Democrat Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami on Tuesday night in a stunning upset victory that reversed a run of recent Republican successes in Florida.
The election of Higgins, 61, a former county commissioner, also added to a string of Democratic wins across the country that have served to highlight the growing level of resistance to Donald Trump in his second presidential term.
Miami-Dade, a county with a significant immigrant population, voted for Trump in historic numbers in 2024, making him the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1988.
That majority melted away in Tuesday’s run-off as Higgins became the first Democrat in 30 years to become mayor of the city of Miami. After winning 36% of the vote in last month’s election after which the top two candidates moved forward, she bested Republican Emilio González, a former city manager.
Republicans’ determination to retain the office in what was, in theory at least, a nonpartisan race was reflected in the number of party heavyweights who lined up to back González. Trump posted two fulsome endorsements on Truth Social, both spelling González’s name incorrectly, and aligning him with the Trump agenda for “secure borders” and cracking down on “migrant crime”.
Higgins, too, focused much of her campaign on immigration. She presented the election to voters as a referendum on the president’s policies, which have included supporting Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis in the construction of the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail, and moves to end temporary protected status (TPS) and humanitarian parole programs for various immigrant groups including Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans.
Her messaging resonated in Miami, whose inhabitants are 57% foreign-born, according to the 2024 census.
“He [Trump] and I have very different points of view on how we should treat our residents, many of whom are immigrants,” Higgins told El País in an interview this week.
“That is the strength of this community. We are an immigrant-based place. That’s our uniqueness. That’s what makes us special.”
Higgins will be sworn in as the first Democratic mayor since 1997, when Xavier Suarez, the father of the outgoing incumbent, Francis Suarez, a Republican, was elected. She is also the first woman to lead the city, and first non-Hispanic candidate since the 1990s, Reuters reported.
Democrats nationally will see the result as a further strengthening of their position after massively successful off-year state and local elections last month. Before the Miami election, Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said he saw it as a bellwether.
“She’s certainly running a lot of high-energy efforts on the ground there, bringing in a big coalition, bringing in all types of folks to support her,” he told CBS News. “[It] will be a big, big win if we win that.”
Laura Kelley, chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic party, said Higgins’s victory solidified a backlash in Florida against Trump’s policies on immigration and the economy in particular.
“The messaging for us is very local because every single one of these issues is pertinent to the daily lives of people who live in south Florida,” she said.
“So we’re seeing families torn apart by ICE’s indiscriminate mass deportations. We are seeing prices continue to go up. We’re seeing the affordability crisis with housing and insurance premiums continue to go up. And so this is all extremely local, and it matters who the mayor is of this city.”
Kelley said the result was also validation of a stronger grass-roots effort among Democrats to help reverse what has been a strong swing to Republicans in terms of registered voters in Florida. She said activists had made more than 300,000 phone calls in recent weeks in support of Higgins.
“The truth is this was not unexpected,” she said. “The Democrats over-performed what was forecast in November, and we’ve continued to have a vote lead in this race even though we didn’t know what the non-party-affiliated voters were going to do.
“At the beginning of the year when people said the Democratic party was dead, instead of licking our wounds, we decided to rebuild and that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s just rebuilding and showing our community that we are not going to let them down.”
Higgins led the Republican by about 19 percentage points as of Tuesday evening, according to the Associated Press.
