Rubio’s Democratic Challenger Takes Page from Dr. Oz’s Playbook to Slam Supporter’s Criminal History

Photo by Shawn Thew – Pool/Getty Images

Rep. Val Demings’ (D-FL) campaign deployed a regrettable tactic this week to attack an ad by her opponent, incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), over the decades-old criminal history of one of his supporters.

Polling in the Florida Senate race has remained tight, with a University of North Florida poll in early August showing Demings up 4 points (with a margin of error of +/- 3.4 points) and several subsequent polls showing Rubio up between 2 and 4 points (all within those polls’ margins of error). With less than two months to go before November’s election, the two candidates are bombarding the airwaves with ads.

The Rubio ad below, titled “Diego’s,” featured three female employees of Diego’s Taqueria & Margaritas Bar in Panama City Beach. The business received a forgivable loan under the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal Covid-19 initiative that provided funds to employers to cover expenses like employee payroll and rent while pandemic regulations forced them to stay closed, and in the ad, the employees credited Rubio for helping save their jobs.

The controversy relates to someone never seen in the 30-second spot: the restaurant’s owner, Silvino Barragan. According to a report by Florida Politics, Barragan was arrested in 2001 and charged with soliciting or procuring a prostitute. He pled no contest to the charge, paid a $297 fine, and the case was closed.

In 2013, Barragan filed the corporate formation documents for Diego’s, and has since expanded to a second location in Panama City Beach, as well as launching a food truck called “Cheo’s Latin Kitchen” in 2021.

Rubio’s campaign pushed back on the report as an attempt to “distract from Marco Rubio’s record of results,” wrote Florida Politics reporter Jacob Ogles, along with this response from Demings:

Demings’ team saw things differently, and suggested the poor vetting of the restaurant in the ad was the latest in a “series of campaign missteps.”

“Marco Rubio’s campaign is in complete disarray,” said Christian Slater, spokesperson for the Demings campaign. “He’s desperately attempting to save his flailing campaign with cheap political stunts, but Florida voters know he doesn’t show up for work, and hurts Florida when he does. This November, Florida will send a cop on the beat to the United States Senate and reject the career politician who refuses to do his job.”

Rubio has since pulled “Diego’s” from broadcast TV, along with another ad, “100%,” which slammed Demings for voting in favor of pandemic relief checks that were sent to inmates and undocumented workers but omitted the fact that Rubio had voted for the bill as well.

Campaigns rotate ads all the time, and Rubio deserved the criticism for the dishonest framing of the “100%” ad — he didn’t just vote for the bill, he was a co-sponsor — but the slam on “Diego’s” is part of an unfortunate trend of political candidates attacking their opponents for associating with people whose pasts include interactions with our criminal justice system.

Reason associate editor Billy Binion had an excellent and detailed commentary earlier this month, titled “Hiring Formerly Incarcerated People Is Good, Actually,” in which he justifiably eviscerated Republican attacks on Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) and Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) for hiring people with criminal records.

Regarding Maloney, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) had shared a New York Post article about two people hired by the congressman, blasting him for his “personnel choices of hard-core criminals.”

One of these men had served six years after being caught with $900 counterfeit cash and the other, Jonathan Alvarez, had started selling drugs at 13 after his father was deported and then when he was 17 years old, he “defended a friend in a street fight against a 22-year-old, who died from his injuries,” wrote Binion. Alvarez was released from prison at age 30, after graduating from a prison initiative that aims to help violent felons re-enter society. Maloney, a long-time supporter of the program, hired Alvarez as a congressional fellow for several months in 2019.

“Alvarez has turned his life around after a very rocky upbringing,” wrote Binion. “What jobs do Stefanik and the Post believe he is worthy to hold?”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat, took a similar swipe at Fetterman, slamming his Democratic opponent as “soft on crime” for employing “two convicted murderers” on his campaign. As Binion and many others have noted, however, the “convicted murders,” brothers Dennis and Lee Horton, “were recommended unanimously for clemency by the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons after maintaining their innocence for the nearly three decades they spent behind bars.” Additionally, the facts of the case make clear that the brothers were never alleged to have actually participated in the murder itself; they admitted only to giving their then-friend Robert Leaf a ride, saying they were unaware he had just committed a deadly robbery.

“It’s a strange point for a publication or a politician to make,” Binion pointed out. “We should keep punishing two men, we’re told, for crimes they potentially did not commit and for which they received clemency.”

The specific crime committed by Barragan, soliciting a prostitute, happened over twenty years ago, searching the Bay County Clerk of Court records doesn’t show the man engaged in any sort of ongoing crime spree, just three instances of minor traffic citations, the last one happening in 2007. He paid a small (under $200) fine for each of these citations and the cases were closed.

None of that should block Barragan from owning restaurants and employing people. It’s all such weirdly minor stuff that I wondered how Ogles thought to research Barragan’s criminal court records in the first place, especially since he’s never mentioned in the ad by name.

As someone who has done opposition research for campaigns in the past, the whole kerfuffle smelled like a hot tip delivered as prêt-à-porter by someone connected to Demings campaign. A tweet posted by Ogles Wednesday morning gave credence to my theory, in which he shared his article about Rubio pulling the two ads along with a comment, “To all the pols and consultants I love and adore, keep the scoops coming.”

To all the pols and consultants I love and adore, keep the scoops coming.
Also… https://t.co/n5jruHzjUg pic.twitter.com/rzpOm81zbR

— Jacob Ogles (@jacobogles) September 21, 2022

I reached out to Florida Politics for comment and spoke to Ogles by phone Wednesday afternoon. While he understandably would not reveal the identity of his source, he did acknowledge that “the truth is, it was drawn to our attention” that Barragan “had stuff on his record, so I did go check it out after getting a tip.”

“I’m not going to pretend I’m doing deep background on every ad — we’re covering a lot of races,” Ogles added. In addition to the Senate race, Florida Politics is covering Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) re-election campaign against former Gov. (and former Republican) Charlie Crist (D), several other statewide races, 27 congressional districts, 140 Florida House and Senate seats (the 120 House districts plus the even-numbered Senate districts are on this year’s ballot) and numerous other local races around the state.

Ogles emphasized that he did check out and verify the information from the tip to make sure it was accurate, not someone else with a similar name, etc. and did hold off publication until he had a statement in response from Rubio’s campaign.

There is a “fair conversation to be had about the PPP program,” said Ogles, because “any federal program of that scale demands scrutiny on where the money is going.” Rubio’s campaign “should have vetted [Barragan’s business] better” before highlighting it in the ad, he added. “To me, the vetting was the primary issue…of all the stories you could tell, why this guy?”

Ogles is correct that PPP — a program highlighted in Rubio’s campaign messaging — deserves scrutiny, and he did proper due diligence to check the facts. Still, it cannot be ignored that Ogles would not have looked into this story of his own initiative, and while we cannot say for sure the tip came from Demings, the logical assumption is that it either came from the campaign directly or an ally.

I am not accusing the Demings campaign of violating any law; Barragan’s court files are public record and Florida election laws allow state-level PACS and outside groups to coordinate with campaigns, so whoever gave the tip to Ogles did nothing illegal. But it does strike a hypocritical tone to voice support for criminal justice reform and then seek to smear an opponent for associating with someone with a long-ago minor criminal violation.

“[P]ost-incarceration employment is one of our most effective ways to discourage recidivism,” wrote Binion, citing research by The Brookings Institution. “Ninety-five percent of state prisoners will be set free at some point. The question we have as a society is what we let them do with that freedom when they get it. If you support law and order, you should want all of them to succeed for the sake of that principle, not despite it.”

Whether it’s coming from the right or left, the efforts to ostracize anyone with a criminal record years in the past should not be applauded as a campaign strategy. Note that in none of these examples, whether it was from Oz or Demings or a media outlet, did the critics even pretend to argue that these people were a threat to our public safety now. Instead, it’s a vile attempt at post hoc cancellation, seeking to excommunicate people for previous offenses for which they already paid their debt to society.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.