On December 9, Democrat Eileen Higgins prevailed over Republican Emilio González in a landslide 19-point win in the run-off for mayor of Miami. Higgins will be the first Democrat and non-Cuban to govern the city in more than two decades. (Elections in Miami are technically nonpartisan, but candidates are usually less than shy about their political loyalties.) Locally, it was a wake-up call for Miami’s Cuban-American establishment, but the sheer size of Higgins’s victory in a city Donald Trump lost by just 0.7 percent last year is also the latest evidence that Republicans’ gains among Latinos are evaporating.
“Republicans’ gains among Latinos are evaporating.”
On one level, the election revealed the depth of the backlash against outgoing Mayor Francis Suarez and his cronies on the city commission. Suarez, a darling of developers and tech billionaires, is the son of former mayor Xavier Suarez, who made a failed bid to return to office this year (with his son’s endorsement). The younger Suarez has spent much of his term lobbying on behalf of Saudi Arabia, whose Public Investment Firm is a client of his law firm. He has also come under investigation by the FBI, SEC, and Florida Ethics Commission for accepting alleged cash bribes and expensive gifts from city contractors.
By all accounts, however, the real power behind the Miami throne is city commissioner and former mayor Joe Carollo, a Cuban-American mob boss in the vein of Al Pacino’s Scarface and a fixture of Miami politics for almost 40 years. In 2021, Suarez appointed the out-of-state but Cuban-American Art Acevedo as Miami Police Chief in an effort to rein in abuse within the department. But less than six months later, Acevedo was suspended after accusing city commissioners including Carollo as well as City Manager Arthur Noriega of using the police department to shake down perceived political enemies. These allegations had merit. In 2023, Carollo was ordered to pay almost $64 million in damages to club owners Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla after they accused him of using law enforcement to target their businesses. Seeing the writing on the wall, the city commission attempted to delay the 2025 elections, but González, the run-off runner up and former city manager, sued the city in order to ensure they went ahead, endearing himself to voters fed up with the clique running the city.
But González’s stand against Miami’s establishment was insufficient to counteract his association with the unpopular Republican president who endorsed him. In 2024, Trump won a historic share of Hispanics, including 70 percent of Cuban-Americans. A year later, his approval rating with that group, which arguably handed him the presidency, has since fallen to just 27 percent, including an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Speaking to voters last year, I found most “Latinos por Trump” hoped he could turn the economy around, while also resenting that millions of illegal immigrants were “jumping the line.” But economic conditions haven’t improved for average Americans since Trump returned to office, and the pendulum on immigration has swung far beyond what most Latinos consider reasonable.
Since January, authorities have not only aggressively pursued deportation of illegal immigrants but subjected permanent residents and even US citizens to prolonged detentions and physical abuse. Much of this is novel to Cuban-Americans, who long enjoyed a privileged immigration status; in their view, Cubans are automatically eligible for asylum on account of the island’s condition as a communist country. Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, virtually any national from the island is eligible for residency after one year of living in the United States, including those that entered illegally. Consequently, the administration has been working overtime to deport Cubans within this limited window, prompting outrage in Miami. One egregious deportation, a Trump-supporting Cuban national began a recent hunger strike after he was sent to a maximum-security prison in Eswatini, elicited a frenzy among Cuban-Americans.
The White House’s ongoing regime change efforts in Venezuela can be read in part as an attempt to retain the loyalty of these disaffected supporters. It’s likely to work, to an extent: Republicans should be able to keep a critical mass of Florida Latinos and especially Cuban-Americans in the fold in the 2026 midterms. But Higgins’s commanding victory suggests that many of them will be less inclined to support Republicans on domestic affairs and others will stay home even if they remain firmly behind the White House’s foreign policy.
Beyond South Florida, Republicans risk serious losses with Latinos in the years to come. If the GOP wishes to avoid that fate, it would do well to recognize that the vast majority of them—like most Americans—favor neither mass asylum fraud and anarchy at the border nor arbitrary, gratuitously cruel treatment of migrants. No less important, González’s defeat offers an early hint that the cost of living crisis that led many Latinos to defect to the GOP is now turning them against Trump and his party. In Miami, that crisis is especially acute: The median price for condos and single-family homes have skyrocketed by 80 percent since the pandemic making it, by some metrics, the least affordable metro area for homebuyers. What happened in Miami in 2025 may happen nationwide in 2026 and 2028.