WASHINGTON — Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, the chairman of the Republican Mayors Association, said the GOP losing the Miami mayorship for the first time in nearly 30 years should serve as a “wake-up call” to all Republicans — beyond the Latino-majority Florida city.
“The Democrats got very involved in the Miami mayor’s race very early and put a ton of money into it, particularly once the primary was determined. I think we got outspent 19 to 1,” Johnson told The Post in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
“Republican candidates run differently in this environment when Trump’s on the ballot versus when he’s not. And we’ve got to figure that out as Republicans,” he added, noting that it will be a key problem to solve for congressional candidates in the 2026 midterms too.
The city’s population is more than 70% Hispanic and the shift toward Democrats in Miami follows the November elections where GOP gains Trump made among New Jersey’s Latino and Hispanic voters were evaporated in this year’s gubernatorial race.
“Who are these people who are not coming out reliably for us when when the president himself isn’t on the ballot — even when he’s endorsing in a race — if he’s on the ballot himself, we see a different result?” he asked. “I think that’s on us, to figure out how to tap into whatever it is that’s getting them to vote.”
Eileen Higgins triumphed in Miami on Tuesday over GOP candidate Emilio Gonzalez, becoming the first female mayor-elect and Democrat to run the city since 1998.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats divulged spending figures, but Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said the national party was going “all in” on the contest in late November. The DNC previously noted it was shelling out up to $22,500 per month for races in GOP strongholds, per Politico.
“There is no sugarcoating these results. They’re really bad for the party,” ex-Republican National Committee official Michael DuHaime told The Wall Street Journal in the aftermath. “Republicans would be smart to heed the warning signs of this election.”
Vianca Rodriguez, a former deputy Hispanic communications director for the RNC and Trump’s campaign, in a post-mortem wrote that Gonzalez’s campaign also “leaned heavily on high-level endorsements and conservative radio exposure but lacked a full-spectrum ground-level communications operation.”
“Meanwhile, Democrats executed a coordinated digital, field and surrogate operation. Community events, voter-education forums and turnout pushes ran simultaneously with paid media,” she added. “Local and national Democratic leaders flooded social media with urgency and repetition.”
Some figures of national prominence — including Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — had also helped by attending fundraising events in the weeks before the runoff.
Johnson said Miami has always been “a heavy lift for Republicans” given that Democrats have a registration advantage in the city — even as the GOP has a larger share of registered voters than Dems in broader Miami-Dade County.
“I do think that this is a wake-up call to the to the party and to the RNC to the importance of leaning into these municipal races and getting involved as early and aggressively as the DNC does,” he added.
“Those large cities are where the majority of the votes are going to come from in presidential years that will determine the outcome of the whole state from an electoral college perspective.”
Johnson also noted that Democrats had won the Jacksonville, mayoral election in 2023 after the city, which is the largest municipality in Florida, had mostly been run by Republicans since the 1990s.
President Trump — who endorsed Gonzalez — became the first Republican candidate since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County in the 2024 election. Former Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly won in the city.
The race was also complicated by the candidates not having been designated by their party affiliation on the ballot, which known as a nonpartisan mayoral contest. That can sometimes provide helpful distance for those not seeking to defend every move by national party leaders or politicians in Washington, DC.
“I can tell you from experience, the Democrat Party doesn’t care if the race is called partisan or nonpartisan,” Johnson explained. “If they know the party affiliation of the person’s a Democrat, they view it as mission critical that the cities in America be run by Democrats and they act accordingly.”
The Dallas mayor, who left the Democratic Party after winning re-election in 2023 and registered as a Republican, runs a group that is planning on targeting other key municipal races — as part of a broader effort that will hopefully spur turnout during the midterm congressional elections as well.
“Everybody likes taxes lower and everybody kind of likes their streets safer. Those are naturally good Republican issues,” he explained. “And so, I think, you know, it’s interesting that when you have nonpartisan races, you get more Democrats running on Republican type issues, which has been my main argument for why we ought to be focusing more on, municipal races as Republicans.”
“If you’re running at the local level on lowering people’s taxes and lowering their crime and you know cutting bureaucratic red tape, improving the park system, things like that, and you just keep it there and no one brings up the party issue, you kind of get the best of both worlds if you’re a Republican,” he also said.
“You’re not having to answer any questions about ICE. You’re not having to answer any questions about any of the more, I guess, divisive issues that we read about all the time in Washington so it ends up being a little bit more, challenging, I think, it becomes, it’s not necessarily the case that everybody who is a Republican who’s running at the local level wants to lean into that.”
The Republican Mayors Association will be drafting their target cities for the upcoming year during a meeting Monday in New York City, with a focus on municipalities in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to chip away at the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall states.”
Tax filings show it has raised more than half-a-million dollars since its launch.
“The RNC needs to make a decision about how important it is for the nation’s cities, where we can, to retain and to keep a seat in the Republican camp, which the Miami seat was,” Johnson added. “This Miami race just proves we have to defend as well, and we need the RNC to join us in a more serious way.”
“They got involved late,” he concluded, “but it was too late, obviously.”
