TALLAHASSEE — In the back seat of the pink and yellow van with her face plastered to its side, Angie Nixon put her head in her hands. After campaign stops that week in Gainesville, Tampa and Miami, the seemingly indefatigable Nixon, a three-term state House representative whose small-budget U.S. Senate campaign upended expectations in the nation’s third-largest state, was visibly tired. With a hoarse voice, she still had one more event with Asian American voters, several appearances at FAMU Homecoming events and a three-hour drive back to Jacksonville to go that day.
Should she win Tuesday, Nixon would be the first Black person to represent Florida as a U.S. senator and the first hailing from Jacksonville in almost 100 years. And she would have done it despite breaking nearly every rule in Florida politics.
In rally after rally, Nixon, in her southern drawl, has invited electric crowds to call her “radical” for demanding affordability across the state through initiatives like Medicare for all and taxing billionaires. The union and community organizer has kept a grueling schedule as she tours the state.
“It’s not a matter of progressive campaigns. It’s a matter of campaigns that put people first,” Nixon said.
First elected to represent a Jacksonville-based state House seat in 2020, Nixon quickly made a name for herself as a disruptor in the DeSantis era, breaking the chamber’s decorum with sit-ins and protests and megaphones. Unabashedly a progressive force in a state Democratic Party that often elevates centrists for statewide office, Nixon joined the Democratic Socialists of America and then defeated former national security official and establishment Democrat candidate Alex Vindman in the primary election.
Nixon, who is everything that Vindman is not, was thrust into the national political limelight the night of the primary election, securing over 55% of the vote with a campaign running on less than $1 million at the time to his $17 million operation. Since then she’s gained endorsements from former President Barack Obama and a coalition of progressive U.S. senators and representatives.
Her campaign has held raucous rallies across the state and generated unlikely imagery in a conservative state with a major nominee for Senate standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the country’s best-known democratic socialist, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“I remember when Angie Nixon did her sit-in in Ron DeSantis’s office. That is what really told me she’s legit. She’s not just saying it to grift or anything. She’s here for people and that made me want to vote for her,” James Blackman said, a first year University of Florida student from St. Petersburg who attended a Sanders-Nixon rally in Gainesville.
In policy and style, Nixon is running a different kind of campaign in Florida, reclaiming what it even means to be radical.
Her Republican rival, current U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody, is betting that a handful of tightly controlled campaign events and attack ads about Nixon’s association with self-described democratic socialists will be enough to secure the Senate seat.
Moody, Florida’s former attorney general whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the Senate after Marco Rubio joined the Trump administration, is banking on Florida’s 30-year political gravity carrying her across the finish line.
She has run a tight-lipped campaign even by Florida standards. Moody has declined invitations to debate Nixon and rarely takes questions from the press. Rallies featuring state and national Republican leaders have restricted access to a few favorable news outlets like Fox News based on invitation.
The Moody campaign has not responded to multiple messages from a Florida Trib reporter.
Even in Republican-friendly Florida, the Moody campaign has many forces working against it. Food, gas, insurance and housing prices continue to skyrocket in the state where GOP leaders have touted affordability for decades.
A grand jury report, which an appeals court has since ordered to be stricken from the public record, found that Moody also played a role in what it considered the misappropriation of $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement to the Hope Florida Foundation. That money was moved into political committees, which then used it to finance ads that helped defeat a proposed state constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana.
When serving as Florida Attorney General, Moody “authorized” her deputy attorney general to sign the settlement agreement. Moody has said little about the controversy, which has dominated Florida politics for months.
Moody has labeled Nixon as a “radical socialist” during rallies, and attack ads use that same language. Although that rhetoric plays on Nixon’s association with DSA, it also echoes language Republicans have long deployed in campaigns against Democrats in a state with a large diaspora of Hispanic voters who fled left-wing authoritarian governments in Latin America.
In the week leading up to the general election, Moody has claimed that Nixon quoted the Communist Manifesto on rally stages and posted “THE COMMUNISTS ARE COMING!” on X.
“It’s so ridiculous that she just feels like she can win just based off of running bad ads and spending money. And so we are working hard to dispel that rumor, that notion,” Nixon said when asked about the attack ads.
A campaign of contrasts
Nixon and Moody are native Floridians, but that’s where their similarities end.
Moody is the daughter of a federal judge from Plant City, a small town between Tampa and Lakeland. Nixon, from a working-class neighborhood north of downtown Jacksonville, grew up in a house torn by domestic violence, watching her mother work two jobs.
Moody went to law school, became a federal prosecutor, and in 2006, at 31, became the youngest judge in Florida when she was elected to the bench in Hillsborough County. Nixon became a union organizer and ran for City Council in 2008 with her one-year-old daughter, Natalie, attached to her hip. She lost that race.
Nixon is also a small business owner of Cafe Resistance, a bookstore and coffee shop located on Jacksonville’s Northside which is a short drive from where she grew up on Moncrief Road.
“I legislate through the lens of being someone that grew up on Moncrief in one of the marginalized, low income communities where we get a bad rap,” she said.
In 2018, Moody secured the Republican nomination for Florida attorney general after a primary in which she was accused of being too liberal for conservative voters. In the years since, she allied herself closely with DeSantis and Trump. In 2020, she backed a legal effort led by Texas to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block election results in several swing states won by Joe Biden.
Nixon would go on to serve as the deputy field director for national Black outreach on Sanders’s presidential campaign. By 2020, Nixon ran for the Florida House while pregnant with her second daughter, Ashanti, defeating incumbent Kimberly Daniels, a conservative Democrat. Redistricting in 2022 moved Nixon into district 13, where she won against unaffiliated candidate La’Ciara Masline and succeeded Rep. Tracie Davis.
Since then, Nixon has continued her grassroots efforts in the form of labor organizing as executive director of Florida For All, an alliance of six organizations that promotes voting rights and enfranchisement. Alongside her legislative work, she is currently Director of the Florida Public Service Union’s Higher Education Campaign.
Nixon’s fiery, pink, grassroots campaign pulled off one major upset in August. Her campaign has more money now — about $11 million, according to campaign-finance records — but is still viewed as an underdog in a state with a well-oiled Republican machine that has rarely lost high-stakes races.
“I am someone who prides myself on putting people before politics, people before profits, and even people before party, and that’s exactly what we did with this campaign," Nixon said. "Good old-fashioned organizing will beat big money each and every day of a week, but it’s just a matter of making sure that you organize the people.”
Trinity Webster-Bass reported from Jacksonville, Tallahassee and Gainesville for this story.
This article first appeared on The Florida Trib and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
