Photograph by Mark Elias/Bloomberg

The prices of the most expensive homes in Miami are increasing at a faster pace than the rest of the market there.

Trying to buy a piece of the pie in Miami or Seattle is becoming more expensive at a faster pace than the rest of the market.

The prices of the most expensive homes in Seattle and Miami are increasing at a faster pace than the rest of the market there, according the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values in 20 cities. The data is broken down into thirds. The highest-priced third in those two cities increased more than both of the lower-cost thirds — the only two areas of the country where that is true, according to the data.

Home prices in the “high tier” market, which start at $268,363 in Miami, grew 8.4 percent from a year earlier, compared with a 6.9 percent rise for low-tier homes. One reason is that wealthy people from other markets are looking for sunny weather and are snatching up luxury vacation homes in the Miami area.

Still, homes in the highest tier in Miami are still 40.4 percent below the peak level for luxury homes, reached in May 2006. They have rebounded 9.0 percent since a post-recession low reached 11 months ago in Nov. 2011.

In Seattle, luxury home prices increased 6.2 percent, compared with a rise of 2.2 percent for homes in the least expensive third of the market.

A “high tier” home in Seattle starts at $404,428. The peak level for luxury homes in Seattle was July 2007, and “high tier” home prices are still 22.5% below the peak. Luxury home prices bottomed a year ago and have since risen 6.2 percent.

Original post is Movin’ On Up in Seattle, Miami by Political Capital.

Photograph by Michael C. Bender/Bloomberg

Albert Gomez talks on the phone at his office in Miami, Florida.

Abelardo and Lucy Gomez, like many of their generation who fled Cuba, have voted for every Republican U.S. presidential candidate for the past 40 years.

Their son is another story.

Albert Gomez, 39, who works in the family business in South Florida, has a bobble-head doll of President Barack Obama perched on his desk. A self-described pacifist who campaigned against offshore oil drilling as a teenager, he has voted for a Republican presidential candidate just once.

“I’m very upset with my son,” said Lucy Gomez, 65, interviewed at her $2 million home in a gated Coral Gables neighborhood along a canal near Biscayne Bay. “He’s my son and he has a big heart. But Albert is a Democrat.”

Like Albert Gomez, the children of Cuban-American immigrants are increasingly likely to buck their parents’ Republican allegiance and vote for Democrats, according to polling data. This change helped President Barack Obama become the first Democrat in 68 years to win Florida twice and creates new hurdles for Republicans, who are searching for ways to win favor among Hispanic voters after losing four of the last six presidential contests.

Cuban-Americans account for just 3.3 percent of the 54 million Hispanics in the U.S., Census data show. Yet two-thirds of the nation’s 1.8 million Cubans-Americans live in Florida, creating a powerful voice in what has been the largest electoral prize for more than a decade among states considered competitive by both political parties.

Obama won 48 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida this year, nearly twice as much as Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2000, according to exit polls from Miami-based Bendixen & Amandi International, a polling firm specializing in Hispanic community surveys. The change is due to a generational shift in political views, according to the firm.

“The trend shows a real danger for Republicans,” said Dario Moreno, a Florida International University political science professor and adviser to Marco Rubio, the state’s Republican and Cuban-American U.S. senator. “They’re losing support among one of their strongest bases.”

See the full report at Bloomberg.com

Original post is Cuban-Americans: Generational Shift Helped Elect, Re-Elect Obama by Political Capital.

Photograph by Robert Alexander/Archive Photos/Getty Images

A Barack Obama supporter visits the Democratic Party's headquarters in Espanola, New Mexico.

President Barack Obama has been accused of campaigning after Election Day.

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have chided him for the trips he’s made to places such as the toy factory in Pennsvylania and the diesel engine plant near Detroit where he has pressed his case for taxing the wealthiest Americans harder.

It doesn’t take Air Force One to launch a campaign, however.

This afternoon, the president is aiming over the heads of Republican leaders again with a round of regional interviews with anchors from regional television stations in states where he won re-election – y tambien en espanol.

The president will take a seat in the Diplomatic Room of the White House mid-afternoon for talks with WPVI in Philadelphia, WCCO in Minneapolis, KCRA in Sacramento and — notably — the Miami outlet of WSCV Univision.

Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote on Nov. 6, close to former President Bill Clinton’s record, and in South Florida Obama won a record 48 percent of the Cuban-American vote, as well as 60 percent of the U.S.-born Cuban-American community.

With both his trips outside of Washington and his media reach outside the Beltway, he is counting on momentum carried from his campaign to convince Congress that taxes for top-earners should be raised while 98 percent of Americans are held harmless from the repeal of the Bush-era tax cuts.

Back in Washington, Boehner is holding the president to significant spending cuts as part of any tax deal. The Republican House speaker from Ohio, where Obama also won re-election, is staging his own media event today: An 11:15 am EST news conference in the Capitol.

See the Bloomberg National Poll today for more on the White House’s reading of the hand the president holds.

Original post is Obama On the Air: English y Espanol by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

President Barack Obama supporter Geraldine Johnson, 80, holds an Obama/Biden campaign sign outside the polling precinct at the New Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church of Tampa in Fla.

Updated at 9:50 am and 7 pm EST

President Barack Obama holds a wider advantage over Republican Mitt Romney tonight than he did last night.

Wider, too, than this morning.

In Florida, that is.

The voting that ended at 1:30 am EST the morning after Election Day was still being counted in Florida.

At this report, in Florida,  it’s:

Obama: 4,185,917

Romney: 4,127,862

That 58,000-vote edge for the president — who already has won the election, by the way — is 11,000 up from last night.

No nail-bitter here — the margin of victory at this point is 0.7 percent (growing with the late count), and the state demands a recount when it’s within 0.5 percent.

They have finished counting the absentee ballots in Miami, with a few other counties still finishing up, the state says. They had until 5 pm today, by law, to finish counting the provisional ballots.

Here was a sobering note from the Miami Herald:  “(Elections Supervisor Penny)  White said she did not know the total number of provisional ballots.”

See the Miami ballot-counting here.

Original post is Florida: The Long Count Goes On by Political Capital.

Photograph by J. Pat Carter/AP Photo

Voters stand in line at a Fort Myers, Fla. church late Nov. 6, 2012.

Updated at 2:55 pm EST

(Still waiting)

It’s you know what all over again — with the elections supervisor in Miami-Dade County still counting presidential election ballots.

Except this time, unlike in 2000, the White House does not hang in the balance.

This time, Miami-Dade’s ballots are likely to ratify President Barack Obama’s second win in the biggest of all swing states, Florida.

With more than 8 million ballots counted statewide, Obama held a 49.85 percent to 49.29 percent advantage over Republican Mitt Romney in the fourth largest state this morning. That was a difference of 47,095 votes.

It’s not 537, the disputed margin of victory by which former President George W. Bush won Florida. Yet it’s a reflection of how hard-fought was the state in which Obama opened more than 100 field offices to push supporters to the polls — a state with a Republican governor, Rick Scott, one Republican senator, Marco Rubio, and a senior Democratic senator, Bill Nelson, re-elected yesterday.

Obama’s advantage in Miami-Dade, the biggest since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964, was 61.9 percent to 37.7 percent at last count of the state elections division. The 521,000 votes he won there surpasses the 500,000 he secured in 2008, and the 318,000 votes that Romney won there fell short of Republican Senator John McCain’s total in 2008 — 361,000.

The county is largely Democratic, though its politics have been dominated by Cuban-American politics. The younger generation of Cuban-Americans has been more open to Democrats in recent elections, including Obama — they elected a Democrat, Miami’s Joe Garcia, to Congress this week, ousting Republican David Rivera.

Still, Obama’s apparent Florida win — expect a call sometime today — will not be secured only in Miami.

Obama won in the swing-voting Interstate-4 corridor: In Orlando’s Orange County, which the president won big in 2008, he won big again this year — by 59-41 percent. In Tampa’s Hillsborough County, which has voted the way Florida has in every presidential election since the 1960s, Obama won by 53-46 percent this year.

Obama widened margins in Disney World’s Osceola, where nearly half the population is Hispanic, and the Panhandle’s Gadsden, where more than half the population is black. (Gadsden was the only one of Florida’s 67 counties that supported Jimmy Carter for reelection in 1984.)

Why do you think Romney was campaigning in Osceola’s Kissimmee last week?  (with the emphasis on “sim”)

Yet the narrowness of his apparent Florida win this year — compared with a 2.8 percent edge in 2008 — has a lot to do with his enhanced strength in Miami. Obama won Miami in 2008 by 139,300 votes. This time, he did it by 204,000 — the difference of 64,700 more than his entire statewide margin.

He under-performed elsewhere: The president won 13 counties in Florida, down from 15 four years ago. Volusia and Flagler, two Atlantic coast counties between Jacksonville and Cape Canaveral,  flipped back to the Republican column this year. (Obama darn near lost Monroe County, home of the Florida Keys). Among those 13 counties, Obama won with smaller margins in all but three. His margins in Broward, Palm Beach, Orange, Hillsborough and Pinellas — the five counties with the most voters after Miami — each shrunk compared with four years ago. He won a total of 58,800 fewer votes in those five.

Romney saw a huge turnout in Lee and Collier counties, home to Fort Myers and Naples on the Southwest Gulf Coast, with a total margin of 177,900 votes. That’s nearly triple McCain’s 2008 victory margin in the two Gulf Coast neighbors.

And the turnout in Miami was big. People were still voting in Miami-Dade after midnight, with hours-long lines at some polling places. This morning, according to the Miami Herald, the county elections office has 20,000 absentee ballots left to count.

These alone could not affect the outcome of the vote statewide, with the state reporting a 100 percent count of precincts statewide, leaving Florida last-in this morning with a vote that won’t prove as historic as 2000.

Still, the final piece of a broad but narrow victory for Obama across most of the swing states that he won in 2008 — clinching eight of the nine that were heavily contested this year, all but North Carolina — rests in Florida’s hands today.

Bloomberg’s Michael C. Bender contributed from Tallahassee. 

Original post is Election Over, Florida Still Counting by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ty Wright/Bloomberg

A car sits parked below a painting of Che Guevara in Havana, Cuba.

Updated at 11:25 am EDT

There are a few names not lightly mentioned in Miami’s Cuban-American community.

One is Fidel Castro, and another is Che Guevera — a couple of figures responsible for the political exile of many hundreds of thousands of Cubans in South Florida and elsewhere since the late 1950s.

There is a name that doesn’t go well in the Venezuelan diaspora in South Florida.

Hugo Chavez, the recently reelected president of Venezuela.

This Spanish-language TV ad for the Romney campaign mentions or alludes to all of them, in connection with another figure who Mitt Romney is fighting in South Florida: President Barack Obama.

Who backs Obama? the Spanish-language ad asks.

Chavez is shown saying if he could vote in this election, he’d vote for Obama

Mariela Castro, a daughter of the Cuban dictator living in South Florida, is shown explaining her support for him.

It portrays a celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency using a picture of the late revolutionary, Guevera, in an email.

En espanol, this campaign is closing with some fire.

Winning 40 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Miami is a threshold line of victory for a Democrat — Bill Clinton crossed it in 1996, Obama crossed it in 2008. The Romney camp is working to hold that line with fighting words.

The Romney campaign would not comment on where the ad is running or the size of the buy. His campaign has bought $213,000 of Spanish language advertising time in Miami through the election, according to ad buying sources, on Univision, Telemundo, and America Teve.

with assistance from Emma Fidel and Lisa Lerer

Original post is Castros, Guevera, Chavez — Obama’s Crowd in Romney Ad by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ferdy Damman/AFP/Getty Images

Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, performs during a concert in Amsterdam.

Eddie Vedder, once lead singer of Pearl Jam, can still pack a house. Even with a ukulele.

At $20,000 per ticket, Vedder helped President Barack Obama find 85 supporters today for a Tampa fundraiser, where he broke out the Hawaiian stringed instrument for some songs.

“Yup, it’s made in Hawaii,” he said. “It has a little birth certificate.”

Obama dropped into the quiet Tampa fundraiser after getting grilled at a Univision town hall-styled forum in the Miami area.

“If Mitt Romney were to be elected, none of those 47 percent of the people will have a voice, because he has ascertained that they are victims,” Vedder said of Mitt Romney’s remark about people who pay no income taxes and are unreachable by his campaign.

Obama said: “At any given moment, all of us have challenges.”

Charlie Christ, the former Florida governor and former Republican who endorsed Obama at the Democratic National Convention, also was in attendance — a fact Obama acknowledged: “I am allowed to hug him if I want.”

Vedder played some of his own songs, as well as covers of others, including Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World:”

(“Got a man of the people,

says keep hope alive

Got fuel to burn,

got roads to drive.”)

Original post is Obama’s Pearl Jam: $20,000 Ticket by Political Capital.

Photograph by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Mitt Romney, on the air in the media hold room at the Univision studios, is interviewed by Univision News, moderated by Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, in Miami on September 19, 2012.

Mitt Romney softened his rhetoric on immigration today, telling a television audience of Hispanic voters that he would not forcibly deport millions of immigrants.

“We’re not going to round up people around the country and deport them,” he said, in a televised forum with the Spanish-language TV network Univision conducted in Miami. “We need to provide a long term solution.”

The comments marked a departure from the Republican presidential nominee’s tone during his party’s primary election campaign, when Romney differentiated himself from some of his rials by taking a hard line on immigration issues.

Romney has said that he opposes granting legal status to undocumented immigrants without first requiring that they leave the U.S., a policy he termed “self-deportation.” He’s also vowed to veto legislation — known as the Dream Act — that would grant young illegal immigrants who went to college or served in the military a pathway to citizenship.

In tonight’s forum, Romney said he would grant legal status to young immigrants who serve in the military or pursue advanced degrees, though he would not detail his immigration plans.

And he attacked President Barack Obama for failing to pursue comprehensive immigration legislation during his time in office.

“He never tried to fix the immigration system,” Romney said of Obama. “I will actually reform the immigration system and make it work for the people of America.’’

In June, the president signed an executive order stopping the deporting hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants brought to the country as children. Romney would not say whether he would overturn the measure.

Democrats seized on Romney’s lack of specificity to argue that Latinos can’t trust the Republican candidate.

“Mitt Romney is wrong on issues of importance to the Hispanic community,” Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said in a statement. “On critical issues, he continued to refuse to answer any of the tough questions or provide any specifics on what he’d do as president.”

A new poll by Fox News Latino today showed Obama leading Romney among Hispanic voters by a two-to-one margin. The survey was conducted Sept. 11-13 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.

Obama is scheduled to address the Univision forum tomorrow evening.

Original post is Romney Softens Immigration Stance by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Residents help clean up in front of a foreclosed home in Miami.

The “Misery Rate” — a Bloomberg index of government data combining consumer prices and the jobless rate — is over 10 percent  in President Barack Obama’s home town, and under 7 percent in Republican Mitt Romney’s home town.

The rate reported today is 10.16 percent in Chicago, with consumer prices up 1.06 percent from year to year and the unemployment rate at 9.1 percent.

In Boston, it’s 6.95 percent, with consumer prices up 0.85 percent year to year and the jobless rate at 6.1 percent.

The index is compiled by Bloomberg, using data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now, this isn’t likely to have much impact on an election in which both Chicago and Boston are true-blue cities in the Democratic Party’s column. But what about some other places?

Like Cleveland, Ohio — in the one state that Romney must win if he wants the White House.

The misery index is 8.68 percent — with consumer prices up 1.38 percent year to year and unemployment at 7.3 percent.

Or Miami, in the state that Obama won in 2008 and hopes to claim again in 2012.

Misery index: 10.51 percent, with consumer prices up 1.14 percent year to year and unemployment at 9.3 percent.

Or Detroit, heart of the auto industry that Obama boasts about saving and Romney wanted to follow a course of bankruptcy.

Misery index: 12.35 percent, with consumer prices up 0.45 percent year to year and unemployment at 11.9 percent.

The presidential election will play out on some important economic battlegrounds, some in better shape than others.

Original post is `Misery:’ Miami Worse than Cleveland — Bloomberg Index in Swing States by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

Mitt Romney, center, his son Craig, right, and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a campaign event El Palacio de los Jugos, in Miami on Aug. 13, 2012.

In a campaign, advance work is everything.

In South Florida, it’s not beyond reason that a random sampling of sponsors for a campaign stop might find a little of the old cocaine cowboy in someone’s closet.

That’s what happened to Republican Mitt Romney last night in Miami, stopping at a juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker.

Romney stopped at El Palacio de los Jugos — the Juice Palace —  owned by Reinaldo Bermudez, aka “El Guajiro,” whom court records remembers for pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1999 and serving three years in federal prison, as the Miami New Times first reported in an account picked up by the Associated Press.  Romney was joined by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the two handing out juices to the crowd.

Bermudez told the New Times that the Secret Service vetted everything about him when the Romney campaign asked to use his fresh fruit and vegetable stand and that they knew about his criminal record. “Here in Miami there are a lot people with money who have had problems with the law,” Bermudez told the New Times. “Thankfully, we all have the opportunity in this country to re-enter society when we’ve done something wrong.”

In media reports in November 1997, Bermudez was identified as one of 12 people accused in a Colombian drug smuggling operation, the AP noted. The arrests followed a seven-month investigation led by the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.  Agents seized about 2,850 pounds of cocaine at three South Florida ports over several months.

As a convicted felon, Bermudez isn’t eligible to vote in Florida unless the governor and state Cabinet restore his rights. (Florida’s attorney general, Pam Biondi, joined Romney at the juice stand — she’s among the Cabinet members who weigh restoration of voting rights.)

The Miami Herald noted that Romney was breaking a certain tradition in passing up the fabled Versailles restaurant in Miami’s Little Havan for El Palacio de los Jugos on Coral Way, “one of a growing number of popular open-air eateries known for their fresh fruit juices and hefty servings of Latin comfort food.”

At Romney’s stop, the press pool was initially ushered out of the site and into motorcade vans, though cameras still on the riser continued to film the proceedings from a distance. Romney was visibly sweating but smiling as his security detail ushered him behind the counter at the juice stand to pick up more juices in styrofoam cups. According to a Romney advance staffer, both the owner,  Bermudez, and the co-owner, Jorge a de la Llama, met Romney for the event.

The pool was ushered away after a few minutes of observing, told that the event was “closed.”

The Romney campaign was filming a campaign ad at the colorful juice restaurant.

That footage may stay in the can now.

Original post is Romney’s Campaign Stop at Ex-Cocaine Con’s Miami Juice Stand by Political Capital.