In Miami, grocery and housing prices are soaring. It made Trump more popular.

MIAMI – Larry Milian makes it a habit not to talk about politics. Milian, a high school teacher who helps manage the only student-run radio station on SiriusXM, usually sticks to sports or offers up life advice for students.

But on a recent Saturday, he broke that rule and shared that he had “absolutely” voted for President-elect Donald Trump.

“I actually don't like Donald Trump,” said Milian, who lives in Hialeah, a blue-collar manufacturing enclave in Miami where Trump is so popular a city council candidate put the former reality star and commander-in-chief's image on her campaign signs.

Milian said he made his decision based “not so much (on) who I want to go have a beer with – but who I think can run the country better.”

The main problem that he thought Trump could fix? The economy.

“The cost of living in Miami is really tall, and there's no reason for it because it's Miami,” he said. “It's not New York; it's not Chicago.”

Many longtime Miamians say they've felt this way since the pandemic transformed much of their city. As New Yorkers and Californians faced lockdown orders and restrictions, many flocked to Florida, with the largest increase of New Yorkers moving to Miami where they could benefit from tax and mandate breaks while working remotely. But along with having the largest net population gain of any state in the country came exploding living and housing costs. Housing prices have risen almost 50%, according to the UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index released last month.

Grocery prices shot up. (An average household spent about $327 per trip). So did electric bills. A carton of eggs last year cost $5.

Milian, whose relatives immigrated from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, has had enough. He is part of a growing constituency of Latino voters – especially men – who supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election. And in presumably purple Miami-Dade County where Democrats had won every presidential election for 36 years, Latino voters flipped the county red.

High prices and inflation were among the top issues for Latino voters, according to pre- and post-election polling. And among Latino men, Trump peeled away longtime supporters of the Democratic Party.

In Miami-Dade County, Trump got 55.4% of the vote while Kamala Harris got 43.9%. Democrats Joe Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 both won the majority of votes in the county when they ran for president.

Fernan Amandi, a political consultant who has done polling for Democrats in the past, said the party neglected to make inroads with communities that supported them in the past.

“They have, in essence, just ceded the county and ceded the state to the Republicans,” he said. “So it's not surprising that the Republicans would then quickly overrun the county.”

Milian, the teacher and radio host, said Florida voters' shift to the right is also about everyday luxuries. Four years ago, he said, he could buy a 12-pack of Coke Zero for about $4.50 and three 12-packs for about $13 at Publix, a local grocery chain. Now, he can’t get a 12-pack of Coke Zero for under $9.

“I love Coke Zero, he said. “It makes me wonder what happened.”

Expanding the GOP's reach

Sebastian Villa didn’t always support Republicans. The 37-year-old sales representative voted for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2012 election.

But in recent years, Villa said he shifted away from the party. He grew up as a Democrat but began doing his “own research” and found he connected more with Republicans and Trump.

“Looking at what has happened and what continues to go on in the world and just in the country, I figured I was making a mistake in being a Democrat,” Villa said.

Obama won a record level of support among Latino voters after he invested in community outreach efforts and also because he promised to enact comprehensive immigration reform – garnering more than 70% of support among Latinos nationwide, according to Pew Research Center. The former president also made historic inroads with a longtime Republican stronghold: Cuban American voters. During his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama earned the largest share of support of any Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton.

The majority of Miami-Dade County residents are Hispanic and Cuban Americans make up the largest percentage of that demographic, according to the U.S. Census. A growing number of Venezuelans, Colombians and Nicaraguans have also settled in the area.

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Republicans in the past decade have focused on appealing to more Latino voters across Florida, beyond their party's existing support from most Cuban American voters. In recent election cycles, the GOP began to reap the rewards of that outreach.

In 2020, Trump beat Biden among Latino voters in Miami-Dade County by a 2 to 1 margin, even though Biden won the majority of Florida's Latino votes. In the 2022 midterms, Gov. Ron DeSantis made even more gains – becoming the first Republican governor in 20 years to win Miami-Dade County. DeSantis, who ran against Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, is reportedly under consideration to replace the president-elect's controversial pick for defense secretary if that nomination falls through.

In 2024, Trump wasn’t the only Republican to win big in Miami-Dade. GOP Sen. Rick Scott also won the majority of votes in the county, flipping his electoral outcome six years prior. In 2018, Democratic senate candidate Bill Nelson held the county over Scott by roughly 20 percentage points. Scott still won the state that midterm cycle.

In this election cycle, Scott leapfrogged over Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Miami-Dade, winning the county by nearly 10 percentage points.

Employing a combination of grassroots and community organizing, including informational events, door knocking, phone banking and digital ads, Republicans consistently reached out to Latino voters, focusing their efforts on voters who were not affiliated with a party.

Cesar Grajales, director of public affairs for the LIBRE Initiative, a conservative advocacy group that targets Hispanic voters, said Democrats didn’t continue their local networking and took the once-Democratic stronghold for granted.

The other problem for Democrats was their message for voters in the area, added Grajales, 43.

“You have to, regardless of party affiliation, you have to knock on the door, you have to talk to people,” he said.

The message Latino voters were looking for was a promise to address the high prices that everyday Americans were experiencing, Grajales said.

“They were pushing for the political agenda that is completely disconnected from the needs and the reality of the Latinos, and I think that was put in this election cycle,” said Grajales, who also hosts a morning radio show on Spanish station La Nueva Poderosa. 

As a father of two, Villa said it’s gotten harder to live in Miami, where the cost of his weekly grocery run has doubled, from $150 to nearly $300. These skyrocketing prices drove him to stick with and continue to support GOP candidates.

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“It's hard to live right now, to be honest with you,” Villa said. “Everybody decided to migrate from their different closed states, and since we're so open that it kind of made it hard for people that live here to be able to afford a house, be able to afford living.”

In the end, voters said it comes down to who can make change for the better.

Milian doesn’t feel any particular loyalty to Trump. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, although he did support him in 2020. He’s voted for both parties, he said. The real test will be whether Trump does what he says he would do: bring down prices.

“If in four years, Trump didn't do what he said he was gonna do with the economy, we'll vote for somebody else who we think will,” Milian said.

(This story has been updated to add a photo.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Miami grocery, housing prices surge helped Trump win election