Parties covet this state Senate seat in South Florida

TALLAHASSEE — As Democrats seek to have real power in the Florida Senate for the first time in nearly three decades, political leaders and donor checkbooks are focused on a South Florida swing seat.

“It’s no secret that District 39 is the top battleground as Senate Democrats continue on the path to the majority in Florida,” incoming Senate Democratic Leader Gary Farmer said last year, framing the race’s importance early in the election cycle.

Now, with qualifying finished and slightly more than four months until the November election, the battle in Senate District 39 is on pace to become one of the most heavily contested and expensive legislative races of the year.

The race in Monroe County and part of MiamiDade County features two state representatives, Democrat Javier Fernandez and Republican Ana Maria Rodriguez, both of whom were recruited by their state parties and have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in help.

Fernandez, however, will first have to win an August primary against Daniel Horton Diaz, a former district chief of staff for U.S. Rep.

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla. Celso Alfonso, who has no party affiliation, also qualified for the race before a June 12 deadline.

The race is being closely watched because it is a tossup in a district that Democrats would like to capture as they try to ultimately regain control of the Senate. Sen. Anitere Flores, R-Miami, cannot run for reelection in the district this year because of term limits.

Democrats, who lost control of the Senate in the early 1990s, need to flip three seats to gain a 20-20 split of the upper chamber, which could be a long shot this year. Senate Republican leaders are fiercely defending their majority and had pumped more than $200,000 into Rodriguez’s campaign as of June 12.

The race is expected to be heavily influenced by the presidential race between Republican President Donald Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, the top race in an election cycle dominated by news of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump lost in the Hispanic-majority district by 10 points in 2016 to Democrat Hillary Clinton, even though he won Florida. The Fernandez campaign is counting on a similar dynamic for the upcoming election.

“We can be fairly certain

Joe Biden will win (the district) just like Clinton and Obama, but the real challenge of this race is making sure the disaffected Republicans who back Biden at the top of the ticket also back Javier Fernandez for state Senate,” said Dan Newman, a veteran Democratic consultant and Fernandez adviser. “That’s the whole ballgame.‘’

Fernandez said he intends to work with Republicans in Tallahassee, if elected in November.

“While I have been criticized by some Democrats for supporting Republicans in the past, I think we need good people on both sides of the aisle whose first objective is to work and to advance solutions to the key problems facing our state,” Fernandez, of South Miami, told The News Service of Florida in an interview Monday.

Rodriguez, of Doral, said that if elected she will “serve everyone in the district, regardless of who voted for” her. But she emphasized that most people in her district can agree on “clean water and low taxes.”

“I am a conservative in the sense that I am fiscally conservative. I don’t believe in having a huge government. I don’t think the government’s role is to have tentacles in every aspect of everyone’s life,” Rodriguez said in a phone interview.