What Miami electing a Democratic mayor for the first time in decades means for Trump

For the first time in nearly three decades, the mayor of the city of Miami will be a Democrat next year. Mayor-elect Eileen Higgins dispatched with her Republican opponent, Emilio Gonzalez, in Tuesday’s run-off election — and did so with ease. As of writing, her lead is nearly 20 percentage points, the kind of victory that suggests it really wasn’t much of a contest at all.

A year ago, such an outcome would have seemed at best unlikely. In 2024, Miami-Dade County backed Donald Trump’s reelection to the White House by a double-digit margin, a swing of 18 points from 2020 (when Joe Biden won by 7 points) and a massive swing since 2016 (when Hillary Clinton prevailed by nearly 30). Miami-Dade County was one of a number of areas with a large Hispanic population that shifted right to aid Trump’s return to the White House, a place that augured a new demographic political alignment in a state that mirrors America’s demographic future.

So much for that.

In 2024, Miami-Dade County backed Donald Trump’s reelection to the White House by a double-digit margin.

We should remember, of course, that Miami and Miami-Dade County are separate entities with separate but overlapping voter pools. More importantly, we should remember that a mayoral runoff election is very different from a presidential one, as turnout on Tuesday makes clear. But there is still a lesson to be derived from the outcome in Miami, and it isn’t onewhich the Trump White House will find encouraging.

Data released by the county earlier this month shows that there are more registered Republicans than Democrats — but more people registered as independents or third parties than either of the major ones. The largest racial or ethnic voter group in the county is Hispanics, who are nearly twice as likely to be registered Republicans as registered Democrats.

In Tuesday’s election, though, only a small portion of those voters cast a ballot (in part because Miami’s population is only about 15% of the county total). In this city with a string of Republican mayors in this county that flipped to back Trump a year ago, Democrats made up a significantly larger percentage of the electorate on Tuesday than they do party registration in the county.

That’s admittedly a comparison of apples to oranges, so let’s just look at the actual election outcomes. Democrats cast about 3,000 more votes than Republicans in the mayor’s race, as of writing. Higgins won with about 7,000 more votes. If every Democrat voted for Higgins and only those Democrats voted for her, she still had enough votes to beat Gonzalez.

Trump put at least some effort into goosing support for the Republican candidate. In a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning, the president encouraged people to go out and vote for the “FANTASTIC!” Gonzalez in this “big and important race.” But fewer than 13,000 Republicans turned out to do so.

Some have suggested that this outcome is a function of Hispanic support for Trump souring since the beginning of the year. In other words, if Miami is heavily Hispanic and Hispanics have turned against Trump, perhaps that explains voter apathy toward the Republican mayoral candidate.

But this explanation is probably too narrow. YouGov’s weekly approval polling since the beginning of the year shows that Trump’s approval is down with every demographic group, including five groups that viewed him net positively in January and now view him negatively. Hispanics, though, never viewed him net positively, and the decline in net approval seen among Hispanics is actually more modest than the declines seen among other groups. (It’s important to remember that smaller demographic groups, like Hispanics, will have larger margins of error and variability.)

Hispanic voters supported him more than they had other past Republican presidential candidates, but he was never particularly popular with them. That popularity has slipped — but it has slipped across the board. The drop in Hispanic net approval of Trump is no more an outlier than a Republican candidate losing by a wide margin in a red-leaning district. We’ve seen similar shifts in a lot of special elections this year.

As is always the case with municipal elections, a lot of the outcome is driven by local considerations, not national ones. That doesn’t mean there are no national lessons to be learned. For example, while lower than presidential election turnout, more votes were cast in Miami on Tuesday than in other recent mayoral contests in the city. Again, Trump himself pushed Republicans and his other supporters to go out and vote. Those who did turn out, though, heavily backed the Democrat.

Was this a function of hostility to Trump and his party? Of apathy from his party’s supporters? From a drop in enthusiasm or an increase in anger among Hispanics? Among everyone? We could probably find Miami residents who fit into each of those categories. We could also undoubtedly find a lot of people who simply preferred Higgins’ approach to pothole-filling.

Still, what we’ve learned from nearly every election during this off-year is consistent: Trump and his party have lost a lot of ground in a lot of places that once seemed reliable, and it isn’t solely because his voters are staying home. That this particular iteration of the story centers on a heavily Hispanic community probably just means that Hispanic voters are not an exception to national patterns, if they ever were.

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