The Miami mayor’s race hardly made a blip on the national radar in years past. It is officially nonpartisan. The city has a relatively small population of about 500,000 people, and the mayor’s powers are limited.
This year is different.
Ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election, President Donald Trump endorsed Emilio T. González, a Republican. The Democratic National Committee stepped in to help Eileen Higgins, a Democrat who easily came in first in a crowded field last month but did not get enough votes to win outright.
On Friday, the first day of early voting, Higgins’s campaign published an endorsement video from Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, and announced that Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona would be joining her at polling sites over the weekend. Republicans held a “Keep Miami Red” rally for González at Versailles, the iconic Cuban restaurant, featuring Sen. Rick Scott of Florida.
Why, a reporter asked Scott, had so much partisanship seeped into the campaign?
“I mean, look at the country right now,” said Scott, who suggested that there were few, if any, truly nonpartisan races left.
Democrats see the runoff as a way to show that their voters are energized even in Miami-Dade County, where Republicans won recent elections for governor and president and Trump plans to build his future presidential library. Republicans fear adding to their slew of losses and closer-than-expected wins around the country before the 2026 midterms.
Miami has not elected a Democratic mayor in more than 25 years. But Higgins won 36% of the vote on Nov. 4, nearly doubling González’s 19%. Another Democrat, Ken Russell, came in a close third place in the 13-candidate field, further bolstering Democrats’ hopes. Russell has endorsed Higgins.
Both runoff candidates say they would not govern in a partisan way, and neither campaign sees the race as a referendum on Trump. But many residents have told Higgins that they are scared, she said in an interview Friday, either about federal immigration enforcement hurting their families or tariffs hurting their small businesses.
“There’s a level of fear, and I have never experienced that before,” she said.
Both Higgins, 61, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner, and González, 68, a former Miami city manager, would represent a significant change at City Hall, which has been dominated by political dynasties and corruption scandals.
The two candidates have run in part on good-government platforms, with Higgins focused on street flooding and the lack of affordable housing and González honing in on overdevelopment and property taxes. Neither has positioned their candidacy at their party’s extreme, though Republicans have painted Higgins as a progressive and Democrats have characterized González as “MAGA.”
The outgoing mayor, Francis X. Suarez, who briefly ran for president in 2024, is term-limited. Suarez and three of the five city commissioners tried to postpone the mayoral election to November 2026, arguing that the move would save money and improve turnout. It would also have given Suarez and some other local elected officials an extra year in office.
González has noted that he was the only mayoral candidate who sued to stop the postponement and won, earning good will from voters.
But he has been outspent by Higgins, who has campaigned with the do-no-harm discipline of a front-runner. González, who directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the immigration system, under President George W. Bush, has embraced the role of scrappy underdog.
“Every day, I wake up thinking I’m 20 points behind,” González said in an interview in his Little Havana campaign office Friday.
Political strategists from both parties caution about reading too much into Tuesday’s results. A Higgins win would be an unquestionable credit to Democrats, but not necessarily an indication that any local congressional districts are primed to flip to Democrats next year.
Case in point: When Higgins won her first County Commission race in the summer of 2018, running as “La Gringa” in a district that included the heavily Hispanic Little Havana neighborhood, Republicans and Democrats thought that South Florida politics were fundamentally realigning in Democrats’ favor. Instead, South Florida and the state as a whole turned increasingly Republican between 2018 and 2024.
While there are slightly more registered Democrats than Republicans in the city of Miami, Republicans have often succeeded in getting more of their voters to the polls, especially in off-year elections. Still, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in last month’s election.
The city voted 50% for former Vice President Kamala Harris and 49% for Trump in last year’s presidential election, according to The Miami Herald — a tiny margin in a city that Democrats had previously won easily. Trump won Miami-Dade County, population 2.7 million, by 11 percentage points — the first Republican presidential candidate to win the county since 1988. Among other factors, Hispanics had shifted right.
Should she win, Higgins would become the city’s first female mayor, and its first non-Hispanic mayor since the 1990s. She would follow in the footsteps of Daniella Levine Cava, a fellow Democrat and non-Hispanic who became Miami-Dade County’s first female mayor in 2020, promising competence and no drama. Levine Cava was reelected last year.
On Friday, David Jolly, a Democrat running for governor of Florida next year, campaigned with Higgins and told a handful of voters that she would be “a mayor for all.”
“That’s the basics,” he told them.
Higgins chimed in, adding one more guiding principle for public servants that has not always been followed in city politics.
“Don’t steal!” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
