Miami, Florida – Florida is home to 1.9 million Cuban Americans, the largest concentration in the United States. At least 900,000 live in Miami-Dade County, on the peninsula’s southern tip.

For decades, that Cuban American community has formed a reliably Republican stronghold in South Florida. But last December, a crack emerged. Miami elected its first Democratic mayor in nearly 28 years.

The win fuelled speculation of a political shift under way in Florida, a largely right-leaning state. But when it comes to the powerful Cuban American vote, experts say no shake-up is on the horizon — at least, not in the foreseeable future.

“The fact is that Cubans, until proven otherwise, are going to support the Republican Party,” said Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University.

Florida’s August 18 primaries will provide a chance for this key demographic to select their party favourites ahead of a contentious midterm election in November.

But they will also be an endurance test for Republicans and Democrats seeking to target the Cuban American base far beyond this election cycle.

Origins of a right-wing base

Analysts say the Republican Party’s success with the Cuban American vote can be traced back to a history of strategic investment in the community.

Florida sits roughly 145 kilometres, or 90 miles, from the island of Cuba. While immigration from the island had been occurring for generations, the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s triggered an exodus to the US, with waves of departures unfolding over decades.

Some left because of the island’s deteriorating economic conditions. Others, to escape turmoil or political repression. Many remain fervent critics of the island’s socialist government.

But experts like Grenier caution against assuming that Cuban exiles naturally drifted to the Republican Party. Historical voting trends, he said, do not bear that out.

Rather, he believes Republicans made inroads during the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan was in power, by directly appealing to disenfranchised Cubans.

At the time, there was a backlash in South Florida to Cuban immigration. A 1980 ballot referendum in Miami-Dade County restricted government documents to English only. Rental signs reportedly warned off prospective tenants: “No Blacks, no Cubans, no dogs.”

But Grenier explained that the Republican Party engaged with Cuban American voters when other political groups were hesitant to.

Plus, the Reagan-era messaging towards Cuba was straightforward: The platform was strictly anti-communist, advocating high pressure on the Cuban government.

That helped instil a strong sense of party allegiance that has been passed from one generation of Cuban Americans to the next.

“There’s a socialisation process here,” Grenier said. “There’s an incubation of political ideology going on in Miami-Dade County.”

Even “new arrivals”, he added, come to “know one thing: that the Republican Party is the party of the Cubans”.

‘A losing proposition’

Other factors have strained relations between Cuban Americans and the Democratic Party in recent years.

Experts, for instance, often point to the 1999 case of Elian Gonzalez, the five-year-old Cuban boy found drifting in an inner tube off Florida’s coast. His mother had drowned fleeing Cuba, and her relatives fought to keep the young boy in Florida.

But the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton forcibly removed the child from their custody, returning him instead to his father in Cuba.

The episode is credited with souring the Cuban American community’s outlook towards the Democratic Party. Some have even suggested it doomed the Democrats in the 2000 presidential race, when Florida was a pivotal swing state.

The Atlantic magazine ran a headline afterwards that read, “Elian Gonzalez defeated Al Gore”, referencing the Democratic Party’s failed presidential nominee.

Grenier, however, speculates that Florida Democrats simply have not done enough to give Cuban Americans an alternative to the Republican Party. Many of their policy proposals are skewed to the centre.

“Democrats have given up on Cuban Americans,” Grenier said. “They’re trying to outflank the Republicans on the right, and that’s a losing proposition.”

Kevin Cooper, the chairman of the Miami-Dade Republican Party, told Al Jazeera he is confident his party will continue its winning streak with Cuban American voters.

“Every election cycle, we see a poll that tries to convince everyone that Cubans have abandoned the Republican Party,” he said. “Then election day rolls around. We make our case, and we win big.”

Ahead of November’s midterms, Cooper explained that Republican candidates are organising door-knocking campaigns across the county. Some even offer prospective voters campaign-branded espresso cups, tailored for small shots of sweet Cuban coffee.

Candidates, Cooper said, “will give them away at the door, instead of a door hanger or a palm card. Naturally, that leads to an invitation to come in for coffee”.

“We have to earn [the Cuban American] vote, and we do it. We earn their vote with policy, and with action, and with results, and with communication and presence.”

The Miami-Dade Democratic Party declined Al Jazeera’s requests for an interview.

Campaigning on foreign policy

State Representative Juan Carlos Porras is among the Republicans campaigning for re-election during the 2026 midterms.

In 2022, he estimates that he knocked on 30,000 doors ahead of his first election to the Florida House of Representatives. The child of Cuban immigrants, he represents District 119, which covers western Miami-Dade County and is home to a large number of Cuban Americans.

But Porras, who has been publicly endorsed by US President Donald Trump, maintains a hardline approach to Cuban foreign policy.

In March, the Miami Herald quoted him as saying he would support the US annexation of Cuba, envisioning the island as a territory like Puerto Rico.

“I still stand by those words,” he told Al Jazeera. “I still think I would love to see Cuba be a US territory.”

Trump has also hinted at military intervention in Cuba as a possibility. “Whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it,” Trump said in March.

Surveys suggest that such remarks resonate with South Florida’s Cuban American community.

An April poll from the Miami Herald found that 79 percent of South Florida’s Cuban Americans support some form of US military intervention in Cuba.

Among that group, 36 percent backed the idea of overthrowing Cuba’s socialist government.

A separate survey in March, from Florida International University’s Latino Public Opinion Forum, found that “Cuban-origin respondents and Florida Latinos form the clearest pocket of support for Trump and for tougher regional policy toward Venezuela, Cuba, and Latin America”.

That makes Cuban Americans an outlier among Latino groups, the survey noted. Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and those of South and Central American origin largely expressed disapproval with Trump’s interventionist foreign policy.

Porras, however, sees Cuban Americans’ affinity for Trump as an extension of their immigrant experience. “They come fleeing” what Porras calls “radical leftist communism”.

“I think Cuban Americans primarily are conservative,” Porras said. “The Republican Party is much more aligned to what we believe in than the left.”

Divisions over immigration

But one element of the Republican platform has raised concern among Cuban Americans, according to recent polling.

Trump has championed the mass deportation of immigrants with irregular status. That has included deporting Cubans who have lived in the country for decades.

But Cuba has largely rejected the US deportation flights. As a result, Cuban deportees are often sent to third-party countries, where they have no ties.

The group Human Rights Watch estimates that the US has deported as many as 4,353 Cubans to Mexico between January 2025 and March 2026 — the largest number of any non-Mexican nationality.

That policy clashes with the desires of the Cuban American community in South Florida, according to the Miami Herald’s April poll.

Roughly 68 percent disapprove of deporting Cubans. An even higher percentage favours resuming immigration processing for Cubans already in the country.

Porras’s Democratic opponent, Reysy “Rey” Sordo, is campaigning on that sentiment. A 27-year-old Miami native also born to Cuban immigrants, he opposes what he sees as heavy-handed crackdowns by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies.

“ICE has a duty to uphold and respect and treat our citizens and non-citizens with dignity,” Sordo told Al Jazeera.

Sordo, who is running unopposed in August’s Democratic primary, shares the view that the island’s current government is an “oppressive and destructive regime that has led Cuba to its downfall”.

Still, he said he prefers to focus on issues at home, including Trump’s mass deportation effort.

“Everybody is living under fear right now, whether it’s fear of not being able to move out for young people, fear of not being able to afford a life here in Miami, fear of being deported,” Sordo said.

Stephanie Best, a volunteer with the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, believes Trump’s policies on immigration could ultimately leave Cuban Americans disenchanted with the right wing.

“I think that many people are kind of starting to see that they’ve been lied to,” Best said. “They thought they would not be detained; they’re being detained. They thought they would not be deported; they’re being deported.”

Surveys have also suggested a growing generational divide among Cuban Americans.

While a majority of Cuban Americans across all age groups identify as Republicans, younger voters, ages 18 to 39, are more likely to identify as Democrats or independent.

Sordo views such trends as evidence that Cuban American voters are “tired of partisan tribalism”. South Florida’s Latino electorate may be powerful, but Sordo explained that many voters still feel disenfranchised.

“We’re by and large out of the conversation, whether it be by our own people who make it to office and then pull up the ladder,” Sordo said, “or by folks who don’t look like us and have oftentimes suppressed folks that look like us.”

Addressing cost of living

Still, polls show immigration is not the biggest issue for Cuban Americans, nor for Latinos more broadly, during this year’s midterm election cycle.

Rather, it is economic strain that is topping voter concerns in the lead-up to November.

A May poll from the Hispanic advocacy group UnidosUS found that 30 percent of Cuban respondents ranked cost of living and inflation as the most important issue for Congress to address — a higher rate than for any other issue.

Immigration ranked sixth among their concerns, behind housing, healthcare and border security.

“There’s a lot of volatility in who [Latinos] support for office, and I think it’s kind of natural,” Jared Nordlund, the Florida state director at UnidosUS, told Al Jazeera.

“I think [Cuba] has definitely been on people’s minds out there. But in terms of the real issues that people are dealing with, it’s much more the pocketbook issues.”

Similarly, Grenier has counterintuitive advice for politicians hoping to loosen the Republican grip on the Cuban American community: “Don’t emphasise Cuba policy.”

He believes issues like cost of living, healthcare and housing will be more persuasive to Cuban American voters.

“The Democrats right now are running way behind in the race, and if they ever hope to turn it around, they have to start with small steps,” Grenier said.

He pointed out that Hialeah, a Cuban American neighbourhood just west of Miami, had some of the nation’s highest levels of enrolment under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

That speaks to the need to address affordability issues, according to Grenier. And if Democrats hope to sway Florida to the left, the powerful Cuban American community will be key.

“I don’t know if [Democrats] are going to do anything in the short term, but they have to start thinking in the long term if they really want to turn this around,” Grenier said.

“If they ever want Miami-Dade County to be a bastion of Democratic voters again, they have to get the margins, at least, of the Cuban vote.”

Short of a tailored strategy for addressing Cuban American voters, Grenier believes the Democrats will make little headway in flipping South Florida: “It’s simply not going to happen.”