President Donald Trump’s election in November, when he became the first Republican to win Miami-Dade County since 1988, marked a dramatic shift in presidential politics in not only South Florida but nationally, according to an NBC News analysis released Sunday.
During the past two decades of presidential elections, from 2004 to 2024, the nation’s politics has moved along geographic, racial, educational and economic lines in a way that has turned historically Democratic counties to Republican.
It found that President Donald Trump “brought more white working-class voters into the GOP, causing spectacular changes in some localities” and that the counties that shifted the most toward Republicans during the Trump are “significantly more Hispanic than the national average.”
That was especially true in Miami-Dade, according to the NBC News analysis, which reported the heavily Hispanic county saw one of the largest shifts in margin toward Republicans between 2016 and 2024 out of more than 3,000 counties nationwide. The county ranked 15th, NBC News found.
This trend played out in dramatic fashion in Texas, where a staggering 29 counties — all of which are majority-Hispanic with some more than 90% Hispanic — show up in the list of 100 counties that saw the greatest gain in GOP presidential vote margin between 2016 and 2024, with 12 among the 20 that saw the biggest shifts, NBC News reported.
READ MORE: Miami-Dade becomes the latest Florida county to flip from blue to red in voter registration
NBC News reported that the voting and census data from Texas is “emblematic of Trump’s dramatic improvement among Hispanic voters in 2024 as well as his success in heavily Hispanic areas along the border in 2020.”
The report by NBC News confirms how the political winds in South Florida have shifted significantly during the past three presidential elections.
In 2016, Miami-Dade voters backed Democrat Hillary Clinton by 29 percentage points. Four year later, Democrat Joe Biden won by just 7 percentage points.
Last November, Trump trounced Democrat Kamala Harris by 11 points in Florida’s largest county, completing the electoral turnaround. Trump won Florida in 2024 — for the third presidential election in a row — by a whopping 13 percentage points, a landslide in a state that used to be highly competitive.
