Miami’s new Democratic mayor signals not just a backlash to Trump, but a seismic shift | Miami
Miami’s new mayor, Eileen Higgins, hailed it as “a new day” for the city after the Democrat ended three decades of Republican rule on Tuesday night in a stunning election triumph.
In reality, the result is more of a seismic shifting of sands given the magnitude of her victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate, Emilio González, in the most populous city in Miami-Dade county, which the president won in 2024 by 12%.
Higgins won the run-off with almost 60% of the vote, according to preliminary results reported Wednesday by the Miami Herald. More than just further evidence of a growing national backlash to Trump’s policies on the national stage, particularly immigration, her win has reset Miami’s political landscape in a manner not seen in some ways in 28 years, and in others not at all.
Higgins is the first woman to hold the office; the first Democrat to win it in 28 years; and the first non-Hispanic candidate since the 1990s. As if to bookend neatly the passing back of the Republican torch, the outgoing incumbent, Francis Suarez, is the son of the most recent Democratic Miami mayor, Xavier Suarez, who was elected in 1997.
“Miami chose a new direction,” Higgins told supporters during her victory party at the Miami Woman’s Club. “You chose competence over chaos, results over excuses and a city government that finally works for you.”
In later comments to the Associated Press, she expressed her belief that the vociferous backing of Trump and Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for González had backfired. While Miami has not seen the same level of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as other US cities, other elements of aggressive immigration policies pursued by Trump and DeSantis resonated in a city where almost 60% of the population is foreign born.
Higgins played heavily on that during her campaign, noting how the elimination of temporary protected status (TPS) and humanitarian parole programs were affecting Miami’s large pockets of Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans.
She also tied in DeSantis’s notorious immigration jail in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz” and its alleged human rights violations and harsh conditions for detainees awaiting deportation.
“We are facing rhetoric from elected officials that is so dehumanizing and cruel, especially against immigrant populations,” Higgins told the Associated Press following her victory speech. “The residents of Miami were ready to be done with that.”
The swing back towards Democrats was notable given that Hispanic voters contributed to the red wave that last year saw Trump become the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade county since 1988.
María Elvira Salazar, a Republican member of Congress who represents parts of Miami, gave perhaps the strongest warning of what was to happen on Tuesday in a video she posted to X last month.
“The Hispanic vote is not guaranteed,” Salazar said. “Hispanics married President Trump, but they are only dating the GOP.”
Salazar, whose seat is among those targeted by Democrats in next year’s midterms, has also warned that voters were likely to turn on Republicans supporting the immigration crackdown on migrants who had been in the US with no criminal records, and pursuing the elimination of healthcare premium subsidies.
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Laura Kelley, chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic party, said Higgins’s victory fully reflected the shifting moods of voters, and said Trump and DeSantis’s heavyweight support for González had turned an ostensibly non-partisan race into a full-on referendum of Republican politics at state and national level.
She said that would continue as DeSantis pushes on with redistricting plans to benefit his party next year.
“The people are going to see this as what it is, a blatant power grab, but what I think they’re going to find is that this is a huge mistake, especially here in South Florida,” she said. “You can see that people are shifting, that Trump and DeSantis are becoming increasingly unpopular.
“And that is going to continue, unfortunately, as our communities continue to suffer under these policies, where they’re seeing their family members being shipped away to state-run detention facilities, where the state is enforcing federal immigration law and draconian indiscriminate ICE raids and detentions that affect every single one of us in this community.”
A more simple assessment of Higgins’s win, and what it says about the region a year ahead of the midterms, came from David Jolly, a former Republican congressman running as a Democrat to succeed DeSantis as governor when he is termed out of office in January 2027.
“Change is here. It’s sweeping the nation, and it’s sweeping Florida,” he told the Associated Press.
