MIAMI — Jeb Bush built the Miami-Dade Republican Party. And now Marco Rubio wants to take possession.

Just five days after Bush made his campaign for president official, Rubio headlined the local GOP’s Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser Saturday. It’s indicative of the awkward predicament South Florida’s two White House hopefuls find themselves in, and one of the complications of having two Miami Republicans running simultaneously for the nation’s highest office.


Known simply as “Jeb” and “Marco,” the men are longtime allies, friends and neighbors who live a five-minute drive from each other in bordering cities. Now the Miami-Dade GOP, built into a powerhouse by Bush in the 1980s, isn’t big enough for the two of them.

The family feud between these two titans of the Republican Party has loomed for months, during which GOP insiders from Miami to Tallahassee have dealt with it like many a conflicted family: with denial. Then it became indisputable Monday when Bush officially announced his bid — and his surrogates threw a few not-so-subtle jabs at Rubio for his lack of accomplishments and executive experience.

In one of the most politically dynamic counties in the most politically dynamic state, many Republicans say it will only get worse.

“There’s a lot of passion, and this could almost literally come to blows,” said David Custin, an independent and longtime Miami-Dade political consultant who’s often hired to work on some of the roughest campaigns.

“If someone says the wrong thing in Nevada or something, there could be a brawl at the Ball & Chain bar in Little Havana. If someone starts shoving somebody in Illinois, fists could fly at The Pub in Coral Gables,” Custin said. “A lot of us, a lot of my Republican clients, don’t know what to do. They don’t want to pick a side. But they might have to.”

In his speech — a standard address about the need to cut taxes and regulations and oppose Obama’s policies — Rubio never said the name “Jeb Bush.” And he downplayed the rivalry.

“I am not running against any of my fellow Republicans,” he said, chiding the press. “I know they want us to fight. I know they want us to argue. It makes better articles, better news stories.”

Rubio later reminded the crowd of his against-all-odds campaign against a powerful governor in 2010, when he won his Senate seat.

“They also said it wasn’t my turn back in 2009, when I ran for the Senate – when literally the entire Republican establishment in Washington and almost all of it in Florida told me that I had no chance,” Rubio said. “In fact, at the very beginning, the only people who thought I could win all lived in my home. Four of them were under the age of 10. And yet we prevailed.”

The contest between the two is particularly vexing to many here because Bush and Rubio are party icons in Miami-Dade and across the state. Most Republicans who run for office — especially in a primary — covet the endorsement of both. They’re featured in candidate mailers, ads, robocalls, fundraisers and rallies. Their respective endorsements are believed to move poll numbers.

Perhaps the most-conflicted Republican of all is Nelson Diaz, the county party chairman who secured Rubio’s commitment to appear at the fundraiser a year ago — before it was clear that the first-term senator would run for president. Diaz used to work as Rubio’s legislative aide. But he’s also a lobbyist for Southern Strategy Group, established by Paul Bradshaw – the husband of Bush’s top adviser, Sally Bradshaw.

“The Republican Party of Miami is and will remain neutral until we have a nominee, at which point we will go all out to ensure there is a Republican in the White House in 2016,” Diaz said, acknowledging a measure of frustration that he has to bat down false rumors that he’s trying to give Rubio an edge.

There are benefits, though, to being home to two serious candidates for the presidency: Diaz on Friday triumphantly announced that the Lincoln Day Dinner was sold out, and that the local GOP hasn’t had this many attendees in more than 25 years.

The tensions and rumblings surrounding the question of who backs whom have ratcheted up as the polling margin between the two men has shrunk. The two are virtually deadlocked in Florida – a state that Republicans likely must win in order to carry the White House. Bush nominally leads Rubio among Florida Republicans, 20 percent to 18 percent — an inside-the-error margin — according to Quinnipiac University’s latest survey. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker comes in a distant third (out of 16 potential candidates) with 9 percent support.

The trend has been in Rubio’s favor. The two percentage point margin between the two represents a net shift of 10 points toward Rubio and away from Bush since March, when the former governor led the U.S. senator 24-12 percent in a Quinnipiac poll.

Nationally, it’s a similar story. According to Real Clear Politics’ national polling average of the race, Bush is essentially tied with Rubio. The margin between the two is less than a percentage point, with Walker in between. At its height at the beginning of the year, Bush’s lead over Rubio was 17 percent to 5 percent. Bush’s advantage started to dissipate about the same time Rubio announced for president in April.

The venue for Rubio’s campaign announcement – the Freedom Tower, nicknamed “The Ellis Island of the South” — was a testament to the history of Miami, particularly for Cuban exiles and immigrants. Many had their immigration status processed at the iconic Mediterranean-style building after they fled to the United States in the wake of Fidel Castro’s 1959 coup.

Bush’s Monday announcement also took place within the county borders, but at a gymnasium lacking that symbolism. His team held a larger, more traditional and well-organized campaign announcement that showcased more surrogates and videos explaining his biography – a tacit admission that Bush, who last ran for office in 2002, knows he needs to start from scratch in introducing himself to voters. Where Rubio spoke only a line of Spanish in his address, Bush spoke more Spanish and emphasized Latino culture.

It’s a practice he learned here in Miami-Dade, where campaigning in Spanish — with a salsa-attuned-ear to Latin culture — is a must. Unlike any other county in the United States, registered Republicans in Miami-Dade are overwhelmingly Hispanic – almost 73 percent – and nearly all Cuban-American. There are more Republicans here (it’s the most-populous county in the state, with 1.3 million voters) than anywhere else in Florida. And they vote at some of the highest rates in the state.

The nearly 360,000 registered Republicans are outnumbered 42 percent to 28 percent by registered Democrats but GOP politicians control the county’s power structure, holding more seats on the county commission and mayor's office and on the state’s legislative and congressional delegations. As a result, GOP politics, and therefore countywide politics, are often covered more in Spanish TV and radio than in English here.

A majority of the county’s top elected officials – the three Cuban-American members of Congress, top Republican state legislators – are with Bush, an established figure since 1980. The race, though, could be far closer among rank-and-file voters, said Armando Ibarra, who’s not siding with anyone and is the director of club growth for Miami-Dade’s young Republicans.

“People are conflicted. Jeb has ties that stretch back 30 years in this community, and that’s tough to match. But Marco is in a good spot. What I hear from some people is that they were jittery about Jeb for a while,” Ibarra said. “It’s going to be hard for a lot of Cuban-Americans in the end to resist the temptation to vote for Marco, a son of this community. There’s a saying with Cubans, ‘la juventud impone’ – it means something like, ‘the youth gets ahead,’ that what the older generation is doing is for the younger. A lot of older people like the idea that a kid who was riding bikes in the neighborhood could be president.”

But Sasha Tirador, an independent political consultant who often handles Spanish-language Republican campaigns, said she has heard older Cuban-Americans grouse that Rubio didn’t wait his turn.

“The sense among many of them is that Marco betrayed his mentor,” Tirador said. She said that Bush’s record of accomplishments might be more attractive to Republican voters here, even Cuban-Americans, who don’t necessarily view Bush as an Anglo.

“Jeb Bush is more than an honorary Cuban. He’s an honorary Hispanic,” she said.

More than any other single figure in the county, Bush is responsible for making the GOP what it is in Miami — and, perhaps, the state. And those efforts helped pave the way for Rubio’s rise.

The bilingual Bush moved to Miami in 1980 when he was 27 years old (Rubio was 9) to work on his father’s campaign for president and then vice president on the ticket of Ronald Reagan, whose campaign team identified Cuban-Americans as ripe for plucking because of their cultural conservatism, vehement anti-communism and still-fresh memories of John F. Kennedy’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion.

Ahead of Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, Jeb became chair of the county party. He became known as a relentless recruiter who reveled in his work — he described converting Democrats as “missionary work.”

The results: 4,000 Democrats switched their party registration that year, with Bush hand-delivering half of that total to the elections office in a single day. On one notable occasion, immediately after a 1984 naturalization ceremony in the Orange Bowl, nearly 10,000 Hispanics registered Republican. In all, voter rolls grew 20 percent that year, an increase disproportionately due to Hispanics, 74 percent of whom registered Republican. Bush’s efforts helped reduced the Democrats’ 3-1 registration edge over Republicans to 2-1 by Election Day, The Miami Herald reported.

A decade later, Bush ran for his first statewide elected office against incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles and narrowly lost. He continued building the local GOP but also began to direct his efforts at the state level as well. He won in 1998, becoming the first Republican since Reconstruction to govern with a majority-Republican Legislature. In his 2002 re-election, Jeb throttled his opponent as Republicans seized the Governor’s mansion, Florida Legislature and Cabinet. In both of his wins, Bush carried Miami-Dade, which remained disproportionately loaded with Democratic voters.

Along the way, Rubio entered Bush’s orbit. A child of the Reagan years, Rubio came of age during the Bush-led Republican ascendancy in Florida. He interned for Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and, in 1996, was recruited by Bush’s future state GOP chairman, Al Cardenas, to run Miami get-out-the-vote efforts for Bob Dole’s doomed presidential campaign. Two years later, he won a city commission seat in the middle-class suburb of West Miami, which borders the tonier Coral Gables where Bush lives today. In 1999, less than a year after Bush assumed office, Rubio won a tough special election for a state House seat.

A loyal Bush-agenda voter, Rubio scaled the rungs of power in the state House and quickly began running for a future post as Florida House speaker. Bush’s machine helped, but Rubio did much of it on his own as well.

Rubio started his two-year term as speaker in 2007, the same year Bush left office due to term limits, and became the standard bearer for his legacy. He hired Bush’s old staffers and policy wonks and resisted the agenda of then-GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, who was viewed by conservatives with suspicion. When the two clashed in the 2010 Senate race, Bush and his network helped keep Rubio alive until he picked up momentum and defeated Crist.

Rubio showed his gratitude by lavishing praise on Bush in his “American Son” autobiography. A year after that, in 2013, Republicans started to turn on both of them for supporting a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Rubio tried to make amends with conservatives and backed away from the immigration bill he helped draft. But Bush didn’t change much and, unlike Rubio, stuck by his support for the Common Core educational standards.

It caused a strain with the local party: the Republican Executive Committee voted in September 2013 to oppose Common Core, a slap at the self-styled “education governor.”

“Is loyalty to its lead promoters – Jeb Bush and the rest of the Republican leadership — so cemented that we will be whipped into one mindset and put party over principle?” activist Pam Evans asked Republicans before the vote.

Rubio slipped in a reference to the controversy Saturday by noting that, when he was in Tallahassee, “We still improved our schools without Common Core.”

Even as two favorite sons ascend to the national stage, the Republican brand in Miami-Dade is diminishing. Local voters have drifted leftward in the last two presidential elections: President Obama won the county in 2012 by a stunning margin of 208,459 votes, enabling him to squeak past Mitt Romney in Florida. Registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans by 188,119; for the first time last year, voters of no major party affiliation – typically called independents — now outnumber registered Republicans.

As if those trends weren’t worrisome enough for Bush and Rubio, younger Cuban-Americans are less likely to register or vote Republican like their parents or grandparents — the GOP is the last choice for non-Cuban Hispanics lately when they register to vote.