How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Gave Florida Democrats a Chance
The New Yorker · Daniel Castro ·
Daniel Castro on the Democratic campaign of Eliott Rodriguez, who hopes to win Florida’s Twenty-seventh District in a competitive House race in Miami.
At the onset of the race, it seemed as if Salazar’s campaign strategy was to continue her embrace of Trump and the MAGA movement, even alongside a surge in deportations in Miami, the nation’s leader in ICE arrests. Last year, she declared that the facilities at Alligator Alcatraz, the infamous immigrant-detention center in the Everglades, met the “highest standards,” and she avoided criticizing the Trump Administration when it announced the terminations of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans, upending countless lives and businesses in her district.
But, a few weeks ago, Salazar released an ad breaking with Trump over immigration enforcement and warning him that the Latino voters who helped him win in 2024 felt betrayed—“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.”—joining the ranks of several G.O.P. candidates nationwide attempting to distance themselves from the President. As Election Day approaches, Trump’s approval rating has hit a record low, currently hovering in the mid- to low thirties, and a recent poll from NBC News showed that a higher percentage of voters consider their vote this November to be a signal of opposition to the White House than in any other midterm in nearly thirty years. Perhaps because of this, Salazar’s ad seemed to barely make a dent. In fact, as Rodriguez explained, Salazar’s turnabout had seemed to spark a fund-raising windfall for his campaign from national donors, who saw the dysfunction as a sign that the seat was potentially flippable. Shortly after, their premonitions were borne out: political forecasters shifted the seat from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” whereas other pollsters even went as far as to call it a toss-up.
We crossed Calle Ocho, where tourists milled around Domino Park and perused souvenir shops selling rooster T-shirts and Cuban-flag magnets, before eventually making our way a few blocks north, to a neighborhood of modest, low-slung apartment buildings. With a little more than a month to go, Rodriguez’s campaign was relentlessly targeting voters with no party affiliation (N.P.A.s, as his staffers called them), who make up thirty per cent of the district and more than twenty-four per cent of Florida’s registered voters. The canvassers were in high spirits: in contrast to the district’s more affluent neighborhoods, where they were often met with silence and Ring cameras, they told me that people in Little Havana still opened their doors, and, more often than not, they were excited to see Rodriguez at their doorstep.
Read the full story at The New Yorker · All coverage of this story