Miami has shattered a three-decade Republican grip on City Hall, electing Democrat Eileen Higgins as mayor in a result Democrats are hoping is a surge leading into the 2026 midterm elections
Higgins, 61, a former Miami Dade County commissioner, defeated Republican Emilio Gonzalez in Tuesday’s runoff, winning around 59 to 41 percent of the vote, according to preliminary counts from the county elections office. The victory makes her Miami’s first Democratic mayor since the late 1990s and the first woman ever to hold the job in the city’s history.
Gonzalez, a Cuban American former city manager and ex director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, did not come into the race empty handed, he had the backing of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and President Donald Trump, who publicly endorsed him as the candidate who would keep Miami in Republican hands.
The runoff came after a crowded first round in November where Higgins topped the field with roughly 35 to 36 percent of the vote, while Gonzalez finished a distant second. Her margin only grew once the race narrowed to a head to head contest, with Higgins carrying all five commission districts in the city, according to local reports.
With her runoff victory tonight, Eileen Higgins will be Miami’s next mayor—the first woman in the city’s history and the first Democrat in nearly 30 years elected to the office.
Congrats, Mayor-elect! pic.twitter.com/lSyZ087Xvc
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) December 10, 2025
Higgins described the election as a choice between what she described as “chaos and corruption” at City Hall and a more service focused city government that would deal with basics like housing costs, transit, and public safety. On the trail, she leaned directly into Miami’s identity as an immigrant heavy city, criticizing Trump era style ICE operations and promising to stand up for the city’s diverse communities, which make up well over half of the population.
Her campaign hammered away at soaring rents and property prices, tying those problems to a City Hall that she said had been too cozy with developers and inattentive to working-class neighborhoods. Higgins pointed to her record on the county commission, where she pushed affordable housing and transit initiatives, as proof she could deliver concrete changes rather than headlines.
Gonzalez tried to offer a different vision, lining up with DeSantis on a proposal to eliminate property taxes on primary residences and casting himself as the law and order candidate in a city he said needed discipline, not what he painted as liberal experiments. In the end, his résumé and high-profile endorsements did not overcome voter frustration with the status quo or the power of Higgins’s message about affordability and services.
The mayor’s office is technically nonpartisan, but both parties poured energy into the contest, treating it as a test of political winds in a state that has leaned Republican in recent cycles. Democrats see Higgins’s win, along with recent successes in places like Virginia and New Jersey, as evidence that anger over costs and Trump’s second term agenda may be shifting Hispanic-heavy urban areas back in their direction.
For Republicans, Miami had been a showcase for the party’s strength with Cuban and other Latino voters, particularly during Trump’s rise. Higgins’s win ends nearly 30 years of GOP control in the city and puts a Democrat in charge of a high profile urban government just as both parties begin to frame their campaigns for the 2026 midterms.
