Former Miami-Dade Commission Chairman Joe Martinez may jump into his third race since leaving office to run for mayor unsuccessfully in 2012. And, no, he’s not running for Congress again.

Martinez wants his old job back. He is seriously considering a run against Commissioner Juan Zapata for his old District 11 seat.

“I have it under very, very strong consideration,” Martinez told Ladra. “I’ve spoken to a few people. There’s a lot of disconnect between the current commissioner and the people.”

Several sources told Ladra that Martinez is being egged on by Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who has been at odds with Zapata, his biggest budget critic, almost since the commissioner was elected. The support, they said, would be quiet and include financial backing.

Martinez laughed off the notion that his former foe would reach out to him.

“It’s not something that… I won’t tell him no. But that hasn’t happened,” Martinez said.

It’s plausible. Martinez never really attacked Gimenez in 2012, though he could have gone negative with the absentee ballot fraud that was caught in his Hialeah campaign office. Up until late last year, he was considering a rematch. And everybody knows that Gimenez would love nothing more than to say “Bye Felicia” to Zapata.

Read related story: Joe Martinez hints at 2016 rematch with Carlos Gimenez

Martinez said he had not been approached by any Gimenez operatives to run but had been encouraged by a number of other people. “A lot of people talk to me as if I’m the commissioner still.”

He said he had also been told about a poll that asked voters if they would change their mind about voting for Martinez if they knew he had been put  up to it by Gimenez.

Another source told Ladra the push poll also asked voters if it changed their mind if they knew Martinez gave $9 million in district taxes to other areas, awarded pay raises to unions and only wanted the position because he needs the paycheck.

Not so, Martinez said.

“I don’t miss it,” he said about serving as commissioner. “But I do care about the direction that the district is going and I think its going in the wrong direction.”

And what direction is that, Ladra asked.

“I’m taking in general. I’m talking about the relationship he has with voters. You can’t see him. You can’t get an appointment,” Martinez said about Zapata.

“I’m talking about the way that surreptitiously the name was changed on the library and the police station without public input,” Martinez said about the West End branding initiative. “It’s a move to incorporate… and to make such a big move, you have to talk to everybody.”

Martinez — who might also be mad at Zap for supporting Gimenez in 2012 — said that Zapata has been hell bent on incorporation since he was a state rep in Tallahassee and Martinez was the district commissioner. “He would always talk to me about it,” Martinez mentioned.

Read related story: Does Zapata still have Martinez’s nod? Depends who you ask

He said he’ll make the decision about whether to run or not in May.

Zapata did not return calls for comment. He’s expressed a real distaste for county politics in the past, threatening not to run for re-election.

But he’s also been quite active lately with a call for a moratorium on development in West Dade (more on that later) and a call to reform the lifetime insurance benefits still paid for past commissioners (more on that later). Just seems like a swipe at Martinez without having to name him.

Zapata, who led a overthrow of the mayor’s veto two years ago, was the sole no vote to the mayor’s $49 million bailout of the science museum last week.

Martinez said he would vote the same way. “But not to spite the mayor.”

Hmmmmm.

It’s going to be a busy week for Republican checkbooks.

We’ve got at least four fundraisers planned this week, two for Tuesday and two for Wednesday, for GOP candidates in state House and Senate races.

First up is former Congressman David Rivera. We already told you he’s back, running now for the seat abandoned by State Rep. Frank Artiles, who is running for Senate. His fundraiser kick-off is Tuesday at Cuban Crafters on NW 7th Street and it is the most mysterious. No telling who might show up — since there’s nobody on the host committee.

The same night, Artiles is having his own fundraiser in Tallahassee hosted by some of his colleagues and would-be colleagues in the legislature and only two state reps (Jose Oliva and Jose Felix “Pepe” Diaz. Los dos pepes) from the 305, because Artiles is not liked that much. The others are from elsewhere, albeit heavy hitters from leadership — including President-designate Joe Negron, Senate Majority Leader Bill Galvano and Speaker Designate Richard Corcoran — perhaps indicating that the GOP is seriously trying to take the blue seat from Sen. Dwight Bullard.

Read related story: In battle to keep Senate seat 40, Dems eye Ana Rivas Logan

Or maybe everybody else is getting their hair done and their shoes shined for Wednesday. That’s when, between them, Sen. Anitere Flores and State Rep. Manny Diaz, Jr., have all the serial political event hosts in town at their soirees, respectively, in Coral Gables and Hialeah.

Let’s ignore that it’s strange for these two — both of whom work in the charter school industry and who arguably draw from the same pool of donors — to have their fundraisers on the very same day at the very same time. Maybe Flores will go to Hialeah next week and Diaz will come to Coral Gables. Cuidado!

The invites are engaging simply because of the large list of inviters — especially with Flores, who is apparently not taking the challenge from Democrat trust fund baby Andrew Korge lightly.

Flores’ event has nine special guests/speakers, 14 event chairpeople, and 25 names so far on the host committee that is “still in formation.” Still in formation?!? When is the elevator at capacity?

Among the special guests is the entire Cuban Congressional GOP caucus (Carlos Curbelo, Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen) and five of the 13 county commissioners — Jose “Pepe” Diaz, Rebeca Sosa, Javier Souto, Xavier Suarez and Juan Zapata — as well as Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez.

Read related story: Senate 39’s Andrew Korge vs Anitere Flores gets ugly fast

Chairs include lobbyists Ron Book, Al Cardenas and Manny Kadre, builders Sergio Pino and Pedro Munilla, automobile mogul Norman Braman and Miami-Dade Republican Party Chairman Nelson Diaz. Hosts include more Jeb Bush, Jr., container queen Remedios Diaz Oliver and a slew of more second tier lobbyists like Jose “El Chino” Fuentes, Luis Andre Gazitua, Bob Levy and Ralph Garcia-Toledo, who is now playing with the big boys thanks to his tour of duty as driver for then Commissioner Gimenez. (Tell your kids: Forget college! Drive a politician around and you’ll get rich!)

All 48 of them invite us to Bulla Gastrobar on Ponce de Leon Boulevard at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Half an hour later, though, we are invited to another fundraiser for Diaz Jr. at Hialeah Park, which you know is impossible in Miami-Dade traffic. Our hosts here include Sen. Rene Garcia, State Reps. Jose Oliva and Bryan Avila, former State Rep. Eddy Gonzalez (who is the RSVP on the invite) and Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban Bovo, all of whom kind of do stuff in lock step. They also include Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernandez and Hialeah Gardens Mayor Yioset de la Cruz as well as the full council of both cities.

We don’t have to wait long to see who wins the prize for best fundraiser. Checks written Tuesday and Wednesday will appear on the March campaign reports, which are due and become public April 10th or 11th.

My money is on the Gables soiree for Flores — if simply because of the numbers.

Game on, people! Warm up those wrists!

Former Congressman David Rivera is going back to his roots.

Rivera told everyone earlier this month that he was running for state House in the seat abandoned by Rep. Frank Artiles (R-Kendall), who is leaving his final term to run for the Senate.

There’s even a kick-off fundraiser Tuesday at one of his old haunts, Cuban Crafters, owned by former State Rep. and Sen. Al Gutman.

Rivera is serious about House District 118. It overlaps with the area he represented in Congress for two years and also includes much of the area he ruled as a state rep from 2003 to 2011.

Those were the glory days, huh? Rivera was pals and roomies with Sen. Marco Rubio, then a House Speaker and future presidential contender. He had both more success and fun as a state rep than he did in D.C. He still hangs around in Tallahassee a lot, where he does God knows what. “Consulting,” he calls it. Deals, I think. And reminiscing. He would love nothing more than to return to the original chamber he served in.

And it’s not unimaginable.

Read related story: David Rivera collects petition signatures for 2016 House run

Sure, Rivera lost his congressional seat to Joe Garcia in 2012, but he was dogged by headlines and news reports of an investigation into campaign finance violations –– not bribery or graft or any real crime — that seems to have never bore any fruit and has apparently fizzled away. Sources say the U.S. Attorney is loathe to call the case on his one and only witness, the somewhat unstable (read: batshit crazy) Ana Alliegro, who has apparently resurfaced with a story about Rivera attacking her when he was with friends in Tally. They can’t call her now.

And sure, Rivera has a primary to get through first. There are already two other Republicans running for that seat.

One is Anthony Rodriguez, who Ladra believes is Artiles’ handpicked successor. It’s just a gut feeling. That and this picture from one of the representative’s self-serving Farm Share events.

And then there is a guy named Steven Rojas Tallon, a 33-year-old father of four who nonetheless has time to work as some kind of program lead for talent development at FIU in an initiative with the Beacon Council and also still serve on the county board tasked with overseeing the $2.8 billion general obligation bond. Quien es la palanca?

And — just to make things more interesting — there is the rumor that former Miami-Dade Commissioner Lynda Bell is going to jump into this race for House 118. She is probably salivating at the possibility and some say she may announce next month.

And sure, the last time Rivera was in a primary, he lost miserably, coming in a distant fourth behind Carlos Curbelo, Joe Martinez and Ed MacDougall in the congressional race for his old seat. He only got 8 percent, less than half of what MacDougall, the anglo former mayor of Cutler Bay, got. Que pena!

But this is a different voter geography. Bell and Rodriguez and Rojas Tallon could somehow split the anti-Rivera votes between them, and Rivera could slide into the general with his very deep base of loyalists and face off against the relatively unknown Robert Asencio, a former Miami-Dade Schools Police lieutenant and public labor champion who has already spent $12,000 of the $20K he has raised in a year.

Read related story: David Rivera has no past, only a future at Cuba Nostalgia

And sure, Obama won the district with 51.7 percent of the vote in 2012.

But people keep forgetting that Obama is not on the ticket. And Hillary isn’t as inspiring. Also, another Democrat ran in 2014, one recruited by the party who should have performed very well. But he was crushed in an off year with Artiles getting 58 percent of the vote — almost ten points more than Gov. Rick Scott only got, which indicates that voters are willing to vote for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another on the same ballot.

And we’re talking about David Rivera here. The Teflon Man. Ol’ Nine Lives, himself.

Ladra will start taking bets now.

Why is everybody so shocked that U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo said he would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump? Ladra is not surprised.

No, it is not because there are a bunch of other Republicans who are casting protest #NeverTrump votes for that evil woman they can’t stand to even look at. Yes, it’s happening, loyalists. Shudder and wince all you want. This year will be record breaking for the number of Republican registered voters who will vote for the Democrat.

Read related story: Some say ‘Bye Marco, Hello Hillary’ because #NeverTrump 

But, no, that’s not it. Ladra is not surprised because Carlos Curbelo has always been a Democrat in disguise.

We wrote about it back last fall after he practically begged to go on Air Force One with President Barack Obama and later posed all giddy with Vice President Joe Biden. The Rino has crossed the aisle to vote possibly more than any other Republican. He has the support of several local Democrats like Florida City Mayor Otis Wallace.

And remember how giddy he got supporting former Gov. Charlie Crist, who had been a Democrat five minutes earlier, against Sen. Marco Rubio?

How far a stretch could it be for him to vote with the Democrats on Election Day?

In fact, the only thing that’s really weird about it is that, well, if he believes his own conspiracy theory about Trump only being in the race to help Hillary, he has now fallen for the trick.

This all came to light after CBS4’s Jim DeFede caught a glimpse of a post on a Key West woman’s Facebook page in which she said Curbelo, who she took a selfie with, told her he would vote for La Clinton.

Of course, he didn’t readily admit that to DeFede on Thursday when the reporter asked him. He hemmed ad hawed and said both Hillary and Donald are “very flawed candidates” that the majority of Americans do not like.

Read related story: Is Carlos Curbelo a Democrat in disguise?

By Friday, he was back-pedaling a little bit.

“I have no intention of supporting either of them for president of United States,” he said on Fernand Amandi’s radio show on WIOD 610 AM.

Maybe Curbelo, who is facing hardly a primary challenge from Jose Peixoto — who has spent all the $27,600 he mustered up, mostly his own money — was looking ahead to the general when he has to appeal to Democrats and Independents if he hopes to defend his seat in a rematch against former Congressman Joe Garcia, who, funny enough, has been trying to tie Curbelo to Trump.

“I know Curbelo tweets he opposes Trump, but we need a congressman who also opposes Trump’s vision, and votes that way,” Garcia said in a statement released earlier this month with a table graphic that shows the Crybaby’s similarities to Trump.

Ooooooooooooh. Is that what happened?

Joe Garcia tries to smear Curbelo with The Donald’s stink, and this is how Curbelo reacts? By promoting Hillary?

That was quick.

The race between Sen. Anitere Flores (R-Kendall) and Democrat challenger Andrew Korge, son of lobbyist and big national Dem fundraiser Chris Korge, is the first this year to go negative.

That means that, officially, the state campaigns have begun.

Occupy Democrats, a national advocacy group that pushes blue candidates, released a video online this week that calls Flores “The Queen of Corruption” because of her ties to the unaccredited Doral College, where she worked as president from 2011 to 2015, earning $150,000 a year (according to her own financial disclosures), while she pushed legislation in Tallahassee that benefited the state’s charter school cottage industry.

They even put a little crown on her head.

The video, a minute and 12 seconds long with foreboding, horror film background music, quotes the senator saying things like “I’m Anitere Flores. I take tax dollars meant for education and pocket them,” and “I abuse my legislative power to enrich myself. Got a problem with that? Tough!”

None of it is spoken. It’s all text superimposed over or shuffled into a collection of the most unfortunate photos of Flores.

“I give your tax dollars to me and my friends,” one slide says. In the next, she’s holding a huge submarine sandwich where a microphone would be in one hand and a large order of McDonald’s fries in the other.

“This is a new low,” she told Ladra. “I think it’s sad.”

By “friends,” the video creators mean Academica, which runs Doral College and is Florida’s largest for-profit charter school operator, and owner Fernando Zulueta, who are connected to a few other 305 politicos and is a prolific campaign contributor. State Rep. Manny Diaz Jr. (R-Hialeah) is chief operating officer of Doral College and State Rep. Erik Fresen (R-Coral Gables) is Zulueta’s brother-in-law. Fresen, a land use lobbyist that specializes in charter schools, is in his last term, but — naturally — is eyeing the Florida Senate as his next step (more on that later).

Flores called the attacks baseless and said that she helped establish Doral College so that higher education would be accessible to more students, regardless of their economic status. She added that the school was pursuing accreditation through the state’s “rigorous process” with state regulators and that “every single school starts off unaccredited.”

The first graduating class at FIU didn’t know if the law school would be accredited in time. Florida Polytechnic University was created by the legislature in 2012, has a president and buildings paid for by the state, charges tuition — which Doral College does not — and it is yet to be accredited. “It can take a while,” Flores said, calling the claims in the video half truths designed to mislead.

The video — posted Monday and with 277,000 views by Thursday afternoon — is a little disingenuous when it says she was paid $450,000 at Doral College, because that is over her entire time there, not an annual amount.

But this is not the first time that the school’s political connections come into scrutiny. The political connections and the benefits Academica may reap have been investigated by several news hounds, including those at the Miami Herald and the Broward Bulldog. The Education Department’s Inspector General Office was moved to audit Academica and other “school management companies” nationwide.

So, it’s natural that this would be where Korge, or those supporting him, get their ammunition. What else are they going to do? He has zero experience, zero track record of his own to run on other than his father is also Hillary Clinton’s sugar daddy. As he was for Obama.

In fact, it’s a little strange (read: hypocritical) to hear this kind of attack on behalf of the silver-spooned son of a man who became a millionaire off the public trough in airport concessions. Andrew Korge grew up on the public teet.

When asked about the video, Korge — who wants Ladra to call him a businessman because he dabbled in real estate and is a shareholder on a start-up — disavowed any connection to it. He also told me he would run a campaign based on his fresh ideas. But in the next breath he railed against Flores in what might be a preview of the negative attack ads to come.

“Let there be no doubt that Anitere and I have very different ideas. She is out to destroy public education. She doesn’t care about the environment. She votes wherever the wind is blowing. I have my principles and core values.

“The key thing is that these for-profit universities and colleges are destroying a generation and she’s part of the problem,” Korge said. “And she should be held accountable.”

You usually don’t hear this kind of attack so early on — more than seven months away from the general election. We usually also don’t hear this kind of attack against a woman — a mother at that. Consultants curse the Hispanic mamita opponent because attacks on moms usually backfire.

But this seat, in a newly drawn district, is seen as one of the few that the Democrats hope they can turn this year. The predominantly Hispanic district leans blue, but a lot of those Democrats are in black pockets that might not be as eager to go out and vote for Hillary as they were for Obama.

So you can bet that there will be more negative attacks on Flores. Ladra is sure they didn’t toss this bomb out so early to not follow up on it. Maybe they’ll find particular angle to motivate black voters to vote against her.

‘Cause they sure ain’t motivated to vote for the rich kid.