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Florida’s shift to the right is perhaps nowhere more notable than in this vibrant swath of the state’s southeast coast where the latest Donald Trump drama is unfolding.
Republicans have made steady inroads in this former Democratic stronghold in recent years, culminating in the GOP carrying Miami-Dade County in last year’s midterm elections. The party’s broader future could now hinge on what happens in south Florida -– but for a very different reason.
Trump, the former president who is again the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, will make his first appearance in federal court Tuesday in Miami, where he faces 37 felony counts related to charges of illegal stealing of classified information.
The charges have propelled Miami into the center of a storyline that, until recently, was largely thought to be unfolding in a grand jury room in Washington. And it has brought to the forefront Trump’s rising popularity among Florida’s Latinos, some of whom have drawn comparisons between the former president’s prosecution and events abroad in which opposition leaders have been arrested or prosecuted in kangaroo courts — despite the U.S. tradition of respect for the rule of law and an independent judiciary.
“These are the sort of things that you see in the Caribbean and Latin America, where you have the party in power persecuting the opposition,” said Kevin Marino Cabrero, a Miami-Dade County commissioner who is friends with Trump and served as the Florida state director for his 2020 reelection campaign. “This community, what it sees is injustice being committed.”
Miami-Dade is the state’s most populous county and home to 1.5 million Latinos of voting age. Democrat Hillary Clinton carried the county over Trump by nearly 30 percentage points in 2016. But Trump made gains in 2020, getting the margin down to 9 percentage points against Democrat Joe Biden.
Last year, the county flipped, with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who built his brand as a MAGA politician lifted by Trump from relative obscurity, defeating his Democratic opponent by more than 11 points.
