A South Florida seat that was supposed to be safe has become one of the closest House races in the country. Florida's preliminary official results show Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart leading Democratic challenger Nicole Locklin by 1,772 votes in the 26th Congressional District — 114,547 votes (49.87 percent) to Locklin's 112,775 (49.10 percent) — with independent candidate Deborah Ann Meidinger Hosey at 2,348 votes (1.02 percent). The Associated Press rated the race Too Early to Call on Wednesday, November 4, with 156 of 158 precincts reporting (98.73 percent) and an estimated 99 percent of the vote counted. Some Florida outlets reported Diaz-Balart as retaining the seat, and his campaign claimed victory; Awaaz Punjab is reporting the lead and the AP's no-call status, because the remaining ballots and certification still stand between a lead and a result.
Source: Associated Press — Florida U.S. House District 26 results (Nov. 4, 2026)
A 42-point seat turned into a coin flip
The single biggest reason is the map. Diaz-Balart won by nearly 42 points in 2024 under the previous district boundaries, and forecasters rated the redrawn seat as safely or likely Republican. But Florida's new congressional map — pushed by President Donald Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis, it redrew 20 of the state's 28 House districts — removed Collier County from the 26th and added areas of southwestern Broward County with more Democratic voters, while keeping the Miami-Dade communities of Hialeah, Doral and Miami Lakes where Diaz-Balart's support is deepest. The result was a district that voted nothing like the old one: a 0.77-percentage-point race in a seat its holder carried by about 42 points two years ago.
Two districts in one: Broward versus Miami-Dade
The count split almost cleanly along the district's new internal border. Locklin led Diaz-Balart by about 22 points in the Broward County section, while Diaz-Balart secured a similar lead in the Miami-Dade section, according to Miami Herald figures reported by Cuba Headlines. Decision Desk HQ's county table told the same story in raw votes, with the race's total vote pool split between the two counties. That geography is why neither campaign could pull away: every Broward batch that widened Locklin's edge there was answered by Miami-Dade batches protecting Diaz-Balart's, and with an estimated 99 percent of the vote already counted, the remaining pool is small — but at a 1,772-vote margin, not yet small enough for the AP to call.
Florida law mandates an automatic machine recount if the difference between candidates is 0.5 percent or less of the total vote. Diaz-Balart's current margin is about 0.77 percentage points — outside the recount line. If the last ballots shrink the gap to 0.5 points or below, a machine recount is triggered automatically, and a still-closer margin after that can lead to a manual recount of overvotes and undervotes. (Florida statute as reported by Cuba Headlines, Nov. 4.)
The candidates: a 23-year incumbent and a first-time challenger
Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American Republican who has held a federal seat since January 2003, is one of South Florida's most established officeholders. President Trump endorsed him before the election, describing him as a 'proven leader,' Cuba Headlines reported. He backed the administration's maximum-pressure policy toward Cuba, but immigration also cut the other way: during the campaign he criticised some immigration raids as 'overblown,' called for individual assessments of immigrants with ongoing legal processes, and sought relief for certain groups of Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans — a live issue in a district full of immigrant families. Locklin, a 38-year-old attorney making her first congressional run, campaigned on the cost of living and housing in South Florida and proposed abolishing ICE and expanding legal immigration pathways. She did it with far less money: about $600,000 raised by mid-October against about $2.76 million for the Diaz-Balart campaign, according to election records cited by Cuba Headlines.
South Florida's tight night, and the delegation math
The 26th was not an outlier on Tuesday. In the neighbouring 27th District, Republican Representative Maria Elvira Salazar held a lead of 50.27 percent to 49.73 percent over Democrat Eliott Rodriguez late on election night, Creative Loafing Tampa reported, and Cuba Headlines reported Wednesday that she had emerged victorious; Republican Carlos Gimenez was projected to win the 28th. If the 26th District's lead holds, Florida's House delegation stays exactly where it was before the election — 20 Republicans and eight Democrats — despite a new map drawn to help Republicans and a national night that cost them the House. For the district's large immigrant communities, and for diaspora readers who follow U.S. immigration politics closely, the surviving detail is the closeness itself: a senior Republican who publicly broke with some of the administration's raid tactics nearly lost a seat his party's own mapmakers had just redrawn.
What happens next
Counties will finish processing the remaining ballots and move to canvass and certification of the unofficial results; the AP will call the race when its analysis supports it. If the certified margin finishes at 0.5 percent or below, Florida's automatic machine-recount machinery starts without either campaign asking. Diaz-Balart's claimed victory and Locklin's path both run through the same small pool of uncounted ballots, so the next update is expected from the counties rather than the campaigns. The new congressional term begins on January 3, 2027. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when the AP calls the race, when certification is complete, or if a recount is triggered.
Source: Cuba Headlines — Diaz-Balart narrowly retains seat in redrawn 26th District (Nov. 4, 2026)