Eileen Higgins’s win has reset the city’s political landscape in some ways not seen in 28 years, and in others not at all
Miami’s new mayor, Eileen Higgins, hailed it as “a new day” for the city after the Democrat ended three decades of Republican rule on Tuesday night in a stunning election triumph.
In reality, the result is more of a seismic shifting of sands given the magnitude of her victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican candidate, Emilio González, in the most populous city in Miami-Dade county, which the president won in 2024 by 12%.
Higgins won the run-off with almost 60% of the vote, according to preliminary results reported Wednesday by the Miami Herald. More than just further evidence of a growing national backlash against Trump’s policies on the national stage, particularly immigration, her win has reset Miami’s political landscape in a manner not seen in some ways in 28 years, and in others not at all.
Red states are redrawing their districts based on 2024 margins. This may bite them in the ass, especially in Texas, if they expect their massive gains with Latinos to hold after the ICE horror show and terrible economy. All of their new R+8 gerrymandered districts might not be as safe as they thought in a D+10 midterm.
This may bite them in the ass, especially in Texas,
Or not, an example Ted Ceuz is the most reviled poltican in Texas and keeps being reelected.
Texas is still a red state, so statewide races like Ted’s US Senate seat are a stretch. Though Beto amazingly got within 2 points in 2018!
You would expect to see action in the primary, he only got elected because he was in a small turnout special election.
It is Trump backlash. It will last a cycle or two, in which Democrats will pass some small policies that slightly soften the edges of our modern dystopia, and then Republicans will come back to power and continue the march into misery for the masses.
I see people mention this often and I understand where they’re coming from because it sure seem like it’s the reason thinking about how Republicans do something bad and it never gets done. While it’s true that this happening I believe the real issue is actually not enough Democrats in office. Democrats when in power are often stuck with razor thin margins and a few of them are basically DINOs like Joe Manchin. If we had more Democrats in office we wouldn’t be stuck with trying to deal with Joe Manchin because we’d have enough votes even without him.
The alternative would be the church committee, where you have a substantial review and then action taken to help prevent it.
Can we get a progressive tho?
If we educate people on why progressive ideals are good for them (and mostly, their wallets), then yes in time. If we just assume Joe Everyman is spontaneously going to take up socialism as a hobby when everything else is telling them it’s terrible, then no.
Slow and steady wins the race
Nope. That’s exactly why Hilary lost.
Then why did Biden win?
He won because Trump failed to steal the election after a once in a century pandemic. That’s who he was running against. Then after 4 years we all got secondary amnesia from watching Biden.
He still got the most votes of any president ever. He got double the votes of Bernie in the primary.
The people want neolib bullshit. It’s stupid of them to want, but it is what they want. We gotta change their minds on a massive scale before we can expect them to change so drastically.
I don’t think people care about ideology as much as we are told. Just call it affordability.
He also got pathetic votes. If he had a progressive against him (at the televized debates, on all ballots), he would have lost by a landslide
That’s pure speculation, you’re just claiming what you wish would happen with zero evidence or justification.
People want to eat (the rich)
I think you overestimate the class consciousness of the average American voter. Biden didn’t get “pathetic votes”, he got the most votes of any president ever. Even just proportionately, all the presidents in the last century with a clear majority win have been neolib types.
People don’t want to eat the rich, people wanna eat hamburgers and play video games. You and your little online message board friends (myself included) want to eat the rich, and if you spend all your time here you might fool yourself into thinking the average American has a somewhat elevated class consciousness. They do not.
My work brings me in contact with all sorts of people across all strata of life. The average person just kinda muddles through life, they don’t really spend any particular length of time thinking about anything really, whatever their favorite diversion is perhaps (games, sports, TV, movies, etc.).
I personally talked to a surprising number of people who, after the election, thought Biden was the candidate in 2024. People genuinely just do not care. They have basically no media literacy, no knowledge of current events, no general practice of critical thinking.
We’re not gonna get a progressive president before the general class consciousness shifts significantly. What we can get is an FDR type who will at least talk to the progressives at the table, and then get progressive to the table.
Slow and steady, comrade snail.
I don’t want Democratic wins. I want non-neoliberal wins to pass legislation that will stop capitulating to capitalists.
Good luck getting a city of ex-Cubans that despise everything about communism and stan capitalism harder than your average white guy to get behind your wishes.
ETA: A recent article that paints a vivid perspective around this.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Every vote away from the far right is a better chance at creating a true progressive shift. I wish it could happen that fast but it won’t. We need to take what is realistic now and NOT STOP PUSHING. This is a huge undertaking for these areas
My point is that electing Democrats is not enough. We cannot afford to elect centrists to continue to kneecap any and all legislation to the point that it is ineffective. It only proves the GOP talking point that government is ineffective.
Centrists only exist to appeal to the right and blame the left. Centrists 100% expect the full support of every leftist while they will do nothing to benefit them.
At the current state of things I’ll take a step back from the cliff rather than a step off.
Arguably we are off the cliff and you want to argue if the hand of the person pulling you back up meets your moral tests. If they don’t you demand they release you so you can continue to fall while you wait for your ideal savior. Hopefully they reach you before you reach the bottom
You are assuming that the hand is actually pulling you up. That’s a mistake.
That strategy has been the predominant one for the Democratic Party since the 1990s. How has the country been doing since then?
If my options were to be dropped off a cliff or dangled over the edge, dangling is preferable.
I’d obviously prefer the person that will lift me up, but if they’re not there
It’s up to us to push our representatives to show results beyond the “not Trump”.
When the Democrats used to wield power for the working class they had full control of the country for decades.
You’re right there. I won’t reject a victory over republicans, but I do want better
I think I’m just tired of the Democratic Party always having just enough centrists to take the blame for their inaction. John Fetterman, Tim Kaine, Chuck Schumer, Kory Booker and more like them will always screw over the working class to appease the wealthy capitalists.
After all those years upholding the embargo on Cuba it finally pays off.
This headline brought to you by ChatGPT
Some humans write like this too. That’s kind of how it learned it.
Woe unto them. They sound like ChatGPT now.
Nah. ChatGPT sounds like us.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatgpt-is-changing-the-words-we-use-in-conversation/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/20/chatgpt-claude-chatbots-language/
https://www.theverge.com/openai/686748/chatgpt-linguistic-impact-common-word-usage
chatgpt favored a few articles in its training data that used “its not x – its y” more than others. it was sheer accident and coincidence to begin with, but is now being cemented into the language by chatgpt’s relative ubiquity and a feedback mechanism where new training data contains this artifact, increasing its favorability in subsequent models. I’m not saying that the phrase didn’t exist before chatgpt. it’s not a seismic shift in language patterns – It’s a feedback mechanism. The same feedback mechanism causes it to prefer “it’s not” vs “it isn’t” despite there being no grammatical distinction between them. “It’s not” was presumably slightly more popular among the training data it (or rather, its trainers) happened to favor during initial training. The same feedback mechanism causes it to write metaphor like a bored, not-particularly-bright college student in a poetry class they’re taking just for the credit.
edit: shibboleth
more edits: everything after “it’s not a seismic shift in language patterns – it’s a feedback mechanism”
