Jesse Scheckner
The info spread like wildfire Monday: Miami-Dade finally flipped to red, with GOP voters outnumbering Democrats for the first time in the county’s history.
Except it wasn’t exactly true, according to the office of Alina Garcia, Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections (SOE).
An updated breakdown of Miami-Dade’s voter rolls the SOE shared with Florida Politics just after 4 p.m. Monday showed registered Democrats still lead Republicans in Florida’s most populous county by nearly 41,000 voters overall — 555,524 to 514,538.
Third- and no-party voters made up the largest chunk of the county’s 1.63 million registrants, with 562,967 eschewing either major party.
Republicans have passed Democrats, however, among “active” voters, meaning voters who have interacted with the SOE or cast ballots within the past two General Election cycles.
The SOE showed 449,337 active Republican voters, compared to 414,680 active Democrats and 417,144 active NPAs.
Meanwhile, 65,201 Republicans, 140,844 Democrats and 145,823 no-party voters were marked “inactive” Monday, a step the SOE takes after a voter is inactive for four straight years and does not respond to the office’s communications.
Florida GOP Chair Evan Power and Alexander Pantinakis, Political Director for the Florida GOP, noted that only active voters are counted at the state level and, considering that few inactive voters return to active status, Miami-Dade has essentially flipped.
“It’s a metric we have been using for years,” Power said on X. “Miami Dade is Red!”
But “inactive” doesn’t mean deactivated. And according to Miami-Dade SOE Director of Communications Ivan Castro, any contact with the office — signing a petition, calling the office or simply showing up to a polling site to vote — will return those voters to “active” status.
And if they go another four years without activity, they will be removed.
“These are people who, after all these years and all these emails, all these contacts, never got back to us,” Castro said by phone. “But if they show up on Election Day to vote, they can vote.”
Miami-Dade has been trending redder in recent years. In November 2024, for the first since George H.W. Bush topped Michael Dukakis there by 11 points in 1988, a Republican candidate for President won the county.
The Miami-Dade GOP also didn’t lose a single congressional or state legislative seat and swept all five races for constitutional offices.
That included the contest for SOE, which Garcia, a longtime Republican operative-turned-state lawmaker, won with 56% of the vote.
As of Monday, Democrats still technically hold the edge in numbers, though that wasn’t what many media outlets and notable GOP figures were saying.
The Hill, The Daily Wire, Florida Phoenix and Florida’s Voice reported that Miami-Dade Republicans outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by 23,580 voters.
Power, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the presumptive front-runner in the 2026 race for Governor, shared the info too.
Their source: an 8:39 a.m. X post by Decision Desk HQ Director of Data Science Michael Pruser, who said the shift came after Miami-Dade “completed its off-year voter roll maintenance (and) shed 172,747 voters from its active rolls.”
“Today marks Republicans’ first-ever lead in vote registration in Miami-Dade,” he said.
The number of voters in Miami-Dade shifted from “active” to “inactive” was actually 351,868. And counting only voters listed as “active” by the Miami-Dade SOE, there are 34,657 more Republicans than Democrats in the county.
The Miami-Dade SOE’s Office said it didn’t complete and reconfirm its count until about seven hours after Pruser’s post.
To paraphrase a misquoted witticism from Mark Twain, reports of the Democrats’ demise in Miami-Dade were — somewhat — exaggerated. For now.
