MIAMI _ Buoyed by name recognition and fueled by rage at President Donald Trump, Donna Shalala won a hotly contested race in a Miami congressional district Tuesday, flipping a Republican-held seat to boost Democrats' chances of taking the U.S. House.
Shalala defeated Maria Elvira Salazar, a veteran Spanish-language TV news anchor with no political experience. At 77, Shalala will become the second-oldest House freshman in U.S. history, and perhaps one of the best known. She was the longest-serving Health and Human Services secretary in U.S. history in the Bill Clinton administration.
"This campaign was never just about me it was about the community," Shalala said to supporters Tuesday night at the Coral Gables Woman's Club. "Tonight I want you to hear a message of unity.
"I want to send a message to Washington tonight that we want our country back, we want our community back and we want our state back. We want it back for kids who are scared to go to school; we want it back for the LGBTQ community. We want it back for airport workers, for Haitians and the Hondurans and the Nicaraguans and the Colombians.
"And Mr. President, ready or not here we come," she said.
Voters said Tuesday that they rewarded Shalala for her experience.
"Shalala has the real experience and the know-how," said Mercy Paloma, a real estate broker who drove voters to the polls all day. She dismissed Salazar as "a TV personality."
"She knows how to kayak, but going to Washington against the lions? You gotta have the chops," Paloma said.
The seat was one Democrats were counting on to take control of the House and Shalala clearly benefited from what observers say is an increasingly Democratic district. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the district in 2016 by nearly 20 points _ the widest margin in a district held by a Republican.
Like other Florida Democrats, Shalala also likely got a boost from the top of the ticket with Tallahassee Mayor and candidate for governor Andrew Gillum drawing nationwide attention and considerable enthusiasm, including a visit last week from former President Barack Obama.
Vienna Morgan, 19, a finance major at the University Miami, said she voted for Gillum for governor, swayed by Obama _ and also cast her ballot for Shalala.
"Donna was the only candidate I knew, and she was our president here at the University of Miami," Morgan said. "All of the professors and students are encouraging people to vote for her. So I did."
Shalala relied heavily on her ties to the university, where she was president from 2001 until 2015, boosting the school's national profile. She cited her career working with younger people to deflect concerns about her age.
And a string of controversies at the school that Republicans sought to highlight in a barrage of ads in the closing weeks did not seem to hurt her.
Jeff Kaplan, a 51-year-old lawyer, said he wasn't particularly enthusiastic about his vote for Shalala, but believed she was a good university president and her skills would translate to Congress.
"A big research university like that, it's a microcosm of a political system," Kaplan said. "She was able to navigate those political waters."
Miles Wohl, an 18-year-old New Yorker who attends Miami and was voting in his first election, split his ticket, voting for Shalala and Ron DeSantis, the Republican candidate for governor.
"Despite my Republican pride, I believe that Donna Shalala would be great for the U, so I voted for her for Congress," he said.
Shalala said she believed that her emphasis on health care struck a chord with voters.
"The threats to health care are real," she said, noting that 100,000 people in the district are enrolled for health care under the Affordable Care Act. "What's on the ballot is not just Donald Trump, but real things that affect people on an everyday basis."
Shalala, who nearly cleared the field when she decided to run and emerged victorious out of a crowded and contentious Democratic primary, campaigned as the only candidate who could arrive in Washington and not need any training.
"The important thing to me is that I deliver from Day One for the people of Miami-Dade," she said. "That's what's important."
Salazar, 56, emerged from a pack of nine contenders jostling to fill the seat being vacated by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the moderate Republican who held the seat.
A long-time Spanish-language TV personality and journalist, Salazar easily won the Republican primary over veteran politicians. She said her television celebrity _ she spent three decades at Telemundo _ helped her turn "viewers into voters."
She had the support of Ros-Lehtinen, who said Salazar would make "a fearsome leader," and Miami Republicans Rep. Carlos Curbelo and Sen. Marco Rubio.
To appeal to the Democratic- leaning district, Salazar sought to position herself as a moderate Republican with no ties to Washington, in the mold of her mentor and predecessor. But her stances on specific issues were often vague or contradictory. Though she voted for Trump, she was critical of his zero-tolerance immigration policy. But she supported his plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
And though she took to Twitter to criticize Trump's to eliminate birthright citizenship with an executive order, she backpedaled her criticism a day later, saying that the first clause of the 14th Amendment "needs to be reviewed."
But Democrats early on believed they had the advantage in the district.
They were enthusiastic about Shalala's candidacy, given her name recognition, ties to the Clintons and long experience with health care.
Shalala said voters never had to figure out where she stood. Once considered one of the more liberal members of the 1990s-era Clinton administration, Shalala faced criticism from the left in the Democratic primary from opponents who feared she was too moderate and too establishment to fire up Democrats that have been trending further left.
But Shalala campaigned largely on Democratic standards, embracing more gun control and increased funding for transportation projects and climate change. She also embraced her fellow female candidates in congressional races, calling it the "year of the woman," with 197 women candidates across the country running for the U.S. House and Senate. Though she once questioned whether a "single-payer" health care system favored by progressives could be implemented, she backed a Bernie Sanders-style "Medicare Option for All" with the condition that employer-provided coverage would be preserved.
"I have not widdle-waddled on the issues the way my opponent has," she said Tuesday. "You know where I stand on health care, you know where I stand on gun control You know where I stand on the environment."
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(Alex Harris, A.J. Guardino, and Rebecca Rae Ripley contributed to this report.)
