Former state Sen. Annette Taddeo is strongly considering another run at elected office, this time for a very familiar post.
Multiple sources have said that Taddeo, a business owner and former Chair of the Miami-Dade County Democratic Party, has plans to pursue her old seat representing what is now Senate District 38, which she left in 2022 to run for Congress.
One political consultant speaking with Florida Politics on background said talk of Taddeo mounting a Senate comeback bid began shortly after Democrats Emily Gregory and Brian Nathan scored upset Special Election wins in House District 87 and Senate District 14 last month, spurring expectations of a potential blue wave in November.
Numerous sitting Senators began encouraging Taddeo to run, reasoning that her relatively strong name recognition, personal background, fundraising track record and proven ability to win in the district would make her a strong challenger to her Republican successor, Alexis Calatayud.
Former state Rep. J.C. Planas, who serves as General Counsel for the Miami-Dade Democratic Party and is part of the organization’s candidate-recruitment squad, said those attributes and others continue to make her an excellent candidate.
“We need candidates who can win, who don’t have to spend $7 out of every $10 introducing themselves to voters, who have built-in name ID,” he said. “And it goes without saying that if she had not left to run for Congress, she would have gotten re-elected and continued to be a bipartisan force in the Senate, and she would have been much better at crafting laws that will protect Floridians.”
And she’s very interested, he added.
“She realizes the urgency in trying to end the Republican supermajority in the Senate. That’s extremely important,” Planas said. “She also realizes we have a good shot at having a Democratic Governor, and breaking that supermajority, I think, is a big part of trying to take the state back.”
Taddeo was born in Colombia, where she spent her first 17 years before fleeing to the U.S. after terrorists kidnapped her father. She is the owner and operator of a translation business called LanguageSpeak. She entered politics in 2008, when she unsuccessfully challenged then-Republican U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
She then ran for the Miami-Dade County Commission, placing third in a nonpartisan Primary.
In 2012, Taddeo was elected Chair of the county’s Democratic Party, and during her tenure, she organized several successful elections for local and state seats, including a 2014 push to place a Democratic candidate in every state House race.
After unsuccessful campaigns for Lieutenant Governor and Congress in 2014 and 2016, Taddeo won a Special Election for Senate in September 2017. She kept her seat in the 2018 General Election, defeating former Republican Rep. José Félix Díaz by 4 percentage points.
In October 2021, Taddeo announced she was running for Governor, but later changed her target to Florida’s 27th Congressional District, which Republican María Elvira Salazar represents.
During the 2024 election cycle, Taddeo ran for Miami-Dade Clerk and Comptroller, but lost to Republican incumbent Juan Fernandez-Barquin.
SD 38 now performs slightly more Republican than Democratic, meaning that on paper, it is one of Florida’s most flippable districts.
But Calatayud’s legislative profile may make unseating her difficult. She has voted against her fellow GOP lawmakers on several notable occasions, including against the state’s six-week abortion ban, and she amended a major land-use preemption law that passed this year so it maintained protections for Miami-Dade’s Urban Development Boundary, which safeguards vital ecosystems like the Everglades and Biscayne Bay — both legislative focuses of hers.
Calatayud also passed the landmark Live Local Act to expand affordable housing statewide, backed a statewide Antisemitism Task Force, worked across the aisle on providing stopgap funding for AIDS medication, passed new survivor-inspired protections for domestic violence victims and was among those who called for strict action after leaked text messages showed members of the Miami-Dade GOP sharing “vile” slurs about Jewish and Black people.
Florida Politics contacted Taddeo for comment on this story, but did not hear back from her by press time.
In an April 1 Facebook post about Ruth’s List Florida, an abortion rights-focused organization that exclusively backs Democratic women and is also said to be supporting her potential SD 38 candidacy, Taddeo wrote, “We are just getting started. Proud to serve on the board of the only organization in Florida solely dedicated to electing Democratic, pro-choice women — and prouder still to fight alongside them. The shift is coming.”
