Miami-Dade's Daniella Levine Cava raises $1 mil for runoff in 10 days

Esteban Bovo behind with $65K since Election Day

Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban Bovo may have headed into the mayoral runoff with a 2,000-vote edge over Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava. But Levine Cava is killing him in fundraising since.

DLC collected more than $1 million between her campaign account and her political action committee, Our Democracy, in 10 days between the primary and Aug. 28. Bovo got just under $65,000 in the same amount of time between his campaign account and his PAC, A Better Miami-Dade.

Half of DLC’s cool mil comes from one source: billionaire S. Donald Sussman, a hedge fund investor and philanthropist who gave her PAC $500K on Aug. 28. There’s more where that came from, however. The liberal Democrat has given millions to Democrat candidates, including more than $22 mil to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Levine Cava also got $100,000 from her mother Lois Levine in Brooklyn — who already gave more than $175,000 in the first round — and $10,000 from former Pinecrest Mayor Evelyn Greer and her husband Bruce Greer, giving her a total for 10 days of $786,750, her best take ever.

Her campaign account collected another $221,288 from Aug. 18 through the 28th, which is the last day of recorded transaction on the latest campaign finance reports filed last week. It includes $25,000 from the Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee, which has also committed a six figure TV buy, and $12,500 from the Florida Democratic Party.

While most of the contributions here are for amounts smaller than $100, there are several notable bundles, like:

$50,000 from 50 different companies with the same address, all owned by Wynwood’s Godfather Moishe Mana.
$13,000 from real estate developer Sergio Rok.
$10,000 from property investors and booze brothers Wayne Chaplin and Steven Becker, CEO and Executive VP of Souther Glazer’s Wine & Spirits.
$5,000 from Evelyn and Bruce Greer, bringing their total investment to $15K
$5,000 from real estate developer Jeffrey Berkowitz

It also includes $1,000 maximum gifts from Congresswoman Donna Shalala former Deputy Mayor Russell Benford, now a lobbyist at Royal Caribbean.

Bovo has fewer bundles, of course, because he collected fewer contributions. But the larger investments constitute about 50% of his August pull. That translates to $19,000 from four sources:

$6,000 from Hialeah developer Santiago Alvarez, a longtime Cuban activist who was accused of financing an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro in Panama as well as several bombings of Havana tourist spots in 2001 and was sentenced to four years in prison for illegal weapons charges — a cache of weapons he was going to send to Cuba — in 2006.
$5,000 from former State Rep and Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, from his property investment companies
$5,000 from former State Rep. turned lobbyist Manuel Prieguez
$3,000 from lobbyist Eric Zichella

His PAC got only $27,500 in three contributions: $5,000 from Wellpath, a Tennessee healthcare company, $2,500 from New Leadership Network PC — which also gave the same amount to DLC’s PAC, to cover both bases — and $25K from Reform Government, a Tampa-based PAC affiliated with Lopez-Cantera.

So, unless he has some dark money stashed away in a non-profit we don’t know about, Bovo is terribly underfunded in comparison with DLC.

Daniella Levine Cava, Esteban Bovo, Mayor’s race 2020

Miami-Dade’s Daniella Levine Cava raises $1 mil for runoff in 10 days added by Ladra on September 7, 2020
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