When voters chose Democrat candidate Eileen Higgins in Tuesday’s election, her defeat of Republican candidate Emilio Gonzalez flipped a seat a Republican mayor has held for three decades.
With both political parties eyeing the midterm elections, now just 11 months away, even a mayoral race is being viewed as a political barometer to gauge voters’ feelings, especially since Gonzalez was endorsed by Trump and lost by 19 points.
John Cardillo, a Florida-based GOP strategist, was watching the Miami mayor race closely. He told AFN one reason Higgins won is the Democratic Party invested campaign money to flip the seat. It didn't help that past GOP mayors, he said, are RINO-like Democrats.
“And they had a very robust ground game and a robust economic message they were hammering home,” he advised.
The liberty-defending message of the Republican Party has traditionally found a lot of support among Floridians whose families come from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, but Cardillo said Higgins tapped into the hot-button issue of illegal immigration and mass deportations.
ICE agents swept through South Florida in mid-November, arresting 150 illegal immigrants with sex offender convictions during a 10-day operation called “Operation Dirtbag.”
The operation arrested 230 in all, which also means 80 noncitizens picked up by ICE had no criminal history.
“They're fine if you're deporting MS-13 gangs,” he said, “but local news down here is inundated with restaurant managers with no criminal record being hauled out in handcuffs in front of their crying kids.”
One similar example was a white woman pulled over by ICE agents in Key Largo, as seen in a video recorded by a Miami Herald reporter. The clip of her arrest, viewed more than 400,000 times, drew sympathy for the woman, who was screaming for help, and anger for the ICE agents who were called thugs and compared to the Gestapo in the comments.
Only later did Customs and Border Patrol state the car was registered to her boyfriend, an illegal alien with a criminal record. The federal agency said she was uncooperative with federal agents who ran her license and let her go.
Even though he personally supports President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, Cardillo says the “optics” of the ICE raids affected the mayoral race. It is also likely, he said, many immigrants know people who were affected directly, or indirectly, by the ICE raids.
