Afternoon all. On Monday we jumped in to help Aftyn Behn close strong in her inspiring bid for TN-7 next Tuesday. Today we are jumping in to help Eileen Higgins in our other big December opportunity to turn a red seat blue - winning the Miami Mayor’s run-off on December 9 against her Trump-backed opponent.
Today I am sharing a recording of a conversation I just had with Eileen about the race. The video is above and transcript is below. Eileen is a well-known, respected and successful leader in South Florida politics. She has a real shot to flip the city of Miami, a mayoralty we haven’t won since the 1990s. Winning here, in the heart of MAGA land, would be a very encouraging way to end what has been a successful electoral year for Democrats - and we just have to go for it everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can learn more about Eileen on her website, volunteer here, and donate to her campaign on this dedicated Hopium page. We don’t yet have a Hopium ActBlue page up for her campaign. I hope to have that up soon.
Old time Hopium people may remember that the very first candidate we ever got behind was Donna Deegan in her successful campaign to flip Jacksonville, the largest city in Florida, in the spring of 2023. Flipping Miami, Florida’s second largest city, would be a very Hopium-filled way to end 2025!
There are many reasons Eileen has a chance to be the first Democrat to win in Miami in almost three decades, but this exchange gets right to the heart of one of the most important - the inhumane treatment of immigrants by the Trump and DeSantis Administrations:
Simon:
You know, I’ve done a lot of work in Miami and South Florida, and I think that for so many immigrants—and even for someone like you who has spent some of your career working in Latin America—when we had just gone through this period of rebuilding democracies and strengthening democratic institutions all across the Americas, for this to be happening here, for the immigrants that came here, for our democracy, for the freedom here, for the opportunity here, to see the kinds of things that happened in Latin America happening here in the United States… I’m sure you must be having some incredible conversations with people who not only feel betrayed by the pulling of TPS, but how America all of a sudden doesn’t feel like the America that they thought they were coming to.Eileen:
They’re hurt, right? They’re hurt. And the idea that it’s the government that’s supposed to help them, right? And these are also American citizens that are living in fear. I met a gentleman—he’s the choir director at one of the churches—and he said, “You know, they’re just looking at people that have my skin color.”Like, what kind of country does that? We used to try. We were never perfect, but we used to try to treat people properly, to form that more perfect union. And all that seems to be out the window, and people are noticing. They feel disrespected. They don’t like it.
And all I can be is compassionate and tell them that if I’m their mayor, I’m going to stick up for them and make sure that they feel supported when nobody else is doing that for them.
Check out our conversation. Get to know Eileen. And do what you can to help her win in what is the other exciting December opportunity to turn a red seat blue. Happy Thanksgiving all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!- Simon
Eileen Higgins Biography
As County Commissioner serving much of the City of Miami, Eileen has led with integrity, experience, and a results-driven approach—building thousands of affordable housing units, investing millions to strengthen hundreds of small businesses, expanding transit, and creating green spaces for families to enjoy.
Now, she’s running for Mayor of Miami to get things done for us. That means restoring trust in City Hall by cutting red tape that stops homeowners and small businesses from moving forward, and fostering safe neighborhoods, beautiful parks, and housing people can afford.
Transcript of Rosenberg Higgins Conversation
Simon Rosenberg:
Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another great event. Joining me today is Eileen Higgins, who is in a runoff to be mayor of Miami in Florida. Welcome, Eileen. Thank you so much for being here today.
Eileen Higgins:
Hi, Simon. It’s great to be here.
Simon:
So listen, we at Hopium and I have done a lot of work in Florida over the years. This is an important place for us. And so we’re so excited that you came out of the election in November having gotten more votes than anybody else and in a strong position to potentially win. Tell us a little bit about— and what we’re doing today is we’re endorsing you. I’m asking my community, I want to be very clear, I’m asking my community to financially support your race to help you win. And for those who can volunteer remotely or in person to do so too. This is something we’ve been doing now for a few years, and we’re excited to get behind you today.
But why don’t you just give us an introduction to you and the race, where many people may not have even known this race was happening, and tell us why it’s so important that we get behind you.
Eileen:
Well, City of Miami is Florida’s flagship brand. So it’s really important that we have a government that works for the people. And for the past few years in Florida, it’s almost been embarrassing when we’re on the national news as the city government for corruption.
We have a set of commissioners that do nothing but yell at one another, and so they’re always in court. And what that means for residents of the city—I’m one of those people—there’s a high level of frustration that they are living in a city with so much potential energy, but the government’s just not functioning. It’s not paying any attention to them or their needs, particularly as we are confronting—we are the tip of the spear on the housing affordability crisis and, of course, on the resiliency sea level rise crisis. And they’re tired, so they’re frustrated with city government and corruption.
And then we are also living in an environment of fear, right? We have a government from Washington to Tallahassee that often says very unkind things. I call it trickle-down hatred as how we describe the people that live in our community in Miami. Again, we are at the forefront of diversity and having been a diverse community. And now there are other governments that are dehumanizing folks and even to the point of shipping them off into cages and alligator Alcatraz, which is obviously outrageous and as my Catholic mother would say, a sin. So that’s the kind of ground that we’re entering here in Miami.
Simon:
So you had an election and now you’re in a runoff. Talk to us about what happened in the election and how you’re now seeing this runoff, and a little bit about your opponent.
Eileen:
Yeah, so in Miami, we have nonpartisan elections. So everybody runs in the first round. There were 13 people in the first round. I advanced. I was the top vote getter by a two-to-one margin.
And part of the reason I was able to deliver that high margin on November 4th is I have represented the city of Miami—or a third of the city of Miami—for over eight years on the county commission. And I have a track record of just getting things done. I’m an engineer by training, so I’m kind of a no-nonsense person. I get up in the morning. I see problems. I attack them through that engineering lens and just try to solve them.
And so I went into this race being able to say things like: ask everybody else up here how many units of affordable housing they’ve built. They can’t answer any, and I’m able to say thousands. Ask anybody else up here, have they gotten funding for mass transit expansions? They’ll say none, and I’ve gotten it for two. So I came in with a real track record.
And I’m running against, in the runoff, a gentleman named Emilio Gonzalez—longtime Trump ally, Trump spokesperson, wholly embraced his MAGA point of view. And that’s not working out so well these days for people.
Simon:
And what people may not realize—there’s a little bit of, I think, a misunderstanding that Miami is kind of this Democratic hotbed.
Eileen:
Right.
Simon:
But we haven’t had a mayor of Miami, a Democratic mayor, someone who was a Democrat to be mayor of Miami, in a long time. Isn’t that the case?
Eileen:
It’s been like 28 years since we’ve had a Democrat in charge of the city. In part, we haven’t run anybody that can raise the money and raise the votes, right? You’ve got to run a campaign in that way. And in part, we haven’t presented a candidate. I’m not Pollyannish. You have to be able to talk to the residents here. And many of those residents only speak Spanish.
And I—from New Mexico, lived in old Mexico, worked all over Latin America—and happen to speak fluent Spanish. So I’m able to do things other Democrats have never been able to do, which is knock on doors in Spanish, debate in Spanish, be on Spanish-language radio, be on Spanish-language television, and meet the voters where they are in the language that’s easiest for them to understand.
Simon:
Well, and I love the way that you phrase the trickle-down hatred because we’ve had, just in the last few months, this incredible effort to strip TPS away from the Venezuelans in South Florida. Cubans are being treated in ways that they’ve never been treated since the revolution in 1959 by this government.
You’ve seen sort of a brand-new kind of politics really emerge in Florida that is unprecedented, where communities that were always… were being mistreated in a way that’s unprecedented. How is that manifesting when you’re going door to door, you’re talking to folks, you’re on Spanish-language radio? How is that manifesting in the race and in the conversation in the city right now?
Eileen:
Well, I’ll give you an example. About a week and a half ago, right after the president stripped Venezuelans of TPS, in our community in Miami-Dade County, that eliminates 100,000 TPS recipients. So that’s a lot of people in my opinion, but let me humanize that.
There’s a gentleman that has a health clinic. He received a letter from the federal government instructing him to fire 27 people who worked at his health clinic because they’re Venezuelan and they no longer have their work permit. That is 27 families that don’t have a breadwinner. And that is a health clinic that is incapable of providing the care their clients need.
So this anti-immigrant rampage that the federal and state government is on is one, mean; two, sinful; and three, bad for the economy.
And I’ll give you an example. I was at church yesterday up in a neighborhood called Allapattah at Corpus Christi, and someone said to me, “I’m voting for you because I want you to stop the tyranny,” right? And this was an immigrant, obviously an American, but had come here as an immigrant. And you know, obviously as the mayor of Miami, I’m not in the tyranny-stopping business, but I can be in the compassionate-giving business. And I can make sure that our residents feel as if they have a voice standing up for them, speaking up for them, and treating them respectfully because they don’t feel like they have that.
Simon:
You know, I’ve done a lot of work in Miami and South Florida, and I think that for so many immigrants—and even for someone like you who has spent some of your career working in Latin America—when we had just gone through this period of rebuilding democracies and strengthening democratic institutions all across the Americas, for this to be happening here, for the immigrants that came here, for our democracy, for the freedom here, for the opportunity here, to see the kinds of things that happened in Latin America happening here in the United States… I’m sure you must be having some incredible conversations with people who not only feel betrayed by the pulling of TPS, but how America all of a sudden doesn’t feel like the America that they thought they were coming to.
Eileen:
They’re hurt, right? They’re hurt. And the idea that it’s the government that’s supposed to help them, right? And these are also American citizens that are living in fear. I met a gentleman—he’s the choir director at one of the churches—and he said, “You know, they’re just looking at people that have my skin color.”
Like, what kind of country does that? We used to try. We were never perfect, but we used to try to treat people properly, to form that more perfect union. And all that seems to be out the window, and people are noticing. They feel disrespected. They don’t like it.
And all I can be is compassionate and tell them that if I’m their mayor, I’m going to stick up for them and make sure that they feel supported when nobody else is doing that for them.
Simon:
Well, these are important times, I think. And thank you so much for deciding to take on this important job and also a tough job. I mean, you’re up against— the politics in South Florida, for people who don’t know, it’s a rough-and-tumble sport in English and in Spanish. Are you having fun?
Eileen:
I’m having fun. I love running for office. People—when you knock on someone’s door, they tell you things they won’t even tell their friends. You can knock on a door and they’ll disclose they have an aunt that’s struggling with depression. They’re not really sure how to find mental health resources for them. You’d be amazed the things people share with you about their lives because they trust you to connect them to resources.
So it’s very meaningful to run for office. I mean, I obviously want to win—I think I am going to win—but win or lose, you know your community better than when you started by knocking on doors of people you’ve never met before.
Simon:
Well, listen everyone, this is not just a race where we have a great candidate who is prepared to do the job with a strong track record, but the two Democrats who ran in the election in November got 53 percent of the vote. So you know, this is an election we can win. And so it’s really important that we provide Eileen and her team the resources, the support they need to close strong in these two weeks.
The election is on Tuesday, December 9th, right? And how is the voting—is there early voting? What’s the process so people know, if they want to volunteer, what’s the context in which the election is taking place?
Eileen:
Voting is already underway. Last Monday, vote-by-mail ballots went out. So we’ve already seen a couple of thousand, I think 3,500, ballots be returned. So right now we’re in that phase of calling people and reminding them to put their ballot in the mail before Thanksgiving or this Thanksgiving weekend.
After Thanksgiving, we’ll pivot because we have three days of early voting—December 5th, 6th and 7th. So we’ll be driving people to eight different early voting locations. And then, of course, when early voting closes on Sunday, it’s all hands on deck to get those people that just love waiting till Election Day to vote, to show up on Tuesday.
Simon:
Okay. Well, listen everybody, you know the assignment, right? Please donate today. If you live in South Florida, please volunteer. We’ll have a link to do that in our post. And also I’ll be working with her campaign to find out if there are remote volunteering opportunities where people can call and text to help drive turnout, because in these kinds of runoff elections, oftentimes the field operation is the thing that delivers because fewer people are voting than on Election Day. So the turnout operation really matters. And so any support people can be in that regard will really matter.
Eileen, thank you so much for your time today. Good luck. It’s been great getting to know you and your team. We’re going to be behind you every step of the way and be with you on election night as you hopefully raise your hand in victory.
Eileen:
All right. Well, thank you, Simon. Thanks to the whole Hopium team and community out there. Appreciate the love, support, and good wishes.
Simon:
Okay, thank you so much. Listen, everybody, thank you. If you liked this today, hit like, share with everybody you know, subscribe to Hopium, and please, let’s help Eileen win. This could be—after this incredibly successful election we had in November—this can be a next step and an important victory in a critical battleground state. This is within our grasp if we do the work and put our head down and get it done together. Thanks, everyone.
