a post-mortem wrote<\/a> that Gonzalez\u2019s campaign also \u201cleaned heavily on high-level endorsements and conservative radio exposure but lacked a full-spectrum ground-level communications operation.\u201d<\/p>\nEileen Higgins triumphed in Miami on Tuesday over GOP candidate Emilio Gonzalez, becoming the first female mayor-elect and Democrat to run the city since 1998. Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cMeanwhile, Democrats executed a coordinated digital, field and surrogate operation. Community events, voter-education forums and turnout pushes ran simultaneously with paid media,\u201d she added. \u201cLocal and national Democratic leaders flooded social media with urgency and repetition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some figures of national prominence \u2014 including Michigan\u2019s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer \u2014 had also helped by attending fundraising events in the weeks before the runoff.<\/p>\n
Johnson said Miami has always been \u201ca heavy lift for Republicans\u201d given that Democrats have a registration advantage in the city \u2014 even as the GOP has a larger share of registered voters than Dems in broader Miami-Dade County.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think that this is a wake-up call to the to the party and to the RNC to the importance of leaning into these municipal races and getting involved as early and aggressively as the DNC does,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
President Trump \u2014 who endorsed Gonzalez \u2014 became the first Republican candidate since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County in the 2024 election. Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cThose large cities are where the majority of the votes are going to come from in presidential years that will determine the outcome of the whole state from an electoral college perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johnson also noted that Democrats had won the Jacksonville, mayoral election in 2023 after the city, which is the largest municipality in Florida, had mostly been run by Republicans since the 1990s.<\/p>\n
President Trump \u2014 who endorsed Gonzalez \u2014 became the first Republican candidate since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County in the 2024 election. Former Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly won in the city.<\/p>\n
The race was also complicated by the candidates not having been designated by their party affiliation on the ballot, which known as a nonpartisan mayoral contest. That can sometimes provide helpful distance for those not seeking to defend every move by national party leaders or politicians in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n
Vianca Rodriguez, a former deputy Hispanic spokeswoman for the RNC and Trump\u2019s campaign, in a post-mortem wrote that Gonzalez\u2019s campaign also \u201clacked a full-spectrum ground-level communications operation.\u201d AP<\/p>\n
\u201cI can tell you from experience, the Democrat Party doesn\u2019t care if the race is called partisan or nonpartisan,\u201d Johnson explained. \u201cIf they know the party affiliation of the person\u2019s a Democrat, they view it as mission critical that the cities in America be run by Democrats and they act accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Dallas mayor, who left the Democratic Party after winning re-election in 2023 and registered as a Republican, runs a group that is planning on targeting other key municipal races \u2014 as part of a broader effort that will hopefully spur turnout during the midterm congressional elections as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody likes taxes lower and everybody kind of likes their streets safer. Those are naturally good Republican issues,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd so, I think, you know, it\u2019s interesting that when you have nonpartisan races, you get more Democrats running on Republican type issues, which has been my main argument for why we ought to be focusing more on, municipal races as Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re running at the local level on lowering people\u2019s taxes and lowering their crime and you know cutting bureaucratic red tape, improving the park system, things like that, and you just keep it there and no one brings up the party issue, you kind of get the best of both worlds if you\u2019re a Republican,\u201d he also said.<\/p>\n
The Dallas mayor, who left the Democratic Party after winning re-election in 2023 and registered as a Republican, runs a group that is planning on targeting other key municipal races. Republican Mayors Association \/ Facebook<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not having to answer any questions about ICE. You\u2019re not having to answer any questions about any of the more, I guess, divisive issues that we read about all the time in Washington so it ends up being a little bit more, challenging, I think, it becomes, it\u2019s not necessarily the case that everybody who is a Republican who\u2019s running at the local level wants to lean into that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Republican Mayors Association will be drafting their target cities for the upcoming year during a meeting Monday in New York City, with a focus on municipalities in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to chip away at the Democrats\u2019 so-called \u201cblue wall states.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tax filings<\/a> show it has raised more than half-a-million dollars since its launch.<\/p>\n\u201cThe RNC needs to make a decision about how important it is for the nation\u2019s cities, where we can, to retain and to keep a seat in the Republican camp, which the Miami seat was,\u201d Johnson added. \u201cThis Miami race just proves we have to defend as well, and we need the RNC to join us in a more serious way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey got involved late,\u201d he concluded, \u201cbut it was too late, obviously.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014\u00a0Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, the chairman of the Republican Mayors Association, said the GOP losing the Miami…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[409,44360,11504,1375,18785,123,125,124,44361,99,44362,4219,4278],"class_list":["post-79207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-donald-trump","tag-eric-johnson","tag-exclusive","tag-mayor","tag-mayoral-race","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-midterm-elections","tag-politics","tag-republican-national-committee","tag-republicans","tag-us-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}