If you live in Senate District 40, where incumbent Sen. Annette Taddeo is facing a challenge from Republican superwoman Marili Cancio, then you also probably live in either House District 115 or House District 118.
This Wednesday, you have a chance to see the candidates in both your senate and house race at the first of three candidate forums brought to us by the Kendall Federation of Homeowner Associations, which has been hosting some well-attended candidate forums since at least 2011.
Beginning at 7 p.m., residents can hear from Democrat Jeffrey Solomon and Republican Vance Aloupis in the 115 race and State Rep. Robert Asencio and his Republican challenger Anthony Rodriguez in 118, as well as Taddeo and Cancio.
Read related: Vance Aloupis fails to mention GOP as required, courting NPAs in general
A week later, they will host Democrat Javier Estevez and Republican Doral Councilwoman Ana Maria Rodriguez, who are running to replace former State Rep. turned Ambassador Carlos Trujillo in District 105, Democrat James Harden and Republican State Rep. Daniel Perez from District 116 and Democrat Heath Rassner, who is running to replace termed-out State Rep. Jeanette Nuñez, who was tapped as LG for Ron Desantis, in District 119.
Juan Fernandez Barquin, the Republican in 119 who beat Analeen “Annie” Martinez, Commissioner Joe Martinez‘s better funded daughter, said he might be out of town, said KFHA President Mike Rosenberg.
KFHA wants to host the congressional candidates from District 26 and 27 on the 25th, but apparently only the incumbent, U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, has confirmed.
Read related: Carlos Curbelo is bad for public education; teachers back Debbie
“We’re still trying to confirm Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Maria Elvira Salazar, but we’re having a difficult time reaching them,” an email blast said.
Rosenberg told Ladra that Donna Shalala, the Dem running against Salazar to replace Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in #CD27, is willing and ready to come out any time, but that he has tried multiple times to reach Salazar to no avail.
“Sometimes I have to be beyond the ‘normal’ persistent in reaching out to candidates,” Rosenberg wrote in an email to Salazar he shared with Ladra. “For some reason there are candidates that don’t want to debate their opponents. I truly don’t understand that, but our forums are not debates, but rather questions. We want to know who you are and what kind of leader you would make. We simply want to ask you questions.
“I will continue to reach out to you as I believe our audience is very engaged and eager to learn.  As President of the Kendall Federation, I must try and make sure all the candidates appear. So, forgive my persistence, but I have always believed, if we can’t get you to meet with our community before an election, we’ll never be able to get you afterwards.”
Rosenberg, who said he hasn’t given up on Mucarsel-Powell either, is right about that.
The KFHA meetings are always in the Kendall Village pavilion at that shopping center, 8625 SW 124th Ave.

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Robert Asencio probably shouldn’t put a deposit on a Tallahassee apartment just yet.

And Ladra bets David “King Nine Lives” Rivera is lighting a candle to Cachita right now.

Because the election might have been on Tuesday, but we still don’t know who won the seat in Florida House district 118.

Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Christina White was preparing Thursday to start a recount of the votes cast in the race, where Asencio, a retired Miami-Dade Schools Police lieutenant, had the longtime legislator and former congressman beaten by 68 votes when all was said and done on Election Day.

That’s a difference of less than .25 percent, which requires an automatic recount.

But there were still 2,973 provisional ballot votes that had not been counted. And after the first batch of about 750 was counted Thursday night, Rivera gained 21 votes and closed the gap to 47. 

Read related story: Blue goes red, red goes blue in four flipped 305 seats

Provisional ballots are given to people who did not provide an identification or who weren’t listed on the rolls or were listed as having voted already but insisted they had not so that elections officials could decide later if they were, indeed, eligible voters and valid votes. Officials go through them one by one to determine. Most aren’t. Of the hundreds counted Thursday, only 30 were added to the final total.

If the rest of them to be counted Friday perform the same way as the first batch on Thursday, Rivera could gain another 60 or so votes and pull ahead.

But either way, the race will still be close enough to demand an automatic recount. That means that, starting Monday, all 65,000 or so votes will be fed back through the high-speed counter, which will spit out the under votes and over votes. An inside source told Ladra that there were somewhere around 5,800 over and under votes in the district. These are ballots in which the presidential race counted or the mayoral or senatorial races counted but this House race vote was not counted for one reason or another. Those will be reviewed individually in person by a canvassing board for “voter intent,” White said.

“Sometimes, a person will circle an entire name instead of filling in the bubble,” White told Ladra. “If someone circled Robert Asencio, then that vote will go to him. If someone bubbled in Asencio and then Xed it out and filled in the bubble for David Rivera, then the voter intended to vote for Rivera.”

Recounts are becoming more and more common, she said, adding that she’s overseen more than 15 since joining the elections department . That includes an Aug. 30 judicial race where all 268,000 votes had to be recounted. The result was upheld.

Read related story: David Rivera is baaaack — to his roots in state House race

White said she expects us to know who our new state rep is in 118 by the middle or end of next week. They will count absentee and Election Day ballots first while they retrieve the ballots that were used for early voting. That will take at least a couple of days, she added.

It looks like Asencio could have the upper hand. Hillary Clinton won the district by 56 percent, compared to 51 percent when Obama won it in 2012. Which means Rivera did extremely well in a district that only supported Donald Trump with 41%. But Ol’ Nine Lives underperformed in absentee ballots. He needed a bigger margin of Republican mail-in ballots over Democrats — say 3,000 — before Election Day and he didn’t get there.

But even if he newcomer pulls it off — and with less than $100,000 to boot — he may not last long. Republicans are going to make winning that seat back the No. 1 priority for the state. They are unlikely to let Asencio pass a single bill or bring a single buck back home.

“If he survives the recount, he may not even get a key to the bathroom,” said Rivera, who is, conversely, one of House Speaker Richard Corcoran’s BFFs.

Hmmmm. Maybe it would be better for the district — and Asencio’s bladder — if the recount goes Rivera’s way.

Both the Florida Democratic Party and the Republican Party of Florida will claim victories in Tuesday’s election after several state seats switched colors.

In the 305, we had four seats flip — two in the House and two in the Senate.

Both House seats were open (one due to term limits and one due to ambition) and both went from red to blue. But the Senate seats were one up, one down, thanks mostly to redistricting that left both incumbents vulnerable to state reps that ultimately got the best of them.

The first of those is Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, who lost a negatively charged contest with 46% of the vote against State Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez, who got 49%. The senior of the DLP political brothers, Miguel raised and spent more than twice as much as Rodriguez (that we know of). DLP’s latest campaign finance report lists $937,000 in contributions compared to J-Rod’s $479,000. Plus DLP had another $750,000 or so in two PACs (Floridians for Ethics in Judicial Elections and Foundation for Human Values). Nobody knows how much more he had in non-profits or secret non-existing PACs like the one that sent a mailer recommending Democrat candidates — and DLP and Sen. Anitere Flores in her senate race.

He should have stressed his track record as an independent moderate, reminding people not only about his single-handed murder of those outrageous guns on campus laws last year but also the fact that he created the required county commission super majority vote to move the urban boundary line. His message, which wasn’t delivered effectively, should have been that he is in a better position to represent his district in a GOP majority Senate where he would be Big Man on Campus next legislative session. He tried to knock down Mr. Do Gooder and failed.

Meanwhile, J-Rod stuck to the ground game that helped him beat the younger brother, Alex Diaz de la Portilla, in 2012. The DLPs need to get back to basics. Knocking on doors and actually pressing the flesh is harder than recording robocalls and cute radio spots that use old Cuban sayings like a crutch. But it is also effective.

Maybe Miguel can do that when he runs for Coral Gables mayor.

Flipping the script on that race, but ending another political dynasty nonetheless, Democrat incumbent Sen. Dwight Bullard was rejected by voters who instead elected Republican State Rep. Frank Artiles to the position (51% to 41%). They must have been moved by the multiple mailers and TV and radio spots calling Bullard a terrorist sympathizer.

Andrew Korge might also want to apologize to the Democratic Party for causing some early primary damage to the cause.

Does this mean that Artiles can move back into his house in Palmetto Bay? We are going to hold him to his promises about beating back the MDX tolls and electing a sheriff in Miami-Dade.

But Ladra suspects that his victory is bittersweet, knowing that he left his House seat to a Democrat.

Robert Asencio could be this election cycle’s unicorn, having won a Florida House seat with less than $100,000 and proving that anyone can get elected. He and Daisy Baez were elected to the Florida House in districts 118 and 114, respectively. Asencio beat David “King Nine Lives” Rivera, who maybe has run out of lives, by a mere 45 votes to become a state rep. Even though Rivera outspent him by at least 3 to 1 and tried to label him as a “child abuser” based on an internal affairs investigation that was possibly taken out of context. Maybe it worked. Maybe Asencio would have won with a bigger margin had that child abuser thing not surfaced.

As of the latest campaign finance reports, dated through Nov. 3, Rivera had collected $272,000 in contributions (on top of a $50K loan to himself). Asencio raised $77,768 and loaned himself $11,650.

Daisy Baez had to spend a lot more to beat off Republican John Couriel as both vied for the open seat left by termed out State Rep. Erik Fresen. She spent $274,000 as of Nov. 3, but also had $118,000 in in-kind assistance, mostly from the Democratic Party. She needed it against the Couriel bank of $438,500, plus $60K in in-kind (maybe the state GOP ought to step it up).

Each had run before — Baez got a respectable 44% against Fresen in 2012, the same year Couriel lost to Sen. Gwen Margolis — so they each had campaign experience and some name recognition for newbies.

But Baez got just under 51% and a lead of 1,301 votes.

So, if we’re keeping score, there was one switch from red to blue in our Miami-Dade delegation and one switch from blue to red in the Senate. But there were two switches from red to blue in the House for a net gain in the 305 of three Democrat flips.

That there weren’t more is a big failure of the state and local Democratic Party because more seats were flippable. After all, someone you never heard of named Anabella Grohoski Peralta got 45% of the vote against Sen. Rene Garcia with less than $5,500 raised against his $190,000 spent through Nov. 3. And a guy named Patricio Moreno got 45% against State Rep. Carlos Trujillo after he spent $5,764 against the incumbent’s $385K. Y un fulano Carlos Puentes, who got 45% of the vote against Jose Oliva, the next speaker, without raising a dime on a loan of $2,240. Oliva has spent $243,000.

Imagine how many more seats would have been flipped with more resources.

Most of us have been preoccupied — perhaps obsessed is a better word — with the presidential or the Miami-Dade mayoral election. But there were a lot of other races that culminated with Tuesday’s vote. Here are some highlights:

Sen. Marco Rubio beat Congressman Patrick Murphy back to gain another six years in office. He has said he will serve all six years. And that is probably true — especially now that Donald Trump won the presidency. If he likes it and wants to stay, the Republican Party will have to back The Donald in 2020. So this means we will have to wait until 2024 to have our first Hispanic president. Good thing Marquito is a young man.

Rubio’s onetime BFF, former Congressman David Rivera lost his bid to go back to the State House — by 45 votes. Isn’t that close enough for a mandatory recount? His 49% showing is much better than he fared in his bid to get back into Congress in 2012, where he lost the primary with just 8 percent in a five-man field (even Joe Martinez beat him). But still, we have a new face in Tallahassee: Robert Asencio, a former Miami-Dade Schools Police lieutenant won one of two House seats that turned blue. Rivera had waged a negative campaign, calling Asencio a child abuser based on a 2003 complaint from the mother of a student who was physically pulled off a bus for acting inappropriately. The investigation was closed without any findings.

Read related story: ‘Child abuser’ allegations in House 118 race ring hollow

But 118 is the second of two local House seats that turned blue Tuesday after Democrat Daisy Baez eeked out a victory over Republican John Couriel to replace termed-out State Rep. Erik Fresen (who is rumored to be after J-Rod’s new Senate seat). Both of them had run previous campaigns and had the benefit of having some name recognition, despite never holding office. But Baez got just under 51% and a lead of 1,301 votes.

Former Congressman Joe Garcia lost his own bid to get his own seat back, but not as closely. There’s a glaringly wide 11-point gap between U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo‘s 52% and Garcia’s 41% performance. Ladra suspects that when the numbers are crunched, we’ll find a bunch of Democrats who voted for Curbelo because of his liberal ways marriage equality and sea level rise and his early rejection of Donald Trump. And I bet Garcia is rethinking those ads that compared Curbelo to Trump, who is the apparent winner of the big POTUS prize. Anyway, that giant gap in the year that Curbelo would be allegedly vulnerable — because that’s it, folks, he is welded into that seat now like IRL — should certainly encourage Garcia to stay in the private sector. Ladra said it long ago. The only person that could have beat Curbelo was Ana Rivas Logan. Too bad she decided to run for state senate. Now we’re stuck with him.

Senator Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, a former Miami-Dade Commissioner and flagship of a political dynasty, lost a heated battle with State Rep. (now Sen.) Jose Javier Rodriguez, 46 to 49% — and turned the longheld Republican seat (brother Alex Diaz de la Portilla sat there for a decade before DLP took over in 2010) blue. The senior DLP outspent J-Rod more than 2 to 1, which almost proves that it is worth more to knock on 150,000 doors than it is to buy slick commercials that tries in vain to cast a liberal onetime legal aid attorney as beholden to special interests. It’s too bad. Miguel DLP was my favorite senator and, while J-Rod will likely be stymied, the incumbent actually did some good as a senior member of the majority party and may have better represented the district. Oh well. Maybe DLP will run for Coral Gables mayor next year.

Ending another political dynasty in the other really heated and mostly negative state senate race — and flipping the seat the other way — State Rep. Frank Artiles will move to the other chamber after he beat incumbent Sen. Dwight Bullard, 51% to 41%. Guess all that business about Bullard being a terrorist worked. It’s scary to think we may see a resurgence of Artiles’ ugly bathroom legislation targeting transgenders. But does this mean he can move back into his Palmetto Bay house? He was forced to move out after Ladra caught him living outside his state House district in 2010.

There will be two runoffs for the mayor’s seat in Doral and in Miami Lakes, where none of the candidates were able to garner 50% of the vote.

Read related story: It ain’t over in Doral, Miami Lakes with mayoral runoffs

There was a big upset in the Miami-Dade School Board race where Steve Gallon III beat incumbent Wilbert “Tee” Holloway III with a resounding 61%. Gallon got a lot of the community support in a district — which includes Miami Gardens, Carol City and North Miami — where Holloway was cast as an empty suit. And it earned him a 22-point lead Tuesday. The other school board seat went to Gimenez in-law Maria Teresa Rojas, as expected. Not just because she is a longtime teacher and school administrator but also because the voters in that district probably reacted vehemently to a negative campaign in which her challenger was cast as a Fidel Castro sympathizer. Look soon for an announcement of Political Cortadito’s expansion into school board coverage.

We can also smoke pot to relieve certain debilitating conditions and chill out about having our own solar energy one day as voters approved the medical marijuana constitutional amendment but rejected the amendment on solar energy choice that would have basically limited our choices and allowed Big Energy to control everything. Voters were not fooled by that one — except in Miami-Dade where we actually had a majority vote yes on this wolf in sheep’s clothing (56 to 44%). Shaking my head.

There were also a bunch of questions in municipalities from Homestead to Sunny Isles Beach and we will get to those individually if they warrant it in the next few days. Some notable examples: Voters in Palmetto Bay rejected a proposal to annex a part of West Perrine. In South Miami, they gave the green light for the building of a new City Hall. And, in North Miami Beach, voters approved a slew of charter changes, including term limits and one that makes it easier for the council to fire the city manager. Please feel free to make suggestions/ask questions.

In fact, Ladra has a feeling we will be writing and reading about the results of this ballot for weeks to come.

It’s a running joke that someday someone in the 305 will accuse a politician of child abuse. But stop laughing. Because it happened.

It’s gotten real ugly in the race for Florida House seat 118, where candidate Robert Asencio, a recently retired lieutenant with the Miami-Dade Schools Department, has been painted as a no less than an actual child abuser on an anonymous website.

Of course Asencio says these are false attacks and that they are standard for his opponent — former Congressman David Rivera. Rivera says he has nothing to do with the website, but he is the one who brought it up during a short debate Sunday on Al Punto Florida on Univision 23.

Read related story: David Rivera is baaaack — to his roots in state House race

“If you go to www.asenciocriminal.com you can see all the things my challenger has done,” Rivera said. “These are facts.”

Except the anonymos website called The Asencio Files — which claims to expose his “criminal history of child abuse, federal crimes, false police reports and taxpayer abuse” — takes those facts out of context. It centers on an internal affairs complaint against Asencio. It says that he grabbed a student and pulled him “out of his seat by the neck and shirt” on a school bus because the boy was “disrespecting him.”

It also publishes Asencio’s campaign phone number and urges people to call him and “tell him child abusers don’t belong in the Florida House of Representatives.”

The website claims to be “paid for, compiled and constructed by former police co-workers of Robert Asencio,” and promises more to come. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”