DeSantis rides huge boost in Hispanic support to historic Miami-Dade victory

Ron DeSantis decisively took Miami-Dade County by the largest margin of any Republican candidate for governor in at least the past 40 years on his path to re-election Tuesday night.

DeSantis defeated Democrat Charlie Crist with more than 55% of the vote in Miami-Dade County, a 16-point improvement on his performance in the county in 2018, when he was first elected governor and a promising sign for his potential viability in the 2024 presidential race.

DeSantis won roughly 65% of the vote in majority Hispanic precincts, also a 16-point improvement. That included a resounding victory in Hialeah, where DeSantis took more than 78% of the vote.

READ MORE: See how your Miami-Dade neighborhood voted in Tuesday’s midterm election

The governor also narrowly won the vote in majority white precincts and more than doubled his vote share in majority Black precincts, capturing more than 16% of the vote in those areas.

His performance was a stunning reversal of his 2018 performance, when he lost Miami-Dade by roughly 21 percentage points, the biggest deficit for a Republican in the county since Bob Martinez lost to Lawton Chiles in 1990 by roughly 26 points.

In 2018, DeSantis also performed best in majority Hispanic precincts, which he narrowly lost to Andrew Gillum by less than one percentage point.

Al Cardenas, former chair of the Florida Republican Party, said that the performance by DeSantis and Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who also cruised to victory in Miami-Dade, showed that Democrats had “abandoned” Florida and raised questions about their ability to compete in the state in the future.

“Democrats were bludgeoned in the streets, in media and were dispirited,” he said via text message. “Miami-Dade became a total takeover. Overcoming this loss in 2024 will be very difficult.”

A better performance in Miami-Dade than Trump

While the composition of voters in midterm elections is different from presidential elections — midterm voters tend to be older and are less likely to have moved recently — DeSantis improved upon the success enjoyed by former President Donald Trump in 2020, when he won more than 55% of the vote in majority-Hispanic precincts, a 14-point improvement over Trump’s 2016 performance in majority-Hispanic precincts. Trump’s improved performance helped him close the deficit in Miami-Dade on his way to winning the state in 2020.

Race-by-race results: Click here for all the statewide and South Florida election results

DeSantis’ performance in Miami-Dade comes as the share of registered Democrats in the county has shrunk over the past several election cycles. Ahead of this year’s race, Democrats accounted for fewer than 38% of voters in Miami-Dade. The last time DeSantis was on the ballot in 2018, Democrats accounted for nearly 42% of registered voters in the county.

And there were early indications of lagging enthusiasm among the shrinking pool of Democrats. This year, more Republicans in Miami-Dade County voted ahead of Election Day, by mail or early voting, than Democrats, a huge shift from 2018, when 40% more Democrats voted early or by mail than Republicans.

The last Republican to win Miami-Dade County was former Gov. Jeb Bush, who won Miami-Dade in both 1998 and 2002, with roughly 53% of the vote in both elections.

“Typically Republican candidates write off the likelihood of winning Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach,” said Karen Unger, Bush’s campaign manager during his 2002 re-election campaign. “We went in with a completely different perspective that we are going to win Miami-Dade.”

Bush, of course, had lived in Miami-Dade County for years and had been chairman of the Miami-Dade Republican Party.

“It was his hometown, so it was important to us on principle,” Unger said.

But she added that his strong performance in Miami-Dade was also tied to his ability to connect with Hispanic voters as a fluent Spanish speaker whose wife was born in Mexico.

“I think he had a greater connection to Hispanic voters than Republican candidates before him,” she said.

Bush, however, was unable to translate his hometown success to the national stage, flaming out in the 2016 presidential primaries despite entering the race a favorite.

A shift to the right broadly among Hispanics

While Miami-Dade’s Cuban-American population has always been closely aligned with the Republican Party, the county’s broader Hispanic population has also shifted rightward over the last few elections, which is best illustrated by Trump’s 14-point improvement between 2016 and 2020. In heavily Cuban Hialeah, for example, Trump was narrowly edged out by Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, with Trump winning just under 48.7% of voters in the city to Clinton’s 48.9%. In 2020, Trump won more than two-thirds of the vote there.

Giancarlo Sopo, who oversaw Hispanic advertising for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, said that DeSantis’ resounding victory showed that his policies resonated with Hispanic voters.

“Gov. DeSantis ran on a popular agenda that clearly galvanized voters in Miami and across the state, especially Hispanics,” Sopo said via text message. “The Democrats’ response was to spend the last few years blaming ‘misinformation’ for their losses with Hispanics. Perhaps this helped them save face with donors, but it was always nonsense and tonight they are paying a steep electoral price for their self-delusion.”

Robert Dempster, chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, attributed DeSantis’ success to what he described as an “incredibly extreme agenda,” and said that his administration’s arrest of 20 people on voter fraud charges suppressed the vote.

Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster whose firm Bendixen & Amandi did Hispanic polling for former President Barack Obama’s election campaigns, said that the Democratic Party needs to reinvent itself in Florida and make a sustained commitment to the state if it hopes to compete in the future.

“You have to be on the political battlefield all the time and not just parachute in,” he said. “What the Democrats require in Florida, and it’s been painfully obvious for eight years, is a wholesale rebranding of the party.”

For DeSantis the victory in Miami-Dade, and particularly his strength with Hispanic voters, show that he would be a formidable contender if he were to enter the 2024 presidential election and a strong foe for Trump, who discouraged DeSantis from entering the 2024 race ahead of Tuesday’s results.

“I think it’s rocket fuel for his presidential ambitions,” Armandi said of DeSantis. “If I were Donald Trump, I would be nervous. He has proven he has much stronger support both in Dade County and with the state’s Hispanic voters than Donald Trump does.”

Data reporters Shirsho Dasgupta and Court Cox contributed reporting.