Democratic party operatives are rejoicing at Eileen Higgins election as mayor of Miami. Laura Kelley, chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic party, said Higgins’s victory fully reflected the shifting moods of voters. Caroline Vakil reports at The Hill:
Democrat Eileen Higgins has flipped the Miami mayor’s office, defeating Republican Emilio Gonzalez and marking the latest sign of her party’s momentum heading into next year’s midterms, according to Decision Desk HQ.
Higgins is the first Democrat to become mayor of Miami since 1997. She bested Gonzalez, a former Miami city manager who served on President Trump’s Homeland Security Department transition team, to succeed incumbent Mayor Francis Suarez (R). The race is technically nonpartisan.
The win is the latest boost for Democrats, who are coming out of better-than-expected elections in November and a strong showing in this month’s special House election in Tennessee. The party hopes an energized base and a focus on issues such as affordability will help flip the House and possibly even the Senate in next year’s midterms.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin lauded the win in a statement, describing it as “testament to what Democrats can accomplish when we organize and compete everywhere, including in Miami.”
“Tonight’s result is yet another warning sign to Republicans that voters are fed up with their out-of-touch agenda that is raising costs for working families across the country,” he added.
Not so fast says Democratic strategist Simon Bazelon. In an interview by Anne Kim in Washington Monthly:
The share of voters who say that Democrats are “out of touch” has gone from about 50 percent in 2013 to 70 percent in 2025. It’s going to be pretty hard to win any election when 70 percent of voters think that your party is out of touch.
and concludes with the following observation about off-year elections:
Broadly speaking, all the election results are roughly in line with a lot of the things we’re saying. Also, I think it’s really important not to overlearn lessons from off-year special elections.
Democrats’ problem is not figuring out how to win federal races in New Jersey and Virginia or New York City. It’s figuring out how to win presidential elections in Wisconsin and Michigan. It’s figuring out how to win Senate races in states like Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Texas—places that voted for Donald Trump by double digits in 2024.
But with that said, I do think that the Democrats who won mostly ran quite disciplined campaigns focused on affordability, which is voters’ top issue.
I found this graphic particularly interesting:
The chart highlights a persistent strategic bind: the Democrats’ most broadly appealing figures are often the least viable with the party’s own primary electorate.. I feel confident in predicting that neither Andy Beshear nor Josh Shapiro will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 and hope I don’t have to explain why that is.
The first proposed candidate who has a chance of becoming the nominee is the third most favorable, Amy Klobuchar, and the present apparent frontrunner, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, is dead last in general favorability. It is not at all clear that Amy Klobuchar could defeat J.D. Vance in 202 and Gavin Newsom’s favorability numbers suggest even longer odds.
Miami-Dade is a very Democratic metropolitan area. Clinton carried it in 2016, Biden carried it in 2020, and Miami proper was carried by Harris in 2024. The question Ms. Higgins’s victory raised is less the national one of whether Republicans have collapsed nationwide as the local one of why has Miami’s mayor been a Republican for the last 28 years? As I see it the Democrats have a different challenge than the “branding, messaging, and tactics” triad presented by Mr. Bazelon. I think their problem is substantive. Furthermore, to become the nominee a Democrat must prevail among primary voters who differ markedly in their views from most of the people in the country. In other words any candidate likely to win in the primaries will have an extremely difficult time in the general election. Democrats don’t have a messaging problem. They have a coalition problem—and the primary process worsens it.
The answer is yes, it is possible to win despite being thought of as “out of touch”, “radical”, “insane”, “senile”, “insurrectionist”, etc, etc.
If voters feel they need to throw the bums out, they will choose the alternative even if they have to hold their nose doing it.
For example, see Trump 2016, Biden 2020, Trump 2024.
Where voters views on the party out of power matter is if voters feel conflicted, somewhat dissipointed in incumbents but not mad or hateful towards them either.