Remember the ghost candidate that ran in the state senate race in 2020 and ruined it for former Democrat Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, rigging the election that unseated him and ushered Republican Ileana Garcia into office? Well, we may have more of those this year.

Ladra thinks she may have found a spoiler candidate running for Miami-Dade County Commission: Claudia Rainville, who qualified at almost the last minute to run in District 11 against the appointed incumbent commissioner, Roberto Gonzalez, and high school teacher Bryan Paz-Hernandez, who has been campaigning since February and was once president of the West Dade Democratic Club, but is running now as an NPA.

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In the Miami-Dade District 11 race, campaign finance reports filed this week show that incumbent Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez — appointed in November of 2022 to fill the vacancy created by the arrest of Joe Martinez on public corruption charges — has raised more than 16 times as much as his only opponent so far, a schoolteacher who announced he would run for the seat in late February.

But that’s only if you count his campaign account. When you bring his political action committee into it, Gonzalez has raised more than three quarter of a million dollars since January — so it’s 117 times what’s been collected by Bryan Paz-Hernandez, who has only been campaigning for five weeks.

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County has paid for old vacant office for a year

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Chairman says D11 is not commissioner’s ‘fiefdom’

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Miami-Dade Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez, who was appointed by the governor and has never been elected, has a challenger in this November’s election. School teacher Bryan Paz-Hernandez, former president of the West Kendall Dems — now an NPA — filed paperwork Wednesday intending to run.

“I’m tired of the traffic and high cost of housing,” Paz-Hernandez told Political Cortadito. “I’ve lived in Kendall almost all my life — except for when I went to college — and I see the problems go unaddressed.”

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