make up the majority of this part of Florida and I believe it is time for him to go home and retire from politics. Maybe then, he will learn a valuable life's lesson he should have been taught a long time ago... generalizations about a group of people should not be condoned and should definitely be exposed as the lies they are. Mr. Diaz-Balart is just as guilty for those insulting words as if he had spoken them himself."

Like Alina said, Diaz-Balart with his support for Trump makes him the odd man out. If she can hammer that message home, she will be the next congressmember from FL-25. If the DCCC wasn't run by venal little fiefdom chiefs like Israel, Lujan, Pelosi and Wasserman Schultz, it would be coming to the aid of Valdes, who is being lopsidedly outspent by the PAC-backed, lobbyist-supported Diaz-Balart. But Valdes is way too progressive, way too independent-minded and way too ethical for a DCCC that consciously sets about to elect conservatives willing to mindlessly take orders from party bosses and who are amenable to the kind of systemic corruption that makes Capitol Hill into a universally despised den of iniquity.

Ready to stand up and slap down the DCCC and the corrupt party bosses who control it by electing anti-corruption progressives like Alina Valdes? Please contribute what you can at the thermometer below: