A mayor who won fewer than 44,000 total votes in two elections had no business ever running for president.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who declared his bid for the White House on June 15, promised he would drop out of the race if he didn’t meet the Republican National Committee’s fundraising and polling thresholds to qualify for the first Republican primary, which was held Wednesday in Milwaukee. Then he claimed that he had qualified for the debate but, as we all could see, he wasn’t on the stage last week. Since then the question has been, Would Suarez persist with his vanity campaign or drop out, as he said candidates with support as anemic as his should do?
We got our answer Tuesday, when Suarez posted on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, “Running for President of the United States has been one of the greatest honors of my life,” he wrote. “While I have decided to suspend my campaign for President, my commitment to making this a better nation for every American remains,” he added. With the suspension of his campaign, Suarez became the first Republican candidate to drop out of the 2024 race.
If some series of miracles had happened and Suarez had been elected president, he would have been the first Latino president of the United States, a goal Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had when they ran in 2016. Rubio dropped out after he lost that year’s Florida primary to Donald Trump. Suarez didn’t even come close to Rubio’s subpar performance.
Such an awful candidate had no business running for president. What made him so awful, you ask?
Let’s start with the fact that not a lot of people have voted for him. Being mayor of Miami is not a powerful position and, sizewise, Miami (population 460,000 in 2020) is 19 times smaller than New York, eight times smaller than Los Angeles and six times smaller than Chicago. There’s absolutely no evidence that Suarez can win broad swaths of support. Suarez, the son of a former mayor of Miami, won 85.81% of the vote when he ran for mayor in 2017.
