A Democratic upset in Miami’s mayoral runoff this week is a wakeup call for President Donald Trump heading into the midterms, as the surge in Hispanic support which fueled his 2024 comeback recedes. It’s an especially painful setback for Trump since he plans to build his presidential library in Miami, and Mayor-elect Eileen Higgins (D) has expressed concerns about transferring public land for the facility.
South Florida has been moving rightward for a decade. In 2024, Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee to carry Miami-Dade County in 36 years. He came within a point of winning the city of Miami, where the majority of the nearly half-a-million residents are not just Hispanic but also foreign born. Joe Biden had carried the city by 19 points four years earlier. On Tuesday, Higgins won the runoff to become mayor by the same margin.
It’s a huge deal in Miami because Cuban Republicans have dominated local politics for a generation. A Democrat hasn’t been elected mayor since 1997, and his victory was invalidated the next year because of ballot fraud. The GOP candidate had Trump’s strong backing and sterling credentials: Emilio T. González was the former city manager, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under George W. Bush and a retired Army colonel.
Insiders in both parties say Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign against immigrants who have no criminal record beyond being in the country illegally turned off Hispanic independents who backed him last year. Another frustration was Trump revoking temporary protected status for several nationalities with a presence in the city. Higgins, a former county commissioner, talked on the campaign trail about a medical clinic that needed to immediately fire 27 employees who lost work authorization after Trump stripped legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.
In a post-election news conference, Higgins said she plans to scrutinize the details of the city’s cooperation agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so her cops aren’t “checking residents’ papers.” Asked whether she’s scared about Trump retaliating against the city, she replied in Spanish: “I am not scared of him at all.”
That said, Higgins was not a single-issue candidate. She campaigned on building thousands more affordable housing units, while presenting herself as a moderate voice, promising to make it easier to do business in Miami. She promised to streamline the permitting process for homeowners and businesses, as well as hire more cops and firefighters.
It’s politically perilous to draw too many national lessons from a local race, but the Miami upset comes against the backdrop of Democrats overperforming across the map. House Democrats contend that the mayoral results suggest they have three pickup opportunities in South Florida next year, though the GOP incumbents will probably be shored up by mid-decade redistricting.
There is a valuable lesson in the results for Democrats, too. A big part of Higgins’s appeal is that she’s not divisive. She presented herself far more in the mold of New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger than New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. In the run-up to Election Day, Higgins stumped not with her party’s progressive darlings but former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. Higgins, who will become Miami’s first non-Hispanic mayor since the 1990s, has long introduced herself as “La Gringa.”
As she celebrated her victory Tuesday night, Trump kicked off an affordability tour with a rally in Pennsylvania, where he told voters not to worry about his tariffs raising their costs. He told supporters they “can give up pencils” because they “only need one or two.” That’s not the winning message he thinks it is, and Miami offers a fresh reminder that America’s political map is never settled.
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