Don’t freak out about the Miami mayoral election, and here’s why:
Excerpt:
Miami’s mayoral election has been framed as a political earthquake, but those sweeping claims don’t hold water. They do, however, evince the ignorance of all too many, across party lines, about the actual power structure in the city, Miami-Dade County, and Florida.
What happened in the mayoral runoff deserves attention, but it is hardly the warning siren some Democrat operatives want it to be, nor is it a reason for Republicans to panic. Miami politics simply don’t function the way national narratives assume.
Let’s start with what this race actually was. The “nonpartisan” mayor of Miami holds a largely ceremonial role. Real executive authority rests with the city manager, who can only serve with the approval of the five-member city commission. That “nonpartisan” commission currently has a stable 3-2 Republican majority.
The mayor may nominate a manager, but the commission decides who ultimately runs the city. Power isn’t shifting in some theatrical way.
Beyond that, the partisan landscape inside the city is very different from the broader county. Miami voters lean blue by registration, with over 61,000 Democrats to roughly 53,000 Republicans. That imbalance has kept the city competitive for Democrats even as Republicans increasingly dominate Miami-Dade County itself.
Donald Trump won Miami-Dade by double-digits in 2024, taking over 55 percent of the vote. Yet he narrowly lost the municipality of Miami, a reminder that the Magic City’s elections sit on different political terrain.
Those differences matter because they show that a Democrat winning the Miami mayor’s race isn’t a shocking anomaly. It reflects the city’s registration edge and its habit of splitting from its surrounding communities. That environment helped Eileen Higgins secure 60 percent in the runoff. It ended a long GOP streak in a ceremonial office, but it didn’t alter the county’s political center of gravity.
Republicans still hold a plurality countywide, with roughly 448,732 registered GOP voters versus about 407,343 Democrats as of November 30.
Looking at what happened just one year earlier underscores how strong Republicans remain in Miami-Dade. In 2024, the GOP swept every partisan countywide office: sheriff, clerk of courts, property appraiser, supervisor of elections, and tax collector. These victories mirrored Trump’s concurrent 55.2 percent countywide performance.
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Most media has no clue including TGP about local politics. In the city I live in Florida the governing arrangement is just like Miami’s, the Mayor is a figure head the city council commission is the governing body that passes or rejects legislation, approves development etc...
There’s Nothing Funnier Than Fussy, Furious Euroweenies
Excerpt:
Hearing disturbingly feminine, Somali corruption-curious Minnesota governor Tim Walz complaining that, because of Donald Trump, people are driving by his house shouting “Retard!” should’ve been the funniest thing that happened over the last few news cycles, but our European friends have done it one better. Actually, they’re not our friends. They’re annoying layabouts who do nothing but whine and complain as they feed off the corpse of the civilization they inherited like cultural trust fund babies. They have gotten very upset because Donald Trump’s national security strategy accurately recognizes that Europe is unable to defend itself and is increasingly unworthy of us squandering more time, blood, and treasure to do it for them. So, they’re lashing out, threatening to be responsible for their own defense.
Yeah, that’ll show us. Throw us in that briar patch, Horst. There aren’t enough “LOLs” on the Internet for how funny it is to see you stomping your feet because we’re done picking up the check.
......Spoiler: There’s never going to be any gratitude. There can’t be. The fact that we uncouth hicks from the New World had to come back to unscrew the mess the Europeans have made of Europe was never going to get us anything like a simple danke schön. That they needed us grated on them then, and it grates at them now that big, loud Yankees were the only thing keeping their sorry butts from chaos. The eurotrash always imagine themselves as the pinnacle of human achievement, though it was really their ancestors who did the civilizational heavy lifting. These sorry sons of greater fathers look at the castles and cathedrals, the culture and the art, and imagine they had something to do with it other than receiving it on a silver platter and promptly turning it over to the horde of seventh-century savages they invited into their country to do all the dirty work that they imagine they themselves are too good for and to pay into the welfare state in place of the babies they were unable to make because of their cultural and physical impotence.
You know that parable about the servants the master gives coins and one of them goes and makes multiples in profit, and he gets praise (Matthew 25:14-30)? Another makes a little less, but he also gets praise. The third buries his talents because he doesn’t want to lose any, and he loses even that in the end. The Europeans have managed to do even worse. They didn’t even preserve what they were given. Instead, they spent their cultural bounty on the equivalent of hookers and blow, and now some imam with five wives and a scimitar is living next door while the call to prayer keeps the euroweenies up at night.
But don’t tell the Europeans that. They don’t want to hear it. In fact, they don’t want to hear anything. That’s why they’re trying to sue Elon Musk and X out of existence with EU fines over transparent nonsense. They’re not mad because his blue checks aren’t sufficiently blue-check-worthy. They are mad because Elon Musk allows their citizens to see and say forbidden things, things they can’t control, and they understand that the only way they can retain power is by limiting debate to a narrow range of views that reaffirms their authority and confirms their own power. The idea that these tin-pot goofs imagine that they get to dictate free speech to Americans is hilarious.
......It’s nice to go back to Europe and visit. I liked Portugal earlier this year – very good wine and surprisingly based people. There are a lot of cool Europeans. They’re just overshadowed by the fascist bureaucrats who rule over them and the vast number of Europeans who are ridiculous, pompous has-beens with a truly inexplicable amount of self-regard.
.....Now, they have taken to jumping on the Twitter machine, the online forum that they hope to someday control, informing us that they’re very mad and that, in light of Donald Trump breaking with the nearly 80-year-long tradition of America pulling Europe’s weight, the Europeans are going to show us what for by doing it themselves. The guys who can’t put together a tank battalion or a flotilla of ships on par with that of your basic Venezuelan drug cartel are going to create a military to pick up the slack for the United States because we’re an unreliable ally now. Good. We don’t want you to rely on us. We want you to rely on yourselves.
But that’s going to be a problem. It’s going to cost money, and you’ve been spending it on importing zillions of Third World barbarians and paying your own people not to work. It’s unclear where you’ll get the money to do all this rearming but go for it. Sincerely. We want you to. Of course, your own people don’t want to do it. The Germans can’t recruit anywhere near as many soldiers as they need, so they took the most basic step towards conscription, which was sending out a questionnaire, saying, “Fritz, could you be in der Bundeswehr if we needed you?” and the Teutonic teenagers chimped out. Why, defending their country is the job of Nebraskan farm boys and eager Appalachians, not the precious heirs of Arminius!
Vets like me and @CynicalPublius, along with a bunch of others who also served in the Cold War, in Europe, and/or with Europeans, are taking a special delight in watching our alleged allies squirm. They didn’t like us all that much then, and they don’t like us all that much now, but they love having Uncle Sucker forking out the cash and corpuscles to keep their Ponzi continent alive. A lot of you guys reading this feel the same – I was at Nelligan Kaserne in the VII Corps AO near Stuttgart, and if you pounded the same plätze, I don’t need to translate that (throw where you were assigned into the comments!). But those of us who helped protect the European ingrates over the years will understand that when they cry, we just shrug and say “macht nichts.”