After Donald Trump fared surprisingly well in Miami last fall, easily surpassing his vote totals from 2020, the president probably felt comfortable weighing in on the city’s closely watched mayoral race.
While this was technically a nonpartisan contest, Democrats backed Eileen Higgins, a former county commissioner, while Republicans supported Emilio González, a former city manager. Trump eagerly endorsed the latter, and the day before the election, the president wrote on his social media platform, “Miami’s Mayor Race is Tuesday. It is a big and important race!!! Vote for Republican Gonzalez. He is FANTASTIC! … MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
It didn’t work. The Miami Herald reported:
Democrat Eileen Higgins has defeated Trump-backed opponent Emilio González in Tuesday night’s runoff for Miami mayor, with the former Miami-Dade commissioner edging out the former city manager with nearly 60% of the vote, according to preliminary election night results.
A raucous crowd danced to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ as Higgins stood alongside family and supporters onstage at the Miami Woman’s Club, a symbolic location as Higgins becomes Miami’s first female mayor.
The race wasn’t especially close: Despite Trump’s intervention on González’s behalf, Higgins appears to have won by roughly 18 points.
This is the first time Miami voters have elected a Democratic mayor in nearly three decades.
About an hour’s drive to the north, Delray Beach’s Democratic vice mayor, Rob Long, also easily won a three-way state legislative special election on Tuesday.
And in case that weren’t quite enough to get GOP officials’ attention, on the same day, Democrat Eric Gisler flipped a state House seat in Georgia, scoring an unexpected upset in a district Trump won last year by 12 points.
The results come on the heels of last week’s congressional special election in Tennessee, where Democrats overperformed in a district Trump won by 22 points.
They also come a month after Democrats dominated in the 2025 elections, following a year in which Democrats have consistently overperformed in ways that should make Republicans quite nervous ahead of the 2026 midterm election cycle.
Around this time a year ago, after Trump won a second term, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans had entered an era of electoral dominance. Trump had successfully realigned the American electorate to put the GOP in a position to control the nation and its future. The same commentary held that the Democratic Party wasn’t just defeated, it was also small and divided, with a demoralized and disheartened base, filled with voters who were prepared to withdraw from civic life for a long while. In the weeks and months that followed, there was a near-obsessive focus on Democrats and their “brand.” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told NBC News in March that his party’s brand was “problematic.” Around the same time, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said the Democratic brand was “toxic.” Days earlier, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told Politico, “If we don’t get our s— together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority.” As it turns out, there’s been a lot less talk along those lines lately. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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