Miami | The Navarro Report | August 14, 2026
Early voting has been underway across Miami-Dade since August 3, and it runs through Saturday ahead of Tuesday’s August 18 primary — a ballot crowded enough that it’s worth a plain explanation of what’s actually being decided, and why some of the least-watched races on it matter more to daily life in the county than the ones getting the attention.
The marquee contests are the statewide ones. On the Republican side, an eleven-candidate field is competing for governor, including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, former House Speaker Paul Renner, state CFO-turned-candidate Jay Collins, and tech entrepreneur James Fishback, among others. Democrats have their own crowded field, featuring former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, former U.S. Rep. David Jolly, and several others competing for a chance to break the GOP’s decade-plus hold on the governor’s mansion. Florida’s U.S. Senate seat is also on the ballot as a special election, with incumbent Ashley Moody facing primary challengers on the Republican side and Alex Vindman and state Rep. Angie Nixon competing for the Democratic nomination. These are the races generating the ad spending and the headlines, and Miami-Dade voters will help decide both.
But buried further down the ballot are three races that will shape Miami-Dade’s government far more directly than who occupies the governor’s mansion: the nonpartisan contests for County Commission Districts 2, 5, and 8. Under Florida’s nonpartisan election rules, if a candidate in one of these races wins an outright majority on August 18, they win the seat then and there — no November runoff required. District 2 features Marleine Bastien, Ernst Jean Louis, and Miguel “Skip” Quintero; District 5 features Vicki L. Lopez, Rob Piper, and Joe Sanchez; District 8 features incumbent Danielle Cohen Higgins, John Edward DuBois, and Martha “Vega” Hero. A nonpartisan School Board race in District 1, with seven candidates, is on the same ballot.
Here is why that matters beyond civics-class abstraction: the County Commission is the body that will vote on Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s proposed budget for the fiscal year starting October 1 — the same budget this publication covered last week, which would eliminate 12 bus routes and reduce early-morning and late-night transit service across the county. The commissioners elected or reelected on August 18 are, in a very direct sense, the people who will decide whether those cuts happen, get scaled back, or get replaced with some other set of trade-offs. A voter who skips to the bottom of the ballot, or stops after picking a governor and senator, is opting out of a decision that will affect whether the bus shows up for a shift-worker at 5 a.m. far more directly than whoever wins the governor’s race in November.
This is a structural feature of how local ballots work, not a Miami-Dade-specific flaw, but it’s worth naming plainly: the races that determine property tax rates, transit budgets, and county services routinely draw a fraction of the attention of top-of-ticket contests, even though county government is where most of the decisions that show up in a resident’s daily life — bus schedules, park maintenance, code enforcement, permitting — actually get made. Election officials and turnout researchers have long documented a version of this pattern nationally: down-ballot local races routinely see meaningful drop-off in participation compared to the statewide contests on the same ballot, even among voters who showed up specifically to vote.
Early voting runs through August 16 at 22 sites across the county, with hours that have varied by week — currently 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. through Friday, shifting to 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the final weekend before Tuesday’s election. Voters need a signature-bearing photo ID, and anyone who requested a mail ballot needed to have done so by August 6; Election Day voters must go to their assigned precinct. A full sample ballot, listing every race down to Circuit Court and County Court judgeships, is available on the Miami-Dade Elections website for anyone who wants to walk in prepared rather than making down-ballot decisions cold in the booth.
None of this is an argument for which candidate in any of these races deserves a Miami-Dade voter’s support — that judgment belongs to the electorate, not this publication. It’s an argument for reading past the top of the ballot before deciding a primary isn’t worth the trip. The governor’s race will be decided by millions of Floridians and settled with or without any single Miami-Dade resident’s vote moving the needle much. The County Commission races will be decided by whoever actually shows up in Miami-Dade — and the winners will be sitting at the dais when the bus-cut vote comes up this fall.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — This article was produced under editorial direction and review by The Navarro Report. Research and drafting were AI-assisted; all facts, sourcing, and final edits were directed and verified by a human editor.