Politics
María Elvira Salazar faces toughest CD 27 re-election test yet in Eliott Rodriguez
Republican U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar and her Democratic challenger, Eliott Rodriguez, have much in common biographically, but they’re pitching very different visions to voters on cost-of-living and immigration issues in Florida’s 27th Congressional District.
Salazar is seeking a fourth term by highlighting bipartisan accomplishments, local investments and opposition to Latin American dictatorships.
Rodriguez is pitching change, arguing the incumbent’s allegiance to President Donald Trump has hurt constituents facing rising costs and aggressive immigration enforcement.
It’s among the most closely watched federal contests in Florida this election cycle, viewed as a test of whether growing frustration over Trump’s policies can weaken Republicans’ recent dominance among Miami’s Hispanic voters.
CD 27 encompasses Coral Gables, Cutler Bay, Key Biscayne, Palmetto Bay, Pinecrest, South Miami, West Miami and Miami neighborhoods south of the Dolphin Expressway in Miami-Dade County.
About three-quarters of the district’s residents are Hispanic. More than half are foreign-born. And Republicans hold a marked advantage with a nearly 39% share of the district’s 394,006-voter electorate, according to the state’s most recent tally.
Third- and no-party voters are the second-largest group, with a 33% share, while Democrats pull up the rear with 28%.
Florida Politics ranked Salazar and Rodriguez’s CD 27 clash fifth on its list of the 11 South Florida races to watch heading into the General Election.
The candidates have several biographical similarities. Both are American-born children of Cuban expatriates who built award-winning journalism careers and became familiar TV anchors.
Diverging paths
Salazar worked for CNN, Univision and Telemundo. Rodriguez spent 25 years at CBS Miami and, in a nod to his tenure at the station, cleverly incorporated its iconic eye logo into his campaign designs.
Salazar, 65, made the transition into politics close to a decade ago, running against Democrat Donna Shalala for an open seat in 2018 and losing by about 6 percentage points. In their rematch two years later, Salazar came out 3 points ahead. Then she beat Democrats Annette Taddeo and Lucia Báez-Geller by 15 and 21 points, respectively, in the next two cycles.
Rodriguez, 70, is making his first bid for public office after retiring from the news industry in 2025. He says housing costs that pushed his children out of Miami, alongside threats to immigrants and democratic safeguards, compelled him to run.
Rodriguez has also long been active in the community, including emceeing charitable events such as Legal Services of Greater Miami’s “Heart of Giving.”
After federal immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January, he joined an ad campaign criticizing Miami Republicans’ immigration record, which came less than two months before he launched his congressional bid.
He’s running on a promise to push for workforce housing on underused federal land, lower-interest mortgages for public servants and federal backstops for catastrophe insurance. He opposes Trump’s tariffs, supports cheaper prescription drugs and voluntary Medicare enrollment for people ages 55 to 64, and vows to defend retirement benefits.
He also wants to ban individual stock trading by members of Congress and the executive branch. On foreign policy, he opposes the Iran war — which Salazar voted against ending in September, the Miami Herald noted in its endorsement of him.
Salazar brings a six-year record of constituent services, job fairs, federal appropriations and a list of legislative accomplishments. Her office says she secured more than $89 million for 47 community projects, including millions for senior housing, a community health center expansion, pediatric mental healthcare, flood control and coastal resiliency work.
Notably, she has a penchant for taking credit for funding she voted against, including $4.4 million for Cutler Bay’s Marlin Road project and $650,000 she presented to Florida International University in 2023, both funded through a 2023 government spending bill she opposed.
Salazar helped enact the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which targets nonconsensual intimate images and sexual deepfakes, and migratory-bird conservation legislation. Her RESIDE Act proposal to convert vacant buildings into housing became part of a bipartisan housing package this year.
She has also touted tax relief for workers and businesses in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Rodriguez has noted cuts Medicaid and food assistance funding while expanding deportation funding.
On healthcare, Salazar joined Democrats in January to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies over Trump’s opposition. Rodriguez also supports restoring those subsidies, which remain a pressing concern in a district with unusually high Obamacare enrollment.
Cuba, immigration and questions of accountability
When it comes to immigration enforcement, the candidates lean the same way, but to different degrees. Rodriguez supports border security, faster case processing and protections for Dreamers, Haitians, Venezuelans and eligible Cubans.
He also wants major changes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and says Salazar’s September campaign ad criticizing Trump’s hardline policies — which drew attacks from the President and conservative commentators, some of whom called for her deportation — can’t erase her funding votes or favorable assessments she gave the now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz immigrant-detention facility in the Everglades.
But Salazar’s departures from Trump over immigration enforcement predate the TV spot. In March, she helped force a vote on temporary protected status for Haitians and backed similar actions for Venezuelans.
Her bipartisan Dignity Act, first filed in 2022 and reintroduced in July 2025, would combine border security measures and E-Verify mandates with renewable legal status for qualifying immigrants who arrived before 2021.
Participants would undergo background checks, settle back taxes and pay $7,000 over seven years. Those conditions make descriptions of blanket amnesty misleading; the main program provides no citizenship pathway, though separate provisions aid Dreamers.
But the proposal’s legal-status provisions aren’t the preference of most Florida voters, according to recent polling, which found 75% of Florida voters favor a conditional route to citizenship and 52% oppose legal status without it — an exclusion Rodriguez has criticized.
Cuba remains central to Salazar’s identity. The Western Hemisphere Subcommittee Chair regularly condemns repression and demands political prisoners’ release.
She and Republican U.S. Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez also favor isolating Havana and support Trump’s regional policies, including the extrajudicial killing of suspected narcotics traffickers off the coast of Venezuela and an overnight raid that led to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Rodriguez opposes the Marxist-Leninist regimes of Latin American nations but disagrees with current federal strategies to curtail them. He said Maduro’s arrest was less about restoring democracy in Venezuela than “stealing their oil” and argued that policies worsening ordinary Cubans’ deprivation are unacceptable, favoring an economic transition toward democracy instead.
He has also demanded answers about controversial donors to Salazar’s campaign, including Xavier Jordán, who gave Salazar $3,000 before Ecuador charged him in an assassination conspiracy; businessman Lenir Pérez, who denies wrongdoing in an environmental prosecution; convicted Cuban agent Manuel Rocha; and alleged intelligence operative Fernando Valdés Pérez.
Salazar’s campaign promised to return Rocha’s money, and she pledged an equivalent donation to Cuban-freedom groups for Valdés Pérez’s contributions. Her campaign did not respond to a query Florida Politics sent her about Jordán.
Odds and ends
The candidates had an opportunity to discuss their differences at three televised debates, which Rodriguez accepted. But Salazar’s campaign did not respond to invitations from CBS Miami, Local 10 and Telemundo 51.
Notably, Salazar has not debated an opponent since 2020. A consultant to her campaign suggested Rodriguez was being hypocritical, as he declined to meet his Primary foe, former federal prosecutor Robin Peguero, on a debate stage. He defeated Peguero with 53.5% of the vote Aug. 18.
This year, CD 27’s election margins promise to be the closest in several cycles. Polling Rodriguez’s campaign commissioned in August found him and Salazar tied at 45% apiece. And multiple political prognosticators — Cook Political Report, Fox News and Sabato’s Crystal Ball — have shifted the contest from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is seizing on the opportunity, adding Rodriguez to its Red to Blue program while the House Majority PAC reported plans to spend nearly $2 million on television advertising and $800,000 on digital ads.
Salazar raised more than $2.55 million since winning re-election in 2024 and spent $2.58 million to keep her seat, leaving $1.6 million in her campaign coffers from prior election cycles by mid-October.
Rodriguez, meanwhile, amassed $1.56 million and spent $945,600 since entering the race.
Election Day is Tuesday.
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