Former newsman beats Robin Peguero by seven points
For nearly 50 years, Eliott Rodriguez delivered the news to South Florida. Now he’s making some.
Rodriguez, the longtime CBS Miami anchor who traded the television studio for the campaign trail earlier this year, defeated former homicide prosecutor Robin Peguero in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for Congressional District 27 and will face Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar in November.
And suddenly one of South Florida’s most closely watched congressional races has become something else, too: The Battle of the Anchors.
Two Cuban Americans. Two longtime television journalists. Two faces Miami voters have been seeing on their television screens for decades.
Only one gets to go to Congress.
Rodriguez beat Peguero 53.5% to 46.5%, a roughly seven-point victory that came despite Peguero having the bigger campaign war chest and spending almost three times as much as Rodriguez through late July.
Apparently, name recognition is worth something after all.
Because Rodriguez’s entire argument for the Democratic nomination was essentially this: I can beat María Elvira.
Not that Peguero wasn’t qualified.
Read related: Democrats think they can beat Maria Elvira; First, they have to beat each other
The 40-year-old former Miami-Dade homicide prosecutor had an impressive résumé. He worked as a federal investigator for the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He had endorsements from former Congresswoman Donna Shalala, several sitting members of Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
And he raised money. Lots more of it than Rodriguez spent.
But Democratic voters apparently decided that the 70-year-old guy they’d been watching on television for decades was the better bet in a district 
Democrats desperately want back.
That’s what Rodriguez’s campaign says the result means.
“They’re understanding that he has the respect and can put together the coalition of voters to defeat Maria Elvira Salazar,” campaign strategist Fernand Amandi told the Miami Herald after Tuesday’s results.
There’s the November strategy in one sentence.
Because Rodriguez isn’t running as some progressive warrior coming to save Miami from the MAGA hordes. Quite the opposite.
He’s selling himself as Eliott Rodriguez. The familiar guy. The trusted guy. The Cuban-American journalist who spent half a century interviewing politicians from both parties rather than screaming about them on cable television.
Remember that Peguero actually tried to use that against him during the primary, questioning Rodriguez’s Democratic bona fides because, as Peguero put it, nobody knew Rodriguez was a Democrat until a few months ago.
Well, duh. He was a journalist.
Ladra would have been far more concerned if viewers knew how their evening-news anchor voted for the past 40 years.
Read related: From anchor desk to the ballot: Eliott Rodriguez makes congress run official
Rodriguez leaned right into that history. His campaign logo practically screams CBS, with a television set and an eye that looks awfully familiar to 
anyone who watched Channel 4.
Subtle it ain’t.
Effective? Tuesday suggests maybe.
Now comes the much, much harder part.
Because María Elvira Salazar is no Robin Peguero.
She’s a three-term incumbent with nearly $2.3 million cash on hand, a national profile and her own decades of television name recognition. She demolished her Republican primary challenger Tuesday with about 81% of the vote.
And CD 27 has moved dramatically toward Republicans.
Democrat Shalala won the seat in 2018, beating Salazar during the Democratic wave that year. Salazar came back two years later, beat Shalala in 
the rematch and hasn’t looked back. In 2024, she won with more than 60%.
So anybody pretending Rodriguez is suddenly the favorite because Democrats picked the guy with the best-known face needs to put down the Kool-Aid. He’s not.
But the district isn’t being written off anymore, either.
Election forecasters have moved CD 27 from Solid Republican to Likely Republican, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has identified it among the Florida districts potentially in play.
Read related: CD 27 primary shrinks as Democrats, dollars line up behind Eliott Rodriguez
And there are reasons Democrats think 2026 could look different.
First, there’s Donald Trump.
The president won Miami-Dade in 2024, completing a remarkable Republican transformation in a county Democrats once treated like their personal ATM.
But immigration enforcement may complicate that relationship in a district that’s about 74% Hispanic.
Cubans and Venezuelans who supported Trump have watched immigration crackdowns hit South Florida communities, while Salazar has tried to 
walk perhaps the trickiest tightrope in Congress: remaining a Trump-supporting Republican while simultaneously advocating immigration protections for longtime undocumented residents.
Her answer has been the Dignity Act, the immigration proposal she has championed for years. Which sorta sounds like indentured servitude. But maybe it’s just a book to sell.
Rodriguez calls it the “Indignity Act,” criticizing it because it doesn’t create a pathway to citizenship.
Expect to hear those two words approximately 47 billion times before Nov. 3.
But immigration may not even be the battlefield that decides this race. Affordability could be.
Housing. Insurance. Groceries. Electricity. Healthcare. The stuff people complain about at Publix rather than on cable news.
Both Rodriguez and Peguero made the cost of living central to their Democratic campaigns, and Rodriguez will now try to pin that pain on Salazar and the Republican government in Washington.
Salazar will counter with her record, her bipartisan legislation, her support for small businesses and the argument she has made repeatedly to voters: that she isn’t simply a rubber stamp for her party. She points to the Dignity Act and other bipartisan efforts as evidence of that independence.
And this is where the race gets fascinating. Because the two candidates are, superficially at least, weirdly similar.
Both are Cuban American. Both spent decades in Miami television news. Both have enormous name recognition. Both understand cameras. Both know how to communicate with Spanish-speaking voters.
And neither can easily caricature the other as some mysterious outsider Miami voters have never heard of.
That’s important in a district running from Downtown Miami and Little Havana through Coral Gables, South Miami, Pinecrest, Kendall, Palmetto Bay and Cutler Bay.
Rodriguez’s challenge will be convincing voters who trusted him to tell them what happened yesterday that they should trust him to decide what happens tomorrow.
Salazar’s challenge will be defending six years in Congress — and the Republican record in Washington — against someone who can look directly into a television camera without breaking a sweat.
Ay, María Elvira. You finally got an opponent who knows where the camera is.
Read related: Is Maria Elvira Salazar finally getting a real challenger in Eliott Rodriguez?
Rodriguez’s age will undoubtedly come up. He’s 70. Salazar’s campaign will have plenty to say about his lack of legislative experience and what Democrats would do with control of Congress.
Rodriguez will have plenty to say about Salazar’s missed votes, her memory lapses on live TV about her votes in Congress, Trump’s immigration 
policies and the cost of living.
And unlike a typical challenger, he doesn’t have to spend the first $2 million introducing himself. Miami already knows Eliott.
The question is whether knowing him translates into voting for him.
Tuesday night, Democratic voters decided he was their best shot. Not necessarily their most ideological candidate. Not necessarily their newest face.
Their best shot.
And now we find out if they were right.
Because after months of Democrats arguing over which candidate could actually make CD 27 competitive, that argument is over.
And come November, Miami television viewers are going to see two very familiar faces asking for their vote.
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