The Friday Brief, December 12, 2025

MAGA Gets A Florida Smackdown

Inside:

Miami Bites Back Against MAGA
A Surrender, Not A Strategy
That’s Not How Any Of This Works, Tina
Indiana Says No To Trump
After Ozempic
German J-school Students Bust Russian Drone Motherships
RFK Will Kill Us All, Part 8524
What I’m Reading
Scenes from the Home Front

The Big Picture

Miami Bites Back Against MAGA

Miami Republicans keep trying to whistle past the graveyard, but this week’s election results are the sound of dirt hitting the coffin lid.

Ah, Miami, the city the Florida GOP treats like its personal electoral ATM, where the standard operating procedure for decades has been simple: take any Democrat, slap a “socialist/communist” label on their forehead, wave a few ghost stories from Havana and Caracas, and watch a chunk of the electorate flinch on command.

It’s a well-worn reflex in a place where Republicans have built a durable advantage among Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan exile communities who fled actual socialist and communist regimes.

Except this time the reflex didn’t fire.

Miami just elected Eileen Higgins, a Democrat, as mayor in a wipeout, beating Republican Emilio González, the Trump-backed candidate, 59–41. MAGA and the RPOF spent most of this year boasting of a permanently GOP Miami/Dade.

Not so fast.

Here’s the part that should make every GOP consultant in Tallahassee start stress-eating at the Governor’s Club: Higgins didn’t win by out-lefting anybody. She won by running on competence over corruption and chaos, “a city government that finally works,” and the grim daily realities MAGA hacks can’t meme away: affordability, housing, and the basic question of whether City Hall is a reality show or a functioning institution.

I’ll spare you a long exegesis on the utterly corrupt Carollo Machine in Miami, but this election shattered its power. The Carollo machine isn’t a campaign apparatus; it’s a municipal ecosystem; part patronage bazaar, part protection racket, part smoke-filled room, part ongoing criminal enterprise.