MIAMI — President Donald Trump’s move to endorse a local mayoral candidate is turning Miami’s nonpartisan runoff election into a political referendum on Trump after widespread Republican losses earlier this month in New Jersey, California and Virginia, particularly among Latino voters.

If Democrat Eileen Higgins wins the runoff, she’ll be the first Democratic mayor of Miami in nearly 30 years. Close watchers say a Democratic win in majority-Hispanic Miami would also be a resounding rejection of Trump ahead of the 2026 midterms.

“He’s nationalized it, he’s essentially made it a referendum on him in his own backyard, with his own party, with a constituency that he was laying claim to as the new part of the MAGA coalition. All that’s going to be tested,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant focused on Latino voters who also co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

In a Truth Social post Sunday night, the president weighed in on the race for Miami mayor, throwing his support behind Emilio González, a former city manager and retired U.S. Army colonel who served as the director of Miami International Airport.

“GET OUT AND VOTE FOR EMILIO — HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” Trump wrote.

The national political stakes of Miami’s mayoral runoff come after neighborhoods with the highest share of voters who turned to Trump in 2024 swung toward Democrats earlier this month in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race. The Latino polling firm Equis on Monday released new findings from a national poll showing 19% of Latino supporters who back Trump are now dissatisfied with the president, opening a window for Democrats.

Latino voters in Miami have long stood apart and been further right from Latino voters elsewhere in the country, according to Madrid. That would make the potential rejection of a Trump-endorsed candidate locally more notable.

“There’s also this Latino dynamic where we just came off of this historical backlash against Trump and the Republicans,” Madrid said. “Cubans will no longer be viewed as the peculiar cousin in the Latino political community. They will be voting like everybody else — that’s significant.”

Miami-Dade is also a key political indicator of the sedimentation of Republican power in Florida, after its swing from Hillary Clinton’s 63% of the vote in 2016 to Trump’s 55% win last year — a trend led, in part, by historically left-leaning Hispanic voters moving toward Republicans.

Miami Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar is now raising alarms to her party about waning support. “I’ve been warning: if the GOP does not deliver, we will lose the Hispanic vote all over the country,” she said on social media earlier this month.

González’s campaign representatives said they had no idea Trump’s endorsement was coming on Sunday, and had not asked for it. “At no point did he go out of his way to seek that endorsement,” campaign communications director Andrew Trabazo told the Miami Herald.

González — who was also on Trump’s 2016 transition team — has publicly said he’s rejecting partisanship in the race, and has tried to criticize Higgins for aligning herself with Democrats.

“I have not campaigned in a partisan way, but Eileen has. She has come out, I think her label is ‘trusted Democrat’ from day one,” González told the Herald earlier this month. “I hoped very very much to keep partisan out of this.”

But among Republicans, he has embraced the national political implications of the race — positioning himself as the stopgap to the “blue wave” elsewhere in the country.

“We’re got the fight of our lives in a couple of weeks. We are going to push back this blue wave that they think they’ve started up in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City,” González said during a Miami Dade GOP Lincoln Day fundraising dinner last week.

Republican after Republican at the dinner also imbued the race with national political stakes.

“Florida is now a red state. Miami Dade is a red county and I want to say, the men and women here, y’all need to work number one to help my friend Emilio González get elected the mayor of Miami,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told the crowd.

Amid the state and national political attention on the race, both candidates are insisting they’re the one keeping the race locally-focused and nonpartisan.

Christian Ulvert, who is running Higgins’ campaign, said it’s González who is trying to make the campaign about Republicans and Democrats. That includes the endorsements of Cruz, Florida Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds.

“The only campaign that’s leaned into a partisan divide is Mr. González’s,” Ulvert said, “Seeing how he sought endorsements from national Republican figures, chasing support from folks outside of the city of Miami, even the state of Florida.”

In the Nov. 4 general election, Higgins led with 36% of the vote, followed by González with about 20%. Third-place finisher Ken Russell, a Democrat and former city commissioner, almost knocked González out of the runoff, securing nearly 18%.

Ulvert said he wasn’t concerned about the Trump endorsement coming off of the general, describing it as a “Hail Mary pass” to “mobilize Republican voters.”

“For us, this endorsement is not changing the trajectory we’re on, which is, with great enthusiasm and momentum, building off of a near two-to-one margin of victory over Mr. González in the first round,” Ulvert said.

Asked for her thoughts on Trump’s endorsement of her opponent, Higgins said Monday that, “I’m just doing my thing.”

“I’m continuing to make sure that the people who live in the city of Miami are my supporters,” Higgins said. “And I don’t have to fly all over the country to find people to endorse me.”

She added that she has a yearslong track record on the Miami-Dade County Commission of “showing that I do not serve in a partisan way.”

“It’s never mattered to me whether they’re Democrat, Republican, Independent,” Higgins said.

But, with Trump’s endorsement raising the political spectre of the race, the party definitely matters for those tracking political trends ahead of the midterms.

“We are all watching what happens in Miami,” said Madrid, the political consultant, “Those of us that watch the Latino vote are, absolutely.”

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