FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida’s final elections of 2025 delivered a resounding rebuke to Republicans, with Democratic candidates outperforming President Donald Trump’s 2024 margins by double digits. The swing gives Democrats a glimmer of hope for next year, a sharp contrast to the despair many felt a year ago in the aftermath of Trump’s win.

“This has big implications,” said Democratic strategist Eric Johnson, who’s managed federal, statewide and local campaigns in Florida. “Florida is tracking with the nation. And if you’re any Republican officeholder, you’ve got to be very nervous looking to November (2026),” he said.

After years of poor performance by her party in Florida, Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, was determined to spread the message that “the pendulum is swinging toward Democrats.”

In a 20-minute video news conference Wednesday about the results, she used the word “pendulum” 10 times, declaring that “We’re thrilled that the pendulum is swinging in our favor,” “very excited about the pendulum shifting” and “a pendulum only swings when there’s a force behind it.”

The Florida Democrats’ communications director, Nora Viñas, called the day after Election Day “victory Wednesday,” adding that “it’s a beautiful day to be a Democrat.”

State and county-level Republicans were publicly undisturbed by the results. They downplayed any implications for 2026, and spread the message that election results in 2025 don’t portend trouble for their party next year.

“What happened on Tuesday is not representative of what’s going to happen in 2026,” said Carl Cascio, chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party.

Next year’s race for governor is “going to draw the Republican vote out heavily. So you’re going to see a truer representative sample of Republican voter turnout, of Republican voters en masse, we hope.”

Evan Power, chair of the Florida Republican Party, pointing to the enormous Republican advantage over Democrats in registered voters, scoffed at the notion expressed by Fried and other Democrats that the December results have implications for November 2026.

“A Florida Dem and Nikki Fried tradition unlike any other — take a lean D district win and try to use it to manufacture momentum. Everyday Floridians are rejecting the radical Democrats pushing us to now a 1.4 million voter advantage,” Power said via text message. “The Democrats remain on the verge of extinction.”

While no single race in 2025 reliably predicts what will happen in 2026, said Sean Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University, “There is a trend. There is a pattern.”

“We’ve seen over the past several weeks that election results are trending toward electing Democrats or more favorable results than they had in the past cycle. Will it continue into 2026? That’s the big unknown,” Foreman said.

Races and results

In contests for mayor of Miami, a state representative and a state Senate seat, the Democratic candidates received significantly higher percentages of the vote than Trump got in 2024.

—Miami mayor: The marquee contest — the one that generated national headlines — was the runoff for Miami mayor. Eileen Higgins, the city’s first female mayor, is the first Democrat elected to the job in almost three decades.

The losing Republican mayoral candidate had endorsements from Trump and the state’s top Republicans, Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott.

Higgins won by 19 percentage points. A year ago, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris finished ahead of Trump in the city of Miami by less than 1 percentage point.

—State House: In Palm Beach County, Democrat Rob Long was elected to fill the District 90 vacancy in the Florida House of Representatives.

Democrats previously held the seat won by Long, so it wasn’t a pickup. But the county’s Republicans had gone all in for the nominee, a Trump-supporting MAGA adherent who wanted to eliminate vaccine mandates, end property taxes and doubted Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Long, for example, defeated Republican Maria Zack by 27 percentage points and an enormous swing from 2024.

A year ago in the same territory, Long’s Democratic predecessor won the district by 12 points and Harris finished 10 points ahead of Trump, according to figures compiled by Democratic data analyst Matthew Isbell.

The Higgins and Long results are especially heartening for Democrats because for decades they enjoyed a huge advantage in South Florida, a dominance that’s been eroding for the last decade, especially in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties, which have been turning more red.

—State Senate: Democrats didn’t win but improved their performance in the 11th state Senate District vacated when Republican Blaise Ingoglia resigned after DeSantis appointed him state chief financial officer. The district includes all or parts of Citrus, Hernando, Pasco and Sumter counties, including the traditional Republican stronghold of The Villages, the Central Florida retirement megalopolis.

Republican Ralph Massullo, a former four-term state representative finished 18 points ahead of his Democratic challenger on Tuesday. But his win was far smaller than last year, when Ingoglia finished 39 points ahead of his Democratic challenger and Trump finished 40 points ahead of Harris.

Fried said the overall Republican-to-Democratic shift is significant, noting that Democrats improved their performance in politically different parts of the state, from heavily Hispanic Miami to Democratic Palm Beach County to the Republican state Senate district.

Richard DeNapoli, the elected state Republican committeeman from Broward County and a former county Republican party chair, said people shouldn’t read too much into the results from December special or runoff elections. “I don’t see any trend lines being formed,” he said.

National trend

The decisions by Florida voters came five weeks after high-profile, off-year major elections — in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia — produced victories for Democrats and defeats for Trump-endorsed Republicans.

As with the big shift in Tuesday’s races in Florida that produced much higher percentages for Democratic candidates and much lower percentages for Republicans — the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia saw the same phenomenon.

There was also a shift earlier in the year. In April, the Republican winners in two Florida congressional special elections each won by smaller margins than Trump received in their districts in November 2025.

Johnson, the Democratic strategist, said the national picture reinforces what has been happening in Florida. Since November 2025, he said 25 seats have flipped across the country — all from Republican to Democratic and none from Democratic to Republican.

As the year ends, Johnson said it’s not hard to figure out what’s on voters’ minds 13 months after Trump won with a promise to improve the economy and bring down prices.

“It’s Trump. It’s all about Trump,” he said. “You can’t keep telling people, ‘The economy is good and don’t believe your lying grocery store bill.’”

Johnson said Trump, by asserting people are doing well economically, is repeating the mistake former President Joe Biden made as public disconnect soared along with prices.

Johnson said the reaction from voters to Republican candidates in Florida and elsewhere looks like the mirror image of voters’ reactions to Democratic candidates in the year after President Barack Obama was elected.

“In 2010, when Democrats took a shellacking with the tea party wave, there were a bunch of special elections preceding it that were the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “The excuses Republicans are using (today) sound a whole lot like the excuses that Democrats were using back then.”

Fried also said many voters are recoiling against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown. Hispanic citizens, and others in the U.S. legally are “walking around scared and not knowing what will happen by the end of the day.”

Johnson, who consulted for state House winner Long’s campaign, said the results showed discontent with the Republican brand.

He said about 50% of the voters who turned out for the special election were Democrats, and about 16% were no party affiliation voters. Long received 63% of the vote.

Unless Long received eight out of 10 NPA voters, something Johnson said was highly unlikely, that suggests there was Republican support for the Democrat. “It means that Republicans actually went and turned out in a special election — turned out and voted for a Democrat. They didn’t stay home because they’re disgruntled. Some chunk of them turned out and voted for the Democrat.”

Republican take

Republican leaders sought to downplay the results.

Cascio said many Republicans weren’t aware of the special election in Palm Beach County.

“If the Democrats want to feel that there’s a swing in the political temperature because they won (state House District 90) in a special election, that’s fine. That’s up to them. I can tell you that our base will be energized and they will come out in 2026. Not only will HD 90 be a different race but all of the races will be well represented by our Republican base,” he said.

At a news conference in West Palm Beach the day after the voting, the governor was asked if the voters’ rejection of the Miami mayoral candidate he endorsed signified a rejection of his policies.

DeSantis distanced himself from the Republican candidate and the outcome.

“I have no idea,” he said. “I wasn’t involved in the runoff. I did an endorsement in the original scrum, and then once it advanced to the runoff, it just wasn’t something I was involved in. So I don’t know what the issues were or any of that.”

Signs for 2026

The 2025 results aren’t a guarantee of future results, but they are a signal.

Republicans have formidable advantages heading into 2026. They are far ahead of Democrats in the number of registered voters. And they have significantly more financial resources for their candidates and their organizing than the Democrats.

Foreman said Democratic prospects rest largely on whether national Democratic organizations and donors decide it’s worth investing significant money in Florida to aid the party’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate nominees, or decide there’s more payoff to spending their resources in places where they see better chances for victory. Support for the top of the ticket would help candidates lower on the ballot, Foreman said.

“Will they come to the aid of the Democratic nominee for governor and senator? Or will they just pay lip service to it?” he said. And were the Miami results a one-off with local concerns driving the outcome, or a sign of something bigger?

Since Tuesday’s voting, the Democratic Party organization that focuses on congressional races added a Tampa Bay area district to its target list and the national Democratic Party committee that works on state legislative races added Florida to its “target map” for 2026.

Midterm elections two years after a presidential election are often difficult for a president’s party. “There’s just a yin and a yang with some of this stuff. But Republicans are going to have to contend with that,” said DeSantis. He won’t be on the ballot because term limits prevent the governor from seeking a third term.

Cascio acknowledged that the midterm after a presidential election usually isn’t good for the president’s party. Voters in the president’s party “tend to rest on our laurels. We can’t do that this time. We’ve got to come out. … We can’t leave undone the work that still needs to be done.”

Power took to social media with a similar message. “If we are going to defy history as the party in power and win the midterms. Ignore the people who want to run from our President. We must fight with President Trump to deliver on the promises that were made. Let’s go!”

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