Donald Trump is proving to be “absolute kryptonite” for Republicans hoping to run in major U.S. cities, according to CNN’s data guru.
Harry Enten, the network’s chief data analyst, noted that since Trump first entered office in 2017, the number of GOP mayors among the 50 most populous cities fell from 14 to just seven in 2025.
Enten highlighted the continued decline in Republican mayors after Eileen Higgins defeated Trump-backed Republican Emilio González to become the first Democrat to win a mayoral election in Miami in 28 years. The result was the latest in a growing list of crushing defeats for Trump-endorsed candidates in local elections this year, including the electoral wipeout in mayoral and gubernatorial races across New York, New Jersey, and Virginia on November 5.
“GOP mayors in the 50 largest cities in 2017 was about 14. Now, with Higgins coming in, it’s seven,” Enten said. “Donald Trump has been absolute kryptonite to Republicans who want to run major cities in the United States. There are very few. They’re an endangered, endangered species.”
The catastrophic run of election defeats for GOP candidates paints a grim future for the party ahead of the crucial 2026 elections, with Republicans already facing an uphill battle to hold on to their majorities in the House and possibly even the Senate.
Enten said the backlash to the president’s second term is evident in Higgins’ victory on Tuesday. A key factor, he explained, is the shift among Latino voters—a critical demographic in Miami, which has a large Latino and Hispanic population.
In February, a CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump’s approval rating among Latinos at –2 percentage points, which Enten described as “not too hot to trot, but not that bad either.”
Fast-forward several months—during which the Trump administration has further implemented its hardline immigration and mass deportation plans—and the president’s approval rating among Latinos has plummeted to –38.
“That is a shift of 36 points in the wrong direction, the completely wrong direction, for Donald Trump,” Enten said. “And what the race in Miami illustrates—I was looking locality by locality by locality—is these huge shifts in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods of Miami against the Republican nominee from the Donald Trump baseline.”
“What we see is Democrats outperforming that 2024 baseline,” Enten said. “How is this actually going to impact things? And what we see is exactly what we saw last night: the first Democratic mayor of the great city of Miami since the Birdcage era,” he added, referencing the 1996 film starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.
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