Democrats can no longer take Florida’s most populous county for granted as a firewall in presidential elections.
Hialeah, Fla. — Sipping on café con leche in one of his favorite Cuban coffee shops earlier this month, Hialeah mayor Esteban Bovo could barely contain his excitement that former president Donald Trump chose his Hispanic-dominated enclave of Miami-Dade County to counter-program the third Republican presidential debate.
“We had some people sleep there last night,” Bovo told National Review the morning of November 8, the same day five lower-polling rivals took the stage in Miami to debate one another as the former president rallied a few miles away in Hialeah.
It’s here in traditional blue Miami-Dade — Florida’s most populous county — where the political tides are turning toward Republicans for the first time in two decades. The GOP’s electoral gains and continued grassroots presence here in the fundraising, candidate-recruitment, and voter-registration departments suggest Democrats can no longer take this county for granted in 2024 and beyond.
“The Republican Party in the state of Florida, I think, has been doing a very aggressive and concerted effort to get it to the grassroots level and not concede anything,” Bovo tells National Review.
Florida Republicans have dominated statewide elections in recent decades, holding unified control of the state legislature and the governorship since the nineties, even as presidential races here have remained competitive. But Miami-Dade was always considered a firewall for Democrats, voting blue in every presidential election since 1992 (and propelling Barack Obama to victory in Florida two cycles in a row). Recent election cycles suggest the pendulum is now swinging toward Republicans. After Hillary Clinton romped to victory in Miami-Dade by 29 points in 2016, Joe Biden carried the county by a mere seven points in 2020 — a double-digit swing toward Trump in just four years.
Then came the 2022 midterms, when Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by 19 points and carried the county by eleven — Republicans’ first gubernatorial victory in Miami-Dade since Jeb Bush in 2002.
These electoral gains are stunning considering Democrats still outnumber Republicans in Miami-Dade, though voter-registration data suggest their numbers are shrinking here as they are on the statewide level. Last month, the county reported 523,902 Democrats, 433,651 Republicans, and 468,064 unaffiliated voters. Those are much closer voter-registration margins than even five years ago, when the county reported 601,261 registered Democrats, 377,550 Republicans, and 446,789 unaffiliated voters.
“When I was mayor here, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 300,000,” Representative Carlos Giménez (R., Fla.) told National Review in Miami earlier this month in the post-debate spin room. Now that number is closer to 90,000. “The independents have swung to the right. They’re still independent, but they’ve swung to the right.”
Much of this trend toward Republicans boils down to an out-of-touch Democratic Party that prioritizes identity politics over kitchen-table issues like inflation and parental involvement in schools, says Miami-Dade Republican Party chairman and state representative Alex Rizo.
“One of the things that Democrats have totally not understood to this day is that socially, Hispanics tend to be much more conservative than your typical voting bloc,” says Rizo, who rigorously monitors his county’s monthly voter-registration reports. “Hispanics are, by and large, Catholic, or come from Catholic countries.”
South Florida Republicans have also become particularly adept at labeling Democrats “socialists”— a term that resonates deeply with many Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan immigrants whose families have flocked to Florida in recent generations to escape authoritarianism. It’s no wonder then that DeSantis signed legislation last year declaring November 7 “Victims of Communism Day” in Florida.
Democrats have struggled to respond to this messaging campaign, to put it mildly.
“They have been fed so much that Democrats are socialists, that they’ll just vote for the other party without really understanding what the other party stands for. It’s a very frustrating position to be in,” says Maria-Elena Lopez, who serves as first vice chair of Miami-Dade’s Democratic Party and attributes much of this trend toward Republicans to in-state migration.
But even she acknowledges that Democrats have dropped the ball in the grassroots-organizing department. “I don’t know if I’m optimistic” about the 2024 election cycle, Lopez admits. “The Republicans have been on the ground in our community, working in community centers, which the Democrats have not.”
Two years ago, the Republican National Committee launched its first Hispanic Outreach Community Center in Miami-Dade to help Hispanic residents prepare for the civics portion of the citizenship test, a sign that national Republicans now see South Floridians as a crucial voting bloc moving forward.
“It took ten years for the Republicans to get where they are in Miami-Dade,” Lopez says, lamenting her own party’s lack of outside resources and reliance on volunteers.“So now we need ten years to regain that position that we had before.”