Democrat Eileen Higgins has been elected mayor of Miami, defeating a Trump-backed Republican rival and ending nearly three decades of Republican control at City Hall in a result watched far beyond Florida.
December 10, 2025 | Miami, Florida
Miami has elected a Democrat as mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years, after Eileen Higgins comfortably defeated Republican Emilio Gonzalez in a high-stakes runoff that doubled as a test of Donald Trump’s pull in Florida politics.
Higgins, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner, took around 59% of the vote in Tuesday’s runoff, according to unofficial results, leaving Gonzalez – a former city manager endorsed by Trump – more than 18 points behind. The win makes Higgins the city’s first woman mayor and the first Democrat to hold the office since the late 1990s.
The race was officially nonpartisan on paper, but in practice it became a bare-knuckle proxy battle between national Democrats and the former president’s wing of the Republican Party. Trump recorded robocalls and lent his name to Gonzalez’s campaign, while Democratic heavyweights, including national party leaders and prominent elected officials, rallied behind Higgins.
A historic first in a city that backed Trump
Higgins’s victory is striking not just because it ends nearly three decades of Republican control of City Hall, but because it comes in a city and county that have shifted to the right in recent years. Miami-Dade backed Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and Republicans have tightened their grip on statewide offices.
That backdrop is precisely why national outlets from the Washington Post to the Associated Press framed the runoff as a key barometer of voter sentiment ahead of the 2026 midterms. A clear Democratic win in such a setting is being read as a warning sign for Republicans who have treated South Florida as increasingly safe territory.
Higgins campaigned on local bread-and-butter issues – from spiralling rents to public corruption – but never hid her party label. In a city where more than half of residents are foreign-born, she repeatedly attacked Trump’s immigration crackdowns and pledged a more welcoming approach at the local level.
Housing, corruption and trust at the centre of the race
Miami’s housing crisis dominated the campaign. The city has seen some of the fastest rising rents in the United States, with long-time residents pushed to the margins by investors, remote workers and the growth of luxury developments along the bay.
Higgins promised to lean on developers for more affordable units, expand tenant protections where possible and push for stricter oversight of zoning decisions. She also made ethics a central theme, attacking a culture of cosy deals and backroom influence in city politics that has generated a string of controversies in recent years.
Gonzalez, by contrast, ran as a law-and-order conservative who would keep taxes low and maintain Miami’s pro-business reputation. With Trump’s endorsement and backing from Florida’s Republican establishment, his campaign bet that the city’s rightward shift would be enough to hold the mayor’s office.
Grassroots energy and national attention
The runoff followed a crowded first round in early November, where Higgins topped the field but fell short of a majority. She headed into the second round with momentum and an increasingly national operation behind her. Democratic groups poured in volunteers, funding and field organisers, seeing the contest as a rare chance to flip a big Sun Belt city.
Local reporting suggests that campaign volunteers made hundreds of thousands of phone calls and door-knocks across Miami’s neighbourhoods, from Little Havana to Brickell and the waterfront high-rises. That sustained ground game appears to have paid off, particularly in turnout among younger voters and residents in heavily immigrant districts.
Gonzalez conceded on election night and publicly congratulated Higgins. While he stressed that the race was about local priorities rather than national politics, Republicans will privately worry about what the scale of the defeat says about their standing in Miami’s diverse electorate.
What Higgins’ win means beyond Miami
Mayors do not set immigration or foreign policy, and a single local result cannot predict the outcome of the next presidential or congressional races. But Higgins’ win feeds into a broader pattern of Democratic gains in city and state elections this year, from Virginia to New Jersey and now South Florida.
For Democrats, the result is evidence that Trump-style politics are losing traction among some of the very voters Republicans have counted on – including segments of Miami’s Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan communities. For Republicans, it is a reminder that cultural and security messaging alone may not be enough when voters are struggling with rent, wages and public services.
Higgins will now inherit a city grappling with climate threats, rising seas, affordability pressures and questions about who Miami is really being built for. How she governs will shape whether this election is remembered as a one-off upset, or the moment Miami’s political map began to redraw itself.
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