Miami Falls

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

 

For the first time since the city was incorporated in 1896, Miami voters elected a woman to serve in the mayor’s office last night. Democrats may actually allow themselves to celebrate that development, too, because Miami’s new mayor is also one of their own.

 

Mayor-elect Eileen Higgins is the first Democrat to win a Miami mayoral election since 1998, defeating a Donald Trump-endorsed Republican candidate by almost 20 points. The results contribute to the body of evidence that suggests Democratic candidates’ prospects at the polls are boosted by a national environment that has become hostile to the GOP.

 

It’s possible to overread the results of any one election, of course. Miami is, after all, a special case — a city that reliably votes blue at the presidential level (even though Kamala Harris carried the town by just one point in 2024) but has backed Republicans farther down the ballot. Indeed, last year, Miami-Dade County voted Republican for the first time since 1988. Miami’s non-partisan mayor’s office has been occupied by Democrat-leaning “independents” over the course of those decades. Still, Higgins is the first mayor-elect in this century to win the office while running as a Democrat. And yet, the shift in how Miami voters cast their ballots should nevertheless send shivers down Republican spines.

 

As the enclave’s name suggests, Little Havana is overwhelmingly Hispanic. While the Cuban diaspora is dominant, it is home to an increasingly diverse group of often foreign-born residents from places like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia. It has been described as “a conservative stronghold” in recent years. Hundreds of its residents poured into the streets on Election Night last year to celebrate an end to their misery under Joe Biden.

 

“Most of my friends are also in their 20s, and the cost of living is something really important to us because the American Dream has escaped so many of us,” one Trump supporter told the Miami Hurricane. That pro-Trump enthusiasm, which contributed to Trump’s ten-point victory over Harris in Little Havana, disappeared last night.

 

Interestingly, though, the farther West you go, the redder the complexion of the Miami electorate.

 

These districts just south and east of the Miami International Airport are not vote-rich, but they are dominated by foreign-born residents and feature a significant population of Venezuelan ex-pats. These areas are not as Venezuelan as neighboring Doral (affectionately deemed “Doralazuela” by locals) or Fontainebleau, but their influence is substantial. There, the backlash to Trump’s immigration polices, to which some mainstream media outlets attributed the overall election result, was not apparent.

 

Higgins devoted much of her campaign to attacking the GOP’s immigration policies in the second Trump era: the ICE raids, the moves to end protected status and humanitarian parole for Haitian, Cuban, and Venezuelan migrants, and even Ron DeSantis’ “Alligator Alcatraz.” That messaging — as well as her general focus on cost-of-living issues — swayed voters closer to the coast, but it didn’t convince voters in more migrant-heavy neighborhoods.

 

Of course, even if the backlash against Trump’s immigration and anti-Venezuelan regime campaign policies is likely overstated, that’s cold comfort for the GOP. More probably, the results in Miami are reflective of voters’ overall impatience with the Trump administration’s failure to rein in consumer costs. To paraphrase the Bard, it profits Republicans nothing to give up their advantages on the economy even for the whole country, but for Flagami!

 

As one Republican Insurance Commissioner remarked while surveying the results in a special election for a House seat in the Peach State — a race Republicans also lost — “Our donors aren’t motivated, and our voters aren’t either.”

 

The results of 2025’s off-year and special elections are consistent. They forecast a Republican drubbing in 2026 if the party doesn’t revise its governing strategy.