Here’s How Trump Turned True-Blue Miami-Dade Blood Red on Election Day

Not only did Donald Trump win back the presidency in an unprecedented political comeback, but the former and future president also managed to win big in Miami-Dade County last night — earning the distinction of being the first Republican presidential candidate to win the once-Democratic stronghold since 1988.

Despite being impeached twice, convicted of 34 felony counts, and ousted from the White House by U.S. voters four years ago, Trump is now poised once again to take the reins of our deeply divided nation.

He was also decisively selected by the people of Florida, a result that surprised precisely no one.

But Florida Democrats had held out hope for Miami-Dade, which has historically swung blue, voting overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Joe Biden in 2020. Yet Trump flipped the county bright red on election night, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade since George H.W. Bush 36 years ago.

(Notably, the county also turned red in the 2022 midterm election that returned Republican Ron DeSantis to the governor's mansion in Tallahassee for a second term.)

How did Trump achieve this seemingly unlikely feat?

Clearly, the local Hispanic vote played a significant role. For example, while exit polls showed Trump upping his share of the nationwide Hispanic vote from 32 percent in 2020 to 45 percent in 2024, he won the local Hispanic strongholds of Hialeah and Doral on November 5 with 75 percent and 63 percent of the vote, respectively.

For additional insight, New Times asked several political experts across Florida to share their takes.

Kevin Wagner, a pollster and Florida Atlantic University (FAU) professor and associate dean, says part of Miami-Dade's shift to the right has been driven by the influx of residents who fled to Florida during the pandemic, many of whom supported DeSantis.

Wagner also points to a larger trend of movement away from the Democratic Party that Florida has seen in recent cycles.

"The predicate for this movement was seen in early statewide elections, so it's not entirely unexpected," Wagner says.

Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University (FIU), emphasizes that many people who left blue states like California and New York for Republican-leaning Florida — including Miami-Dade County — helped flip the county to red.

She also notes that the perception of Democrats as "socialists" has driven many local Hispanic voters, in particular, to support the Republican Party.

Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, agrees that one of the key reasons Miami-Dade flipped from voting for Clinton by double digits in 2016 to voting for Trump by double digits in 2024 is the Republican Party's sustained attack on Democrats as "socialists."

Jewett says that rhetoric resonated with a significant number of Hispanic voters in the county, not only Cubans but Venezuelans as well.

"The thought in their head was, 'I didn't get forced out of my old country and come all the way to America just to come back to socialism.' Right?" Jewett says, before adding, "Of course, from a political-science definition, Joe Biden is not a socialist, and nor is Kamala Harris. They're just not. But the labels stick."

Jewett and DePalo Gould both point to another key factor in Trump's success among Miami-Dade voters: the Republican Party's focus on registration drives.

Jewett says the Florida's GOP has consistently spent time and money on registration efforts in Miami-Dade's Hispanic community, noting that the last time Democrats held an organizational advantage in Florida was during the Obama administration, when the incumbent president's team, along with other nationally prominent Democrats, came to Florida.

Last but not least, Jewett explains, Miami-Dade's aggressive shift to the right was partly due to DeSantis' focus on cultivating Republican Hispanics in South Florida.

That, and "just Trump himself."

"I can't really 100 percent explain it," adds the professor. "It just seems like [Trump] has the ability to really talk to people in a direct way that they respond to, including a lot of people in the Hispanic community who, at first glance, would seem to never support him."

FIU professor and former Trump White House official Mario Loyola offered a more strident view of the turning of the tide.

In Florida, Loyola tells New Times, "Millions of Latinos realized that what the new Democrats are pushing is simply socialism under a different name. They’ve seen that before and they know where it leads."

Loyola says Trump won over voters who "remember who violated their bodily autonomy by forcing them to take medicines they didn’t want and didn’t need; who sought to censor and persecute them for expressing doubts about official policy or disagreeing with required new definitions of words like "boy" and "girl"; who traumatized their children with mask mandates for a year for no medically justifiable reason."

Adds Loyola, "Trump won voters who are worried about the threat to democracy because people know who the real threat to democracy is."