By Jose E. Navarro | The Navarro Report
Nine months into her term, Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins remains a genuine anomaly in South Florida politics: a Democrat governing a city whose Cuban, Nicaraguan and, increasingly, Venezuelan and Colombian exile communities have spent decades voting Republican as a rejection of the socialist and authoritarian governments many of them fled. Her landslide win in December, 59 percent to 41 percent over Trump-endorsed Emilio González, made her the first Democrat to hold the office in nearly thirty years. It also made her something of a live experiment in whether a progressive, immigrant-forward agenda can actually govern, rather than just win an election, in a city this conservative on the specific question of exile politics.
The nickname that follows Higgins everywhere, La Gringa, tells you most of what you need to know about her approach. Fluent in Spanish and a seven-year county commissioner representing Little Havana, the historic heart of Miami’s Cuban conservative community, before running for mayor, she has never pretended to be something she is not. Born in Ohio and raised in Albuquerque, she leaned into the nickname rather than fighting it. That willingness to be plainly herself while still showing up, in Spanish, in the neighborhoods that have long distrusted Democrats, is central to how she built a coalition wide enough to win a city that is roughly 70 percent Hispanic or Latino and had voted for Trump-aligned candidates for most of the last three decades.
What separates Higgins from a typical Democrat elsewhere is that her core message was not really about the economy or partisan identity. It was a direct, values-based break with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, delivered to a Hispanic electorate Republicans had assumed was durably theirs on exactly that issue. She called the toughened raids and detention practices dehumanizing and, invoking her Catholic upbringing, sinful. She specifically criticized conditions at the Krome detention center and opposed Miami’s participation in the federal 287(g) program, which had allowed local police to act as an arm of federal immigration enforcement. That position is not symbolic. As mayor, she has moved to pull city police out of that enforcement role, arguing there is no reason Miami’s own officers should be doing the work of federal immigration agents.
The bet embedded in that agenda is that Miami’s Hispanic communities, historically anti-communist and pro-enforcement in the abstract, are not monolithic when immigration policy starts touching their own families, neighbors and customers. Local reporting on her win found exactly that kind of erosion: a Cuban American restaurant owner in downtown Miami who backed Higgins said he had watched customers disappear as raids intensified, framing his vote less as an ideological shift than a response to what enforcement was doing to daily business. Academic observers offered a related but distinct explanation, arguing that rising prices and tariffs, not immigration alone, had become the more salient complaint, with voters increasingly associating economic strain with the current administration rather than the prior one.
Both explanations point to the same structural reality Higgins now has to manage: she did not flip Little Havana and similar precincts by converting conservative exile voters into progressives. She won by finding the specific issues, enforcement tactics that reach into daily life and economic pressure that predates any partisan loyalty, where her position and the community’s lived experience overlapped, while leaving the harder ideological terrain, views on socialism, Cuba policy, and broader distrust of the political left, largely untouched. That is a narrower coalition than it looks from the outside, and it is one she has to actively maintain rather than assume.
Governing on that basis carries real constraints. Miami’s mayoralty is mostly ceremonial with limited formal power; budget authority rests with the city commission, not the mayor, which means Higgins’s agenda depends on persuasion as much as executive authority. She inherited a city facing a shrinking budget, squeezed by state-level policy and federal grant cuts, alongside a housing affordability crisis she has proposed addressing through a city-run housing trust fund and faster permitting. None of that is where her Hispanic conservative base and her progressive base necessarily diverge, which is likely deliberate: affordability and permitting reform are areas where a Cuban-exile small business owner and a Democratic activist can plausibly want the same outcome.
Immigration remains the more combustible terrain, and it is where the coalition’s durability will actually be tested. Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, whose district includes the city, has argued publicly that the Hispanic vote is not settled, that voters are dating the GOP rather than married to it, and that continued enforcement without accommodation for long-settled residents without criminal records risks pushing them further away. That argument, coming from a Republican, effectively acknowledges that Higgins’s opening exists and could widen if federal enforcement continues to escalate. Whether it does largely depends on decisions made in Washington, not Miami City Hall, which leaves Higgins managing a coalition built substantially on national political weather she does not control.
What Higgins’s first nine months suggest is not that Miami’s Hispanic conservatism has been overturned, but that it is more conditional than either party’s conventional wisdom assumed. She won by being specific rather than broadly progressive, and she appears to be governing the same way, focused on enforcement tactics and cost-of-living pressure rather than a wholesale ideological pitch. Whether that model survives the 2026 midterms, when national Republicans will have every incentive to reassert Miami-Dade as a Trump stronghold, is the real test still ahead.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance under the direction, editing, and final approval of Jose E. Navarro.