Miami Democrat Annette Taddeo launches campaign to be state’s first Latina governor
After months of open speculation and exploratory meetings around the state, Miami state Sen. Annette Taddeo is making it official: She is running to be Florida’s next governor.
Taddeo, 54, filed campaign documents with Florida’s Division of Elections on Monday morning. Her entry shakes up a Democratic field that has been so far dominated by two front-runners — U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist and Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried — as they vie to challenge Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022.
“We need a governor who will actually govern,” Taddeo told the Herald in an interview last week.
“We clearly have someone that is more concerned about being president than he is about running Florida, more worried about Republican primary voters in
Iowa than he is about families here in Florida.”
Taddeo is the only Hispanic gubernatorial candidate among the top contenders, in a state where Hispanics make up nearly 27% of the population, according to the Census Bureau’s latest release in 2020 — a growth that accounts for almost 1.5 million new Latinos in the past 10 years. If she were elected as the Democratic nominee, she would be the first Latina candidate to earn a major party nomination for Florida governor. And if Orlando-area U.S. Rep. Val Demings becomes Sen. Marco Rubio’s Democratic challenger in 2022, Florida’s minority party would top the midterm ballot with two women of color.
Taddeo says she’s running as the grassroots candidate. Her candidacy is a milestone for a party that has struggled with messaging to Florida Latinos in the past several elections, something Taddeo says she’s confident she will be able to overcome by speaking directly with Hispanic and African-American voters to create a “winning coalition” for Democrats.
A major factor that weighed into her decision to run, she explains, is her belief that “candidates need to reflect the coalition” Democrats want to create. It’s not enough for Latinas to be surrogates or running mates or campaign managers, she says. They need to be the ones running, too.
“I love how people work so hard and say, ‘We want minority votes’ ... because they know that the coalition to win is a coalition of diverse voters across the state for Democrats, and certainly it’s something that we haven’t tried before,” Taddeo said. “But for us [women of color] to dare to actually be at the front of the bus instead of the back of the bus is somehow aiming too high.”
Taddeo, a working mother with a 15-year-old daughter and two adult stepdaughters, said parents won’t forget DeSantis’ months-long feud with local school board members and the Biden administration over implementing mandatory mask use policies in public schools.
“As a parent, and from all the parents I’ve heard from, I don’t think that’s something you forget,” Taddeo said. “When politics comes to the point that it’s actually affecting your kids, it’s a whole different ball game.”
Taddeo says Medicaid expansion in Florida and addressing climate change will be two major themes of her campaign over the next 10 months ahead of the state’s Aug. 23 primary election. But above all, she said she wants to address the crisis of parents, especially women, who have left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic and haven’t returned.
“It has become more expensive for parents to figure out who’s going to take care of their kid while they go to work, and if it costs more than what you make, it makes it really tough,” said Taddeo, who owns a business that provides a range of language services called LanguageSpeak. “I know that businesses are aware of this issue, and I think we as a state should start investing more in helping those parents with that childcare and earlier education.”
She said she’d like to push for the expansion of Florida’s Voluntary PreKindergarten program, which currently provides a free pre-K education for three hours a day for kids under 4 years old, to run for a full day.
‘ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE’
At a news conference outside the Florida Secretary of State’s office, where Taddeo filed her campaign paperwork, the state senator said few policy positions distinguished her from her primary opponents, Crist and Fried.
“I don’t think most of us disagree on many of the policies,” Taddeo said. “Although I will tell you, those people across the state that have been really outspoken to me about running are very aware that I am a lifelong Democrat and somebody who has never stood down to our Democratic values.”
Taddeo’s message was a not-so-subtle jab at her opponents: Crist, a former Republican governor, and Fried, who has campaigned for Republicans in the past.
Rumors of Taddeo’s potential run began circulating earlier this year as she discussed the possibility with Democrats in the Florida Legislature, MiamiDade County and Washington. She’s been meeting with Hispanic leaders across the state, including in Central Florida.
Taddeo is well-known in South Florida, where she’s a frequent guest on Miami’s Spanish-language radio stations and stumped for national Democrats campaigning on her home turf. She’s irked fellow Democrats more than once in openly criticizing her party’s late outreach and investments for Florida Latinos and their positions on Latin America policy.
“The people that are within the Democratic Party, where I have been with them in the trenches, the ones who knock on the door, the ones who work and make the phone calls and really try to help elect Democrats, I do know that many of them respect me because I’m willing to speak out when we are not doing something right,” said Taddeo.
But Taddeo is lesser known than Fried, the only Democrat elected statewide in Florida, and Crist, who registered as a Democrat in 2012 and two years later chose Taddeo as his running mate during an ill-fated attempt to win his way back into the governor’s mansion.
“I think for Senator Taddeo to be successful, she’s going to have to occupy a lane and also have to capture the imagination of the Democratic electorate through messaging and herself and her story,” said Miami-based Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi. But he warned that Taddeo has just 10 months to raise money against two betterfunded candidates.
Earlier this month, Taddeo’s political committee, Fight Back Florida PAC, announced a slate of consulting firms that have run research, polling, ads and mail programs with Democrats in battleground races across the country. And on Friday, the committee announced a group of new hires who’ve worked on progressive causes and campaigns in Florida, including Jackie Lee, Biden’s Florida state director in 2020, and Millie Raphael, who worked as Senior Hispanic adviser for former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum. But her committee reported less than $250,000 on hand last month, a fraction of what Crist and Fried have available to spend.
“But as we saw in 2018,” Amandi said, referring to the surprise Democratic gubernatorial primary victory of Gillum, an underfunded and embattled candidate, “anything is possible.”
Taddeo will be at a significant fundraising disadvantage during the 2022 legislative session, when she will be forbidden to raise money by the Legislature’s rules. But she said Monday that her work in the session, which runs from mid-January to midMarch, will ultimately be a campaign asset because voters will see she is fighting for them in Tallahassee.
Taddeo, who represents Florida’s Senate District 40 in West Miami-Dade County, was first elected to her seat in a 2017 special election triggered by the resignation of state Sen. Frank Artiles, after it emerged he used a racist slur while speaking to Black colleagues in the Florida capital. Taddeo, a Colombian American, became the first Democratic Latina elected to the Florida Senate.
Prior to that victory, Taddeo had endured a string of losses. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008 and again in 2016, when former Congressman Joe Garcia beat her in the Democratic primary for Florida’s 26th Congressional District before losing in November to former U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Republican. She lost a county commission race in 2010.
Then in 2014, Taddeo was picked by her nowopponent Crist to be his running mate. That put her in position to become the state’s first Latina lieutenant governor, a glass ceiling that was shattered four years later by Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez.
A FLORIDA STORY
Born in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, in 1967, Taddeo fled to Alabama as a teenager with her family after her father, an Italian American from New Jersey, was briefly kidnapped by the Colombian FARC, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization that Taddeo said had taken over her town and her family’s farm.
Still, she’s not unfamiliar with attacks from Republicans calling her a communist. In the 2017 special state Senate election, when her Republican opponent called her a sympathizer of socialist regimes in a campaign ad, Taddeo said she decided to be much more explicit about her background and her father’s story. “It really was very upsetting, personally to me, to my mom,” said Taddeo. “One day I was shopping for uniforms for the next school year and the next day, I was in Alabama.”
Taddeo hopes her “Florida story” will resonate with voters across the state.
“My story is a story of believing in the American dream,” she said.