How Miami stopped being the Democratic bastion of Florida and became the epicenter of the conservative wave of Latinos

“Thanks to Miami Dade County.”

That was one of the first sentences of the victory speech of Rum De Santis to celebrate his re-election as governor of the state of Florida on Tuesday night. It was not for less.

LOOK: Ron DeSantis is re-elected Governor of Florida, a state that is consolidating as a bastion of the Republican Party

In a situation that has not happened since 2002, the main city of Florida voted massively for the Republicans in the elections on Tuesday. Miami became the main city with a Latino majority in the United States where Republicans rule.

Nearly 70% of Miami Dade County’s population is of Latino descent, and among that group, nearly half are Cuban-American.

And the city is today the clearest sign of an electoral earthquake that is transforming US politics: the realignment to the right of an important part of the country’s Latino electorate.

A turn (to the right)

It’s a particularly heartwarming victory for Republicans. For decades it was taken for granted that the US Latino vote leaned toward the Democratic Party. And as the nation’s Latino population grew, Democrats relied on this segment of the electorate as a kind of guarantee of an increasingly promising future for them nationally.

The Cuban community in Miami has traditionally been more conservative than other Latino groups in the country. But since the beginning of the new century, Cuban-American youth, which seemed to be moving to the left, had contributed, along with other groups such as African-Americans and progressive whites, to Miami being the great Democratic stronghold in the state of Florida, which in turn was seen as the main electoral battleground in the country.

The defeat of the Democratic candidates in Miami on Tuesday leaves that narrative in question.

DeSantis scored a notable win in Miami. (AFP).

Miami-Dade County, the heart of the largest metropolitan area in the state of Florida, voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday for Governor De Santis instead of his Democratic challenger Charlie Crist.

The partial results on Tuesday night, according to county authorities, indicated an already impossible to trace advantage of 55% for De Santis compared to 43% for Crist.

By contrast, during his first gubernatorial election in 2018, De Santis had lost the Latino vote in Florida by 10 percentage points.

The last time a Republican candidate for governor had won Miami was in 2002, when Jeb Bush was the Republican candidate.

This Tuesday the other electoral results in Miami were equally disappointing for the Democrats.

Florida is the third largest state in the country. (AFP).

Senator was the winner. blond framereelected to represent the state of Florida, over Val Demings, an African-American who was seen as one of the rising figures of the Democratic Party.

And in the competition for the lower house of the US federal legislature, conservative congresswoman of Cuban origin Maria Elvira Salazar beat a Democrat of Colombian origin, Annette Taddeo.

“Republicans and they don’t know it”

Salazar celebrated his victory at La Carreta, an emblematic restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, and told the media that “this election proves what Ronald Reagan said, that Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”

The wide lead obtained by the Republicans in Tuesday’s elections in Miami shows their strength among Cubans, but they also seem to be popular among other Latino groups such as voters of Colombian and Venezuelan origin.

It is not a phenomenon that occurs from one day to the next. Republicans have been building strength in Miami for more than a decade.

Hispanics are showing a growing Hispanic bias. (AFP).

While in 2012, close to 50% of Cuban-Americans had voted for the presidency for the Democrat Barack Obamain 2016, only 41% did so for Hillary Clinton.

This translated into increasingly close elections in Miami.

If the trend continues, the Republican presidential candidate is likely to win that city in 2024, practically guaranteeing that the state of Florida, the third largest in the country, will also be in the conservative column.

conservative bias

If the trends seen in Miami continue to spread to the rest of the country, the electoral consequences could be profound. Latinos, with 19% of the total US population, are the largest ethnic minority in the country.

The growing conservative bias among Latinos is strengthening the Republican position in other states with large Latino populations such as Texas and Nevada.

There is more and more clarity about the reasons that explain this exodus of Democratic votes to the Republican side.

Cuban Americans have traditionally been more conservative than other Latino communities. (AFP).

Many of the Cuban American or South American voters in Miami do not share the existential concern about immigration issues that characterizes other Latino groups in the rest of the country. That is why they are not so scared of the discourse against undocumented immigrants that has become so important to Republicans since Donald Trump came to power in 2016.

Instead, the Republicans’ anti-socialist discourse resonates with many of these Latinos who fled their countries to escape leftist governments that frightened them.

The conservative position on cultural and religious issues also fits among many Latinos.

effective courtship

Finally, many analysts say, Republicans have been more effective and disciplined for years in courting the Latino vote in Miami and elsewhere.

For years, Democrats assumed Latino votes were automatically theirs.

Today it is clear that this is not the case.

In 2024, Joe Bidenor whoever is the Democratic presidential candidate, will have to work to prevent Latinos, the group that was supposed to be the long-term salvation of their party, from becoming the one that hands the White House over to the Republicans instead. .

Source: Elcomercio