The Telegraph – The only reason for Republicans to worry is that voters appear to be growing angry at rising prices.
“The Magic City” is what Americans have called Miami since even before it was formally incorporated as a municipality in 1896. Arguably America’s most exciting and successful metropolis since the Covid pandemic, its mayor’s office has been a Republican stronghold for nearly three decades. It has bucked the trend of other major US cities, which have shifted reliably to the Left.
That Republican magic appeared to wear off on Tuesday, however, when Democrat Eileen Higgins, until recently an elected commissioner representing Miami-Dade County, which surrounds the city of Miami proper, won a crushing 18-point victory over Republican candidate Emilio González, a former city comptroller. Higgins is also the first non-Hispanic to win the mayoralty in decades in a city long dominated by Cuban-Americans.
Although Miami’s mayoralty is technically a non-partisan position, Democrats celebrated nationwide. Higgins’s victory followed several other off-year Democrat wins, including in New York’s mayoral race and the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. Democrats hope the trend could portend major gains for their party in the November 2026 mid-term elections, which will determine control of Congress and the fate of Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.
But on the ground in Florida, it is hard to see it that way. Electing a Democrat in Miami after almost 30 years of Republican incumbency is hardly an achievement. Despite Florida’s evolution into a deeply red state, many of its major cities remain loyally Democrat. Miami’s Cuban-inflected politics, which now also incorporates voting blocs drawn from the city’s growing anti-communist Venezuelan and Nicaraguan communities, may have long kept its mayoralty in Republican hands, but a majority of the city’s voters nevertheless favoured Kamala Harris in 2024 and Joe Biden in 2020. Given that incumbent parties in national office tend to lose in mid-term contests generally, a blue victory in a blue city is no tectonic change.
Miami’s outgoing mayor Francis X Suarez hails in any case from the dying liberal wing of the Republican Party. He refused to endorse Trump in 2020 and briefly ran against him for the Republican nomination in 2024. As he told me in a May 2024 meeting, he attributes his success to leaning into innovation, promoting law and order, and keeping taxes low.
On that score, Higgins is hardly a dyed-in-the wool Leftist, either. A former US diplomat, she later worked in the private sector as a marketing manager for brands such as Jose Cuervo, a leading producer of tequila. In her election campaign, she, unlike many Democrats, expressed strong support for the police, which under Suarez have reduced Miami’s crime rates to record lows.
Sharing her Republican predecessor’s pro-business stance, she has pledged to go even farther than he did to deregulate commerce and ease new business creation. In a bid for support from Miami’s powerful Cuban community, she also recently delivered county commission funds for a new museum celebrating the Cuban exile brigade that took part in the Bay of Pigs incident, a US-backed 1962 attempt to oust Fidel Castro. She and Suarez generally agree on a need to combat the purported effects of climate change and on expanding urban mass transit.
Even then, Higgins’s victory was not as resounding as it may seem. Her mandate this week was the result of a run-off election that had to be held after Miami’s general mayoral ballot on Nov 4 failed to produce a required majority winner. In that vote, she received only 36pc of the city vote among a field of 13 candidates, many of whom were disputatious Republicans who succumbed to infighting over who should succeed Suarez. That group included Suarez’s father Xavier, himself a former Miami mayor, among other Republicans who were more prominent than González, who was but a former appointed official.
Despite these peculiarities, going into 2026, Republicans should take note that Higgins hammered away at the national affordability crisis, which rides on a national 3pc inflation rate but is perhaps even more keenly felt in Florida. Property prices have surged in the last five years because of the state’s recent popularity and the costs for some other goods and services have also risen.
This is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the state’s success. But Higgins’s victory may rest on voter concerns about rising prices that could have major consequences elsewhere.