Some red warning sirens are beginning to sound about Republican hopes in 2026 and, yes, in 2028, because American politics is like a pendulum. If it swings one direction one moment, then wait a minute, it’ll probably swing back the other direction, naturally.
Miami has been Republican for decades, specifically because there’s a large Cuban Republican population, which is very anti-communist.
But for the first time in 30 years, Democrats have now taken control of Miami. That’s after candidate Eileen Higgins clinched the city’s mayoral election. Higgins beat out Trump-backed Republican Emilio Gonzalez in the Florida city’s runoff Tuesday night. She became the first Democratic mayor in the city since 1998.
President Trump threw his weight behind the Republican candidate. He was joined by senators Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But it didn’t matter very much.
Some of the early bellwethers are not moving in Republican directions right now. It is also a warning for Republicans with regard to the Hispanic vote in the United States.
President Trump won an outsized share of Hispanics in the last election cycle. The polling shows that many, many Hispanics are falling off the Republican bandwagon right now because Trump solved some of the big issues, like closing the southern border. However, he has alienated an awful lot of Hispanic Republicans with some of the more public-facing ICE actions. And a lot of Hispanic Republicans, who were driven away from the Democratic Party by their social radicalism and DEI, have been moving back because Democrats have been moving away from those discussions and back toward “affordability.”
This is the issue of the day: “affordability.”
President Trump has labeled affordability a Democratic hoax, which I totally understand because “affordability” is a broad buzzword that encompasses many things.
Does it encompass the inflation rate? If we’re talking inflation rate, Trump has brought down inflation to manageable levels — still higher than it should be, but it’s not riding at 9-11% as it was under Joe Biden.
If we’re talking about energy prices, they are falling under President Trump.
When people say “affordability,” it is fair to say that very few people ever think that things are “affordable.” Nothing is “affordable.” If you are struggling economically at any time in your life, this means inherently you’re going to think things are unaffordable.
When people talk about affordability, what do they mean? They mean that things are less affordable for them now than they were back in 2019. That is what the polling data shows. Americans are dissatisfied with how far their money is going right now.
Yes, many people are making more dollars than they were in 2019, but those dollars aren’t going quite as far. Items are less affordable than they were five or six years ago, but when Democrats talk about the problems of “affordability,” they are neglecting the fact that most of those problems emerged under Joe Biden.
That is what Trump means when he says that the “affordability” argument is a hoax. He means they created an inflationary spiral that jacked up prices, and then they handed him a bad situation. He has brought inflation down to manageable levels, and now they’re shouting about affordability. They can’t shout about inflation because if they say the word inflation, everyone’s going to look at Joe Biden and look at Trump and realize Trump brought the inflation rates down.
So if Democrats talk about “affordability” as a catch-all, that is a much more lucrative political line for them to pursue.
What we need, as always, is more deregulation, lower taxes, and better incentive structures for businesses to create new goods, products, and services.
When a party wins a national election, as Republicans did in 2024, the general tendency is to believe that you have a mandate and that you are in the ascendancy.
That may not, in fact, be true. It may be that a lot of people voted for you just because they didn’t like the other guy. When we live in a binary election system, that is the most common answer as to why people vote.
They’re not necessarily voting for something, they’re voting against something. And this is where I think the Republicans have to be very careful, because Republicans can tell themselves a story where we are now in the ascendancy. Culturally, we are in the ascendancy at the moment.
But what may actually be happening is that the most visible anecdotal evidence is in our favor, but the general statistical trend is not in our favor, and that’s something we need to keep an eye on if we want to be accurate about the solutions that we actually put forth.
