On a bright, breezy Saturday morning in late September, Eliott Rodriguez, a congressional candidate in Florida’s Twenty-seventh District, walked the streets of Little Havana with two of his campaign volunteers. They were in the throes of a debate over the best translation for “Sorry I missed you,” an essential phrase in the door-knocking lexicon, eventually settling on “Perdona que no nos vimos” (“I’m sorry we didn’t see each other”). Nearby, roosters scampered along the edge of Cuba Memorial Boulevard Park. Rodriguez, a trim, seventy-year-old Cuban American, is a Democrat and former local news anchor, which makes him a well-known figure in the area. Predictably, he has spent much of the lead-up to Election Day working to win over Latino voters in the majority-Hispanic district, which covers much of central Miami—a group that, in recent years, has moved to the right. In 2020, despite voting for Joe Biden, the district narrowly elected Republican María Elvira Salazar, who had been endorsed by Donald Trump, to Congress. In 2022, she was reëlected, and, in 2024, Trump carried the district, and Salazar cruised to victory, winning by more than twenty points. But Salazar, who, amazingly, is also a Cuban American former news anchor, is now reckoning with her district increasingly turning on the President amid economic pressure and an immigration crackdown that is extremely unpopular among Latinos.
At the onset of the race, it seemed as if Salazar’s campaign strategy was to continue her embrace of Trump and the MAGA movement, even alongside a surge in deportations in Miami, the nation’s leader in ICE arrests. Last year, she declared that the facilities at Alligator Alcatraz, the infamous immigrant-detention center in the Everglades, met the “highest standards,” and she avoided criticizing the Trump Administration when it announced the terminations of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans, upending countless lives and businesses in her district.
But, a few weeks ago, Salazar released an ad breaking with Trump over immigration enforcement and warning him that the Latino voters who helped him win in 2024 felt betrayed—“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.”—joining the ranks of several G.O.P. candidates nationwide attempting to distance themselves from the President. As Election Day approaches, Trump’s approval rating has hit a record low, currently hovering in the mid- to low thirties, and a recent poll from NBC News showed that a higher percentage of voters consider their vote this November to be a signal of opposition to the White House than in any other midterm in nearly thirty years. Perhaps because of this, Salazar’s ad seemed to barely make a dent. In fact, as Rodriguez explained, Salazar’s turnabout had seemed to spark a fund-raising windfall for his campaign from national donors, who saw the dysfunction as a sign that the seat was potentially flippable. Shortly after, their premonitions were borne out: political forecasters shifted the seat from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” whereas other pollsters even went as far as to call it a toss-up.
We crossed Calle Ocho, where tourists milled around Domino Park and perused souvenir shops selling rooster T-shirts and Cuban-flag magnets, before eventually making our way a few blocks north, to a neighborhood of modest, low-slung apartment buildings. With a little more than a month to go, Rodriguez’s campaign was relentlessly targeting voters with no party affiliation (N.P.A.s, as his staffers called them), who make up thirty per cent of the district and more than twenty-four per cent of Florida’s registered voters. The canvassers were in high spirits: in contrast to the district’s more affluent neighborhoods, where they were often met with silence and Ring cameras, they told me that people in Little Havana still opened their doors, and, more often than not, they were excited to see Rodriguez at their doorstep.
“Rodriguez is essentially a household name for Miamians of a certain age,” Carlos Odio, a researcher focussing on Latino voter sentiment who grew up in Miami, told me. “I remember him being on television as a kid.” When I asked Rodriguez if it felt like he was back on the local-news beat, he smiled and nodded. “Same skill, talking to people.” As a campaign volunteer filmed with an iPad, Rodriguez introduced himself in his mellifluous anchorman’s voice to residents and passersby, asking how they were doing. “La situación está difícil, no?” he said. (“Things are hard, right?”) Fidelia, a woman in her sixties who had arrived in the U.S. from Cuba seven years ago, mentioned how difficult life was for her family back on the island but wasn’t critical of the Trump Administration, or of Salazar. “This country has been a blessing for me,” she said. At Rodriguez’s pitch, one older man in a fedora and sunglasses held up his hands as if it had nothing to do with him: he was only a resident. Another Cuban woman was more forthcoming. “I don’t like her,” she said when I asked about Salazar. “I don’t think she’s sincere.”
As the South Florida heat intensified, we passed a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses across the street. “We got some competition,” Rodriguez murmured. When Rodriguez approached Melba, a middle-aged Nicaraguan woman walking her dog, she told him that she had swum over the southern border with her son in the eighties but proudly declared herself a Republican, mainly owing to her Christian values. She had voted for Trump but wasn’t happy with the state of the country. “The things that he’s doing, or the things that ICE is doing, that’s sad,” she said, also mentioning the Iran war and gas prices. She liked the Democrats but was turned off by the “gender stuff,” adding that she was too old to change her beliefs. “I’m with you on that,” Rodriguez replied. After he moved on, I asked if Melba knew who she’d be voting for, and she said that she’d have to think hard about it.
The Twenty-seventh District has been referred to as the at-large seat of the Americas, and, increasingly, the matchup between Rodriguez and Salazar has taken on an international dimension. During that morning’s canvassing shift, Rodriguez and several campaign volunteers walked by a monument to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and a member of the group mused that Trump and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio (a native of the Twenty-seventh), seemed to be plotting a repeat of the operation. The notion isn’t far-fetched. Recently, a Wall Street Journal report revealed that, in June, a group of wealthy Cuban Americans met at a mansion in the district, just a few miles south of Little Havana, to plot Cuba’s post-Communist future. Meanwhile, Rubio has openly discussed direct intervention, threatening that the Cuban regime would “learn the lesson the hard way” if it didn’t capitulate to American demands.
The current Administration’s crushing sanctions and blockade on oil shipments to the island have made Trump popular among Miami Cubans. And some right-wing politicians in Latin America allied with the White House have endorsed Salazar, including María Corina Machado, the exiled Venezuelan politician who won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Colombian President, Abelardo de la Espriella. But, in this election, both candidates have attempted to claim the mantle of anti-communism. Rodriguez, in addition to covering Miami’s biggest stories, such as the Mariel boatlift and Hurricane Andrew, had also reported from inside Communist regimes such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, once even interviewing Fidel Castro, and recently attacked Salazar in a Spanish-language social-media post over the Trump Administration’s partnership with the socialist government in Venezuela. (He isn’t a fan of Zohran Mamdani’s plan for government-owned bodegas, either.)
In a reflection of the race’s tricky political balancing act between long-term and more recent exiles, Rodriguez said that he still has family in Cuba and believes that the Administration’s economic strangulation of the island is hurting citizens more than the government. “I think people have opened their eyes that Trump’s policy toward Cuba is not about restoring democracy—it’s about enriching himself,” Rodriguez told me. In response to de la Espriella’s and Machado’s endorsements of Salazar, he said that he was more focussed on families struggling to make ends meet in Miami.
After all, the campaign would need more than Little Havana. Though Rodriguez’s campaign has gained momentum, fuelled by the same anti-Trump resentment that has powered the Republican-turned-Democrat former congressman David Jolly’s run for governor and the Democratic state legislator Angie Nixon’s Senate campaign, Republicans maintain a strong grip on the district and have been significantly outpacing Democrats in voter registration throughout the state. Since 2020, national Democrats and their allies have all but abandoned Florida financially. Susan Whitman-Helfgot, the co-finance chair of Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida, was motivated to get involved anyway. She helped found the West Miami Dems, a voter-registration group, after the 2024 Presidential election, newly determined to make Florida a swing state again. “You need to pull in the no-party voters. It’s not an easy sale, but it can be made,” she told me.
The stakes for voter engagement are particularly high for this year’s elections in Florida, she explained, in the face of recent Republican-led changes to state election laws that will de-register voters who do not participate, as well as a swell of disinformation aimed at disenfranchising Latino voters. Some Latinos told her that they thought they weren’t allowed to vote in congressional elections as independents. Others mentioned hearing at church that they simply couldn’t vote this year. She was also quick to point out that, although Latino voters were not a monolith, the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown had increasingly become a political wake-up call for those affected by it. “It changes when it’s personal,” she said. “When you’re Venezuelan, and you’ve had a family member thrown out, it’s a whole different ballgame.”
That sentiment dovetailed with a 2025 poll of mostly long-term Venezuelan immigrants in Florida by Florida International University’s Latino Public Opinion Forum, which found that thirty-five per cent of respondents had family or a close friend affected by the termination of T.P.S. Of all the poll’s participants, a fifth of those who had voted for Trump now regretted it. Trump, for his part, did not seem concerned. After initially shrugging off questions about Salazar’s ad, he reposted more than a dozen posts attacking her on Truth Social: “She is nothing but a back stabber,” one post read. “I’m glad Latino support hasn’t wavered.” Another read, “So we need a NEW Republican to Replace Salazar.”
In the days after the ad, Salazar appeared on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” saying that she spoke with Trump and had a “fantastic conversation” with him, adding that he was “courteous” and “very receptive.” It was unclear whether her ad was a reaction to any new voter data, but, since its release, she had been keeping a relatively low profile in Miami. Shortly after meeting with Rodriguez, I reached out to Salazar’s spokesperson for an interview, even visiting her office on Eighth Street, where a Cuban flag emblazoned with the word “Libertad” hung on the wall, but my repeated requests were unanswered. Then, a few days later, I received a tip that the congresswoman would appear at a Mass at Our Lady of Lebanon, a Maronite Catholic church back in Little Havana that serves a diverse community of Lebanese and of Latino descent. At the conclusion of an English-language service interspersed with hymns in Arabic, the priest introduced Salazar, who stood up in the front row, smiling and waving. She walked with him into an adjoining banquet hall, where she shook hands and posed for pictures. As I approached Salazar, a young woman stepped in front of me and began addressing her as a bearded man beside me filmed the exchange.
“You were talking about enforcement,” the woman said. “I wanted to interrupt. My name is Arianne Betancourt. My father was in Alligator Alcatraz. Myself and several of the people here went to your office several times. Your staff told us you were in full support of this Administration and its policies.”
Salazar nodded in response, a tight smile across her face as a small crowd formed around us. “Wait a minute, who did you talk to?” she said, glancing over her shoulder as two staffers approached. She began to introduce Reidel Nabut, her deputy district director. “This is, uh . . .”
“Yes, that’s who I spoke to,” Betancourt said. “But, you know, it’s been six months since that happened. And you really let the community down.” After some back and forth, with Salazar’s spokesperson looking on uneasily, the congresswoman turned to the priest. “Are they part of this community?” she asked him, indicating Betancourt and the man who was filming. “No,” he said.
“We are part of the community, and I’m one of your constituents,” Betancourt replied. Salazar smiled and nodded, pointing at the man who was filming, an activist named Thomas Kennedy. “Sí, that’s why you’re taping.”
Eventually, the priest and a few parishioners intervened, and Betancourt left. Salazar’s team told me that she wouldn’t be taking questions. I spoke briefly to the priest, Manuel Rahmeh, a native of Lebanon, who told me that the majority of his church congregants are immigrants. “They should be treated in a different way.”
A few days later, I met Betancourt for coffee in North Miami. The video of her exchange with Salazar had been posted online and had gone viral, so much so that Salazar had been forced to issue a statement, telling a local news station she believed that the encounter was politically motivated and that Betancourt had a “clear agenda.” Betancourt, who is half Cuban but also has Honduran and Salvadoran roots, told me that before her father was detained she wasn’t a political person at all—she had even voted for Salazar. She had worked as a tour guide in Little Havana and other parts of Florida before quitting her job to focus full time on getting her father released from detention and had been among the first to document human-rights abuses at the facility. Her father’s case was complicated; he had a criminal record, but she told me he had been following immigration protocol.
He was detained at a routine check-in at ICE’s Miramar field office. She had sat outside in her car all day waiting for him and finally received a call at 9 P.M. with his voice on the line telling her that he was in Alligator Alcatraz, shackled to a bed.
When she tried to get help from Salazar’s office, she said members of the staff told her that there was nothing they could do and that the congresswoman supported immigration enforcement. Eventually, with help from the Community Justice Project, Betancourt was able to get her father out. The congresswoman’s office disputed her account, saying that her team had met with Betancourt and claimed they had offered to help with her father’s case. A spokesperson for the congresswoman also said that her office has resolved many immigration-related cases for its constituents.
Betancourt now works for an immigrant-rights group called the Workers Circle, and she said that she’d confronted Salazar on behalf of nearly eight hundred families with loved ones detained in other South Florida facilities, such as Krome. Her phone was constantly pinging throughout our conversation, and at one point she received a call from a detention center. She showed me a WhatsApp group for Cubans who had been deported to Africa.
Later, Betancourt told me that advocating on her father’s and other detainees’ behalf had made her a target of far-right Cuban American influencers. It had also caused tension in her family. She’d been renting from her father’s sister, a Trump supporter, who she said called her a communist and kicked her out after seeing her attend a vigil. But she added that, over the past couple of months, she had felt a shift in her critics. “Some of the people who were against the work I was doing are now, like, ‘You know what, maybe you were right.’ ”
It echoed what I’d heard from others in the city. Although no one I spoke to in the Twenty-seventh District predicted a stampede of Republicans running to vote for Rodriguez, one longtime local politician told me that even his most vociferous MAGA friends had become quieter, steering their conversations away from politics. A lawyer I met related the story of a Republican colleague who had remained a Trump supporter until a few weeks ago, appalled by the lack of due process in immigration court. She asked her colleague if she planned to vote for Salazar.
“She told me she would probably stay home,” she said. ♦