Ken Russell wants another shot at Miami City Hall — as mayor this time

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Part of a series of profiles about the Miami mayoral candidates

Former Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell wants Miami voters to give him another go — this time in the mayor’s chair.

The same Ken Russell who once stood out for his clean-cut idealism and YouTube-friendly optimism when he joined the commission in 2015, now promises to “take out the garbage” at City Hall. If voters can forgive him for leaving early in 2022 to run for higher office.

Russell says Miami is broken — corrupt, disconnected, unaffordable — and that he’s the one who can fix it. His campaign pitch is all about “courage, character, and community,” and he’s playing the reform card hard: expand the commission, cap term limits, clean up the back-room deals and bring residents back into the process.

He’s the candidate talking about affordable housing like it’s personal. On the dais, he pushed for co-living and inclusionary zoning — ideas that tried to make room for regular working people in a city built for millionaires. The problem is, they never really took off. His zoning fixes were pre-empted by Tallahassee and his housing ideas ran into developer pushback. It’s a nice theory. Not much of it became reality.

Still, Russell likes to show receipts. He passed an environmental ordinance to limit fertilizer runoff into Biscayne Bay and was the only commissioner who voted against criminalizing feeding the homeless. That independence has earned him some respect — and some enemies.

The 52-year-old former yo-yo champ (yes, that’s true) has been chasing bigger stages for years. He toyed around with congressional seat once but withdrew, and running against then-Sen. Marco Rubio before he left his commission seat early to run for Congress for reals, just to lose in the primary to Annette Taddeo. Now he’s back home trying to convince voters he’s focused on Miami again, and not still trying to use it as a stepping stone to a larger stage.

Read related: Ken Russell qualifies for November Miami mayoral race; ADLP dips one toe

On the debate stage, Russell has looked sharp and steady — no gaffes, no real sputters. But he had plenty of jabs and zingers. He comes off as the grown-up in a crowded field of candidates yelling over each other. He talks policy, but he’s also shown that he’s not afraid to throw punches. Translation: He’s not as bland as he looks.

And his performance has earned him a spike in the polls.

Plus, he is probably the only candidate who has been out knocking on doors for three hours every day for months. He says he’s going to knock on his 2,000th door this week and walk his 100th mile — ala Lawton Chiles.

That said, he is pretty much the male version of Miami-Dade Commissioner Eileen Higgins, who is one of the 13 running for the mayor’s post and has consistently been leading the polls. The two big Democrats in the non-partisan race (yeah, right) are competing for a lot of the same environmental-friendly, socially-conscious, or otherwise “woke” votes.

A big difference is that Higgins has way more money — $813,000 collected in her campaign account and her political action committee, compared to a total of $184,000 for both Russell’s campaign account and his PAC. She has the campaign machinery. She also has the endorsement of Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who is out there campaigning with Higgins at events in what seems like a bit too much back scratching (more on that later).

Meanwhile, Russell has the backing of “two of the most environmental mayors in Miami-Dade,” in former South Miami Mayor Phil Stoddard and former Pinecrest Mayor Cindy Lerner. But Ladra’s nose is twitching because these greenies come with a bit of a stench.

Stoddard’s past includes a bizarre burglary episode in which police found him stark naked at home with teenage foreign student and accusations of police misreporting, and Lerner, who is a defender of open space and transit, lost two county commission races in a row and has been accused of steering no-bid deals to relatives without disclosure. Hardly the kind of squeaky-clean champions Russell needs when he’s fighting for votes in neighborhoods that care about trust. Russell may be banking on their name-brand heft among environmental voters. But the risk is real: his opponents can package these endorsements not as badges of purity, but as proof he builds his coalition on flawed foot soldiers.

Another big difference is that Russell has amassed a sizable following online, posting slick, sometimes quirky TikToks and reels aimed at younger voters. He’s got 22,400 followers on Instagram, where Higgins has 5,255, and a whopping 413,600 followers on TikTok, plus 15.5 million likes. Higgins is not on TikTok. Unless she’s in one of his videos.

So, Russell may have mastered socials, but the question is whether that translates into turnout. Other candidates have tried to use it against him, calling him the selfie boy and mocking his online presence. They’re just jealous.

What Miami gets with Russell is someone who knows City Hall inside out — and who might actually try to clean it. His record shows good intentions that don’t always survive contact with political reality. He’s not corrupt, not flashy, and not particularly connected to the old machine — which makes him both refreshing and an underdog.

But he has one big stain: Russell was the critical swing vote when the city commission approved the 99-year lease for the site of the former Melreese Golf Course for the future Miami Freedom Park real estate boondoggle dressed up as a soccer stadium. In the lead-up to the vote, Russell insisted on specific concessions: wage minimum and full cost cleanup of the toxic ash-laden site. After the deal passed, Russell faced criticism (and possibly some regret) for his “about-face” on the vote. It’s hard to live that down.

Read related: Ken Russell’s about face on Miami Freedom Park vote seals political fate

Then after the developers, led by Jorge Mas and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, went to the city to go back on a clause that he incited on to use $20 million in public benefit funding for the Freedom Park space — rather than to acquire other parks throughout the city, as Russell intended — he called it a “bait and switch.”

He has been criticized as ineffective as a commissioner, but says he can do more as mayor, where he can direct policy and surround himself with people who will help him fulfill his vision.

Ladra thinks Russell means what he says. But Miami politics eats idealists for breakfast. If he’s going to win, he’ll need more than courage and character. He’ll need a city ready to believe that honest can still work.

Ken Russell comes with a biography that reads more like a film than a standard political résumé. His father was a yo-yo champion with international ties; his mother, Japan’s national yo-yo champion. He, in turn, spent years competing and traveling in the yo-yo world himself. He went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earned a B.S. in Business Administration, then stepped into the family business, and later opened a watersports store.

After he left office, he opened a consulting firm and worked for the Sierra Club — until Higgins got him fired.

His entrance into politics? A story of a dad refusing to wait. When he learned that the park where his kids played had become contaminated and the city drifted on action, he organized neighbors, demanded change, and got the job done. He uses that origin point to signal he isn’t a career politician — he’s a citizen-turned-public-servant.

In 2015, he won the race for District 2 on the City of Miami Commission (covering Coconut Grove, Brickell, Downtown, Edgewater) and served until December 2022, leaving early in a hissy fit protest after the dysfunctional commission cancelled the December meeting sorta as a last jab to him.

And he’s used the mayoral race to jab back, saying “at least I didn’t leave in handcuffs” to former Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who was arrested in September 2023 on 14 public corruption charges including bribery and money laundering that were dropped more than a year later, and criticizing the amount of taxpayer money Commissioner Joe Carollo has wasted defending himself from lawsuits about his abuse of power.

Read related: Miami Commission cuts Ken Russell’s last meeting; he threatens to quit early

But he also has some heft. The key pillars of his campaign are:

• Anti-corruption and transparency: In his announcement: “Corruption in Miami isn’t just an open secret — it’s a way of doing business.” He pledges to “take out the garbage at City Hall.”
• Affordable housing and inclusive growth: He carries his own commission record (co-living zones, inclusionary zoning) into the campaign as proof that he knows housing is the challenge.
• Resilience and neighborhood-first infrastructure: He frames the mayor’s job as coordinating all of Miami’s multiple crises — housing, climate, infrastructure — and reconnecting the city’s many neighborhoods rather than letting growth displace residents.
• Governance reform: He wants to chair the commission himself (rather than appointing a peer), expand the size of the commission from 5 to 7 or 9 seats, shift city elections to even years (higher turnout), and implement lifetime term-limits. That’s structural change, not just policy.

That crisply defined platform — not just “help housing” but “governance reform + anti-corruption + housing + resilience” — joins his other strengths, which include a compelling personal story as an entrepreneur, activist, outsider who turned public servant, a visible and modern, digital-savvy, campaign and a credible record from his commission days, where he passed a water-quality ordinance to reduce fertilizer pollution and worked on co-living spaces and inclusionary zoning.

Russell leans into his “outsider who got things done” narrative. He vacuums in his past: the contaminated park, the grassroots mobilization, the yo-yo entrepreneur turned city commissioner. He uses that to signal authenticity (“I’m like your neighbour”) and competence (he’s done the actual job, passed ordinances). His campaign website emphasizes this: “From your next-door neighbor to Miami’s next Mayor.”

But he has his weaknesses, too. The congressional and short-lived Senate campaigns that ended in failure could be cast as “ambition without results,” and some of his signature policies are pre-empted by state law, which may raise questions of how much he can actually deliver given state-local constraint. And, of course, Melreese.

In a crowded field of 13 candidates, standing out is hard even for someone with Russell’s credentials. While he has been included in the most recent debate, which only had candidates that polled over 10%, Russell is still seen as the tail of the front-running pack, which includes Higgins, former City Manager Emilio González and, unbelievably, Carollo.

Russell represents a kind of “next generation” of Miami politics — not the old dynamic of political dynasties, not the purely developer-driven model, but someone who combines activism, private-sector experience, and municipal governance. He has cast himself as the one to build a city that doesn’t leave people behind, that rewires the system instead of just adding towers.

But the question remains: will the voters buy the story of system-cleaner and reformer in a city long comfortable with insiders and old networks? Will he move beyond housing talk and governance reform into delivering measurable difference? Will his digital savvy translate into real votes?

Russell’s path to victory is: win the progressive & reform-souled vote, consolidate that base, make housing his visceral promise, and become the “governance change” candidate. If he falters, it’ll be when the message gets too abstract or the opposition frames him as “another politician with promises”.