Dark money from unknown sources is once again influencing voters
Coral Gables commission candidate Ariel Fernandez — a well known activist and publisher of the Gables Insider website — is either a socialist or a Republican, depending on what party you identify with.
Democrat voters in the Gables got a text message Tuesday reminding them that Fernandez served as deputy district director for former Congressman David Rivera, listing Rivera’s sins from 2014 campaign finance violations through last year, when he was charged with failing to register as a foreign agent for Venezuela, stemming from his $50 million consulting contract with the country’s oil company to improve its image in the U.S.
Republican voters got a text message reminding them of his job with Rivera, too. But it only had the 2022 charges, which link Rivera to the socialist Venezuelan government this time.
Like Rivera never did anything bad before that.
“Who is the elephant in the Group 5 Coral Gables Commission race,” comes with a photo of an elephant, symbolizing the GOP. That’s pretty obvious. And, actually, attorney Alex Bucelo, who is also running in the open Group 5 race against Fernandez, is also a Republican. But pesky details don’t make for good hits.
And why is the image a cup of coffee for the socialist message? Are the beans rom the Venezuelan Andes?
“WE DON’T NEED A CORRUPT POLITICIAN REPRESENTING US ON THE CORAL GABLES COMMISSION! STOP ARIEL FERNANDEZ BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE,” says one of the messages, or yells it in all caps.
“It shows desperation,” Fernandez said. “Alex had commited to not going negative. We had a handshake and we were going to stick to the issues. “Our differences are striking when it comes to the issues.”
Bucelo is going to say he had nothing to do with this, of course. But the Getting PAC recently paid consultant Alex Miranda, who did work for newly-elected Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera, who endorsed Bucelo. Miranda got $8,500 for mail media consulting.
And Ladra thinks voters will see these in the mail soon, too. Why? Because they have disclaimers and we don’t get disclaimers on campaign texts.
Read related: Desperate Pat Keon attacks Vince Lago with more dark money in Coral Gables
The attacks are paid for by Getting Things Done, a political action committee out of Fort Lauderdale, run by Jason Blank, whose whole job is to run shady PACs. It’s existed since 2018 and Blank is very good at hiding where the funding really came from. Most of the contributions to Getting Things Done in the last few months are from other PACs.
Getting last got $10,000 from the Blank PC, which got $10,000 from the South Florida Accountability Project, another one of Blank’s PACs, which got $24,000 in February — $10,000 from Tampa beer tycoon and real estate investor Tom Pepin and $14,000 from New Jersey politics consultant Elnatan Rudolph, who practically invented political text messaging.
Blank was the source of attack ads two years ago against Mayor Vince Lago when he was challenged by former Commissioner Pat Keon.
But Lago endorsed and is helping Bucelo in the race, not Fernandez.
These dark money attacks do not do well in the Gables, where the posh people like to know who is giving them their information. Ladra does not expect these to go well.
But she also does not expect them to be the last of this kind of thing.
Coral Gables race gets ugly with separate texts for blue and red voters added by Ladra on
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