Angie Nixon Won’t Stop Fighting
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It is one month earlier than Election Day, and a crowd of trustworthy Democrats has gathered close to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for what needs to be a tense event. The viewers within the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center is usually older and white, the form of “Vote Blue” stalwarts from surrounding Broward County who sport I MISS BARACK caps and pine for the times when the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was algae free. Angie Nixon, the candidate right here to deal with them, is operating what seems to be like a doomed marketing campaign for the U.S. Senate. She has considerably much less cash than her Republican opponent, is trailing in most polls, and has damaged with occasion leaders in nearly each inner dispute of the previous ten years, from Bernie versus Hillary in 2016 as to whether Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
And but contained in the air-conditioned foyer of the auditorium, a minor miracle is happening. These partisans love her. “You finally feel a momentum,” says a delighted John McRae, who’s there along with his spouse, Nancy. “She’s very exciting,” says Deborah Webb, an area substitute instructor, virtually giddy. “She’s kind of like Christ coming into the Temple and throwing over the tables,” says Tim Singer, who plans to volunteer for Nixon, leaning nearer to be heard over the buzzing crowd.
The indisputable fact that Nixon has this viewers so amped up may shock nationwide Democrats. Her popularity as a bullhorn-toting agitator within the Florida home of representatives made Nixon a divisive determine within the state occasion. She gained her seat by primarying a fellow Democrat, Kimberly Daniels, and has carried out protests on the home flooring with out the say-so of occasion leaders. After a coverage disagreement, Nixon and one colleague, state consultant Michele Rayner, didn’t communicate for 2 months. (Rayner, now an adviser to Nixon’s marketing campaign and a detailed buddy, admits Nixon was proper.)
Many of the occasion’s moderates have been in opposition to Nixon’s Senate bid in the course of the major. And normally, Establishment Democrats have been “not supportive” of her confrontational strategies, Rayner tells me. They fear she is going to push out trustworthy, if centrist, Democrats. In 2023, Nixon launched a cease-fire decision to halt Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It infuriated the Democratic state senate minority chief, Jason Pizzo, who went as far as to publicly apologize to Israel’s consul common to Miami. A yr and a half later, Pizzo declared the Democratic Party in Florida “dead” and dramatically give up to grow to be an impartial.
In spite of those considerations from occasion officers, on August 18, when given the selection between her and Alex Vindman, a stiff, poll-tested reasonable of the sort Democrats have been foisting upon Floridians for years, voters selected Nixon by a decisive 12-point margin. The end result shocked nationwide commentators. Vindman is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who grew to become an MSNBC darling after testifying at President Trump’s impeachment hearings. He had out-fundraised Nixon 16-to-1 and was so assured she posed no menace to his nomination that he barely bothered to marketing campaign in opposition to her. It was a testomony to how poorly Vindman understood Florida — “He says he’s lived here for three years,” Nixon tells me, “but I had never heard of him” — that he did not see what was apparent on the bottom: Democratic voters have been fed up with the established order.
For them, the previous decade has been one agonizing defeat after one other. Since 2016, what was as soon as essentially the most prized swing state on the electoral map has grow to be a dependable GOP stronghold. Trump has carried Florida in three consecutive presidential elections, rising his margin of victory each time. The 2022 midterms have been such a massacre for Democrats — Governor Ron DeSantis and then-Senator Marco Rubio gained reelection by 19 and 16 factors, respectively — that strategists and donors began to put in writing off the state. “Florida is off the board,” DeSantis bragged to Fox News in 2024. “It is a Republican state.”
Nixon, a dynamic 42-year-old Black former single mom and union organizer, has premised her marketing campaign on the concept that GOP rule has been a catastrophe. Florida has grow to be extra repressive, with bans on abortion and public-school-curriculum supplies going into impact, and fewer reasonably priced, with analysts rating its housing markets among the many most hostile within the nation towards renters. She caught hearth as a result of she appears to grasp higher than every other candidate that this election is about “rent, gas, food, and how Florida has become the Hamptons of the United States,” as one longtime Democratic donor, Mitchell Berger, places it. The Democrats’ go-to response over the previous 30 years has largely been to run essentially the most anodyne candidates they’ll discover, solely to observe Florida grow to be redder. Nixon has taken the other strategy, seizing on a polarizing agenda of larger authorities and common packages that pundits lengthy assumed would solely resonate in deep-blue states like New York.
Her major win needs to be thrilling for the occasion. She is an genuine working-class candidate with charisma, the form of populist whom political strategists have salivated over this midterm season. “Donald Trump’s net worth has increased by over $4 billion since he’s been back in office. What y’all bank accounts look like?” Nixon asks the group. “I mean, seriously, what do your bank accounts look like?” People begin calling out numbers. “Somebody said, ‘Double zero.’” Nixon bows her head in pity. “Lord. We going to work on that.” But the nationwide occasion was initially cool to her efforts. It was galling for Nixon, partly due to Democrats’ lip service to how a lot they owe to Black girls. “It’s like they want our labor,” she tells me, “but they don’t want our leadership.” It additionally appears shortsighted. For Nixon, November 3 will mark not the tip however one other starting. The deeper reckoning comes after the election. She desires to reshape Florida politics — win or lose, with or with out nationwide Democrats’ approval.
In DeSantis’s workplace, the place she vowed to remain till he met along with her about Florida’s congressional maps.
Photo: Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat
When Nixon introduced her Senate bid in January, she’d spent months making an attempt to recruit another person for the job. She had a number of good choices, she says, together with colleagues within the state legislature who she knew “had the back of the community and weren’t going to sell out.” But none of them might be satisfied a statewide race was definitely worth the headache. “They kept saying, ‘Where am I going to get the money from? It’s Florida; it’s deep red.’ They felt like it was just a suicide mission.” That Nixon rejected their defeatism is constant along with her longtime strategy to politics. Rather than despair at subpar management, she runs for workplace herself, even when it means dispatching fellow Democrats. “I have no problem primarying people,” she says. “That’s what I have always done.”
The joke round Florida is that Nixon’s is a “friends and family” marketing campaign. It closely depends on her decades-old alliances and private relationships as a substitute of the same old consultants and party-assigned staffers. Former colleagues from the state legislature and SEIU and even Nixon’s eldest daughter, Natalie, who is nineteen and joined her mother at a latest rally on the University of South Florida, can commonly be seen piling out of her pink-and-yellow marketing campaign Sprinter van.
Still, Nixon does need the help of nationwide Democrats. Days after successful the August major, she spoke by cellphone with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. She says she requested Schumer for his assist; Nixon wished introductions to donors and help with press. (Florida, with its ten main media markets, is without doubt one of the most tough and costly states by which to promote.) “We’ll see” was the gist of Schumer’s reply. His noncommittal reply grew to become a minor trigger célèbre in progressive corners of social media. The outrage seems to have motivated the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to behave: Kirsten Gillibrand, Schumer’s fellow senator from New York who runs the group, hosted a digital fundraiser for Nixon earlier this month. Schumer and the DSCC are “now being supportive,” Nixon says, though it got here late and solely after a public marketing campaign for assist. “Elected officials don’t like bad press,” she says.
Most of the problems Nixon is operating on — Medicare for All, the “Green New Deal,” free youngster care, Bernie Sanders’s proposed tax on billionaires — are factional third rails, emblematic of years of infighting between Establishment moderates and progressive insurgents. Many fellow Democrats, each nationwide and native, imagine these stances will torpedo her candidacy. Nixon’s polling numbers have been a seize bag, starting from nearly tied to a double-digit deficit. And she faces in Republican opponent Ashley Moody a candidate operating with the unwavering help of her occasion.
A former state lawyer common, Moody has by no means misplaced an election. She is the uncommon Republican official who has outrun DeSantis in statewide races. Her alliance with the governor is a primary expression of the Florida GOP’s sense of impunity over the past decade. Moody defended DeSantis’s unpopular campaigns in opposition to abortion and leisure marijuana. In 2023, she signed off on a deal that routed $10 million from a Medicare settlement payout to Hope Florida, a charity affiliated with the governor’s spouse, Casey; the cash was then used to fund Republican political motion committees. A grand jury this summer time discovered that the switch was an unlawful misappropriation of the funds, however jurors couldn’t decide who was at fault, so no prison costs have been filed. (Moody has referred to as assaults on her involvement “disingenuous.” In October, an appellate court docket ordered the grand-jury report back to be expunged, saying the panel overreached.) Meanwhile, Moody’s political fortunes have continued to rise. In 2025, when Rubio joined Trump’s Cabinet as secretary of State, DeSantis appointed her to his vacated Senate seat. Moody grew to become a dependable pro-Trump vote on Capitol Hill, backing the president’s refusal to increase Obamacare subsidies, his pillaging of Venezuela’s oil reserves, and his ongoing warfare on Iran.
Nixon is juggling making the case that Moody is corrupt with a frenetic marketing campaign schedule that leaves her relative lack of sources extra pronounced. When I meet her in Tampa between marketing campaign stops, she has slept solely two hours, has been on the street nonstop for the previous week and a half, and hasn’t seen her youngest daughter, 6-year-old Ashanti, in as many days. Seated on a sofa within the Black English Bookstore on East Oak Avenue, she lets free about how annoyed she is with the occasion management. Nixon tells me in regards to the checklist she’s been preserving of people that have slighted or undermined her. “Former colleagues. Some chairs of Democratic executive committees. Mm-hmm. Some chairs or presidents of caucuses. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There’s a list that has been kept,” she says with fun. “After the race, we going to have some nice conversations.” I ask if she’ll share a number of the names with me. “I don’t wanna name names right now,” she says. “I’m just trying to win.”
Three of the names that might be on Nixon’s checklist are straightforward sufficient to guess.
There are the Vindmans — Alex, her Democratic major opponent, and his spouse, Rachel, a politics Substacker who till 2024 co-hosted a podcast referred to as The Suburban Women Problem. When Nixon began to noticeably think about operating for Senate, she was informed the DSCC was already recruiting Vindman. She discovered his contact info and referred to as him to gauge his curiosity. At the time, he was comparatively unknown in state politics and had by no means run for public workplace. Vindman and Nixon by no means spoke at size in regards to the run, and when Nixon requested across the state occasion, she received what seemed like a definitive reply: He wasn’t . She launched her marketing campaign on January 22. On January 27, Vindman launched his.
It was an ungainly solution to kick issues off, and it solely grew extra fraught because it grew to become clear he supposed to behave like Nixon’s marketing campaign didn’t exist. “I saw Vindman in Orlando for an event — it was at the Pulse-nightclub-shooting remembrance, so this was back in June,” says Wes Hodge, the treasurer of the Florida Democratic Party. “And he made a comment like, ‘Well, we’re looking at November and the race against Moody.’” Hodge was incredulous. “I was like, ‘Dude, you don’t have that luxury! You have an opponent in August who you need to take seriously.’” Vindman approached a possible debate with the identical perspective. “We’re happy to let you know the second we make a decision,” his marketing campaign supervisor, Blakely Wall, informed reporters in July when requested if Vindman would take part. (He by no means agreed to a debate.) This posture rankled Nixon, considered one of whose many criticisms of “unelected Ashley Moody,” as she refers back to the GOP incumbent, is that she, as an appointee, didn’t earn her workplace. Here was Vindman performing simply as entitled, carrying on as if the nomination have been a foregone conclusion and their major only a formality.
By the tip of July, Nixon’s momentum was tougher to disregard, and at the least considered one of Vindman’s surrogates determined she was price taking over. His spouse, Rachel, who had beforehand impressed a right-wing outrage cycle by posting a joke about Trump getting shot, went after Nixon on Threads. “If your campaign events with less than 20 people devolved into you making personal attacks on your opponent, you are a shitty human,” she wrote in a since-deleted submit. “Also, buy some professional clothes for the love of everything (shoes included).” It’s unclear which private assaults Rachel was referring to. Nixon replied with a cheeky picture of herself in heels. “Are these OK?” she wrote. Rachel later apologized, and her husband has not publicly addressed his spouse’s remarks. After shedding the first, Vindman endorsed Nixon, launched her to his donors, and made a $400,000 contribution to the Florida Democratic Party.
The Friday after the first, Nixon received on a name with FDP chair Nikki Fried — the third doable title on her checklist — whose official stance on the Democratic nomination was impartial. “We stay out of all those primaries,” Fried tells me, “and we make sure that everybody’s getting a fair shake.” The name between Fried and Nixon didn’t go nicely. According to Axios, some within the occasion believed Fried was upset when Nixon gained, and their dialog, which Fried says began out as congratulatory, devolved right into a heated disagreement. “Unfortunately, it became tense,” Fried tells me. Nixon reportedly bristled on the chair’s try to provide recommendation, telling Fried, “You never gave a care about me from the beginning, and now you’re telling me how to run my campaign?”
Fried tells me one of many considerations she raised was about Nixon’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and what Fried describes because the celebratory response by some chapters to Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel: “I was just making sure I was relaying messaging to her of concerns that I have been hearing, not only from demographics in our coalition but from some electeds, too, that were worried.” Fried assures me she is inspired by Nixon’s distancing of herself from essentially the most controversial elements of the DSA platform, particularly abolishing the police and prisons. Nixon shouldn’t be a socialist, and he or she tells me she joined the group this summer time purely as a result of her marketing campaign “needs to be all hands on deck” to beat again the best. While Fried appears intent on placing a conciliatory tone — “The most important part is that everybody’s united” — Nixon is much less concerned about doing so. “We are running a coordinated campaign,” Nixon tells me after I ask for extra particulars in regards to the name. Was she actually upset that Fried gave her recommendation? “We are running a coordinated campaign,” she repeats.
Celebrating her Senate major win.
Photo: Will Brown/Jacksonville Today
Nixon has at all times achieved issues her personal manner. She ran her first marketing campaign as a candidate — for a metropolis council seat in her hometown of Jacksonville — proper after graduating, in 2008, from the University of Florida. She had come again from faculty along with her daughter Natalie, who was lower than a yr outdated, and located herself sad with native management. The Moncrief neighborhood the place Nixon grew up had barely improved since she was a toddler. The neighborhood was on high of a Superfund web site. The soil was poisonous, and the native colleges have been in the identical tough form as when Nixon’s mom deemed them insufficient and had her bused throughout city. Nixon’s cousin was shot and killed once they have been youngsters. “If he would’ve got bused across town like me,” she says, “I think he still would be alive.”
After Nixon introduced her candidacy, she went door-to-door, pushing Natalie in a stroller. “It wasn’t about being in charge,” she says. “It was about wanting somebody that was going to do the job correctly.” She provides, laughing, “Damn, I’m really anal. I’m kind of type A.” She and Rayner, who’s sitting beside Nixon as I ask about her begin in politics, start cackling. “I’ve learned a lot about myself on this campaign.”
Nixon misplaced the election, however she spent the following decade shuffling amongst positions in Duval County politics — as a district aide for a state consultant, then as a subject director and political director for the mayor of Jacksonville — and, finally, as an organizer for coverage nonprofits, just like the advocacy group New Florida Majority, making an attempt to spice up civic engagement amongst Black and brown Floridians. In 2016, Nixon helped run Black outreach for Sanders’s 2016 presidential marketing campaign in Florida, a gig that got here full circle when the Vermont senator dedicated $250,000 to again Nixon’s Senate marketing campaign in early October. “I met Bernie maybe twice,” she says.
In 2018, SEIU’s Florida chapter recruited Nixon as a subject director. She labored on varied campaigns, together with the push for a $15 minimal wage. (A legislation carrying out simply that went into impact final month.) Later, she was moved to a SEIU native that organizes faculty Head Start staff, the individuals who present youngster care and early training for the kids of low-income college students. “I do not have words to describe how hardworking Angie is,” says Afifa Khaliq, the native’s president. In 2020, Nixon ran for state consultant and gained. She launched her Senate marketing campaign as her third time period within the legislature was ending.
What seems on the floor to set Nixon aside as a lawmaker is her pugnacity. She likes to combat. She has a line of tattoos alongside her proper forearm — one is the Adinkra image for “call to war” — as a result of that was the arm most seen to her colleagues when she addressed the legislature. “I wanted them motherfuckers to see this while I’m talking,” she says, cocking her arm like she’s holding a microphone. Just a few weeks earlier than we meet, Nixon agreed to a $250 nice and 15 hours of neighborhood service to resolve two misdemeanor costs — trespassing and resisting arrest — from her refusal in May to vacate the governor’s workplace. She had been demanding a gathering a few latest Republican gerrymander within the state that diminished the variety of Democratic-leaning congressional districts from eight to 4. Nixon didn’t need a trial on the costs to distract from her marketing campaign, so she took the neighborhood service and moved on. But if she had not been in the midst of the marketing campaign? “She wanted to continue to fight,” says her lawyer, Mutaqee Akbar.
Her facility with battle has proved a helpful high quality at a time when right-wing politics are distinguished extra by their rancor than their substance. Laura Loomer, the influential pro-Trump conspiracist who efficiently lobbied the president to fireplace a number of high aides final yr, referred to as Nixon on X “a ghetto, black, communist.” Vice-President J. D. Vance traveled to Florida on October 1 and informed a rally crowd in Lakeland that Nixon doesn’t “belong in America.”
But what genuinely makes Nixon totally different, based on individuals who know her, is that her public brawling is matched by her shrewdness and stamina as an organizer. “Angie won the Democratic primary because she has been knocking on doors, talking to people, alongside people, for decades,” says Phillip Agnew, who met Nixon when he was a part of the Dream Defenders, a Black Lives Matter–period youth-activist group. She is unafraid to speak to anybody. Nixon says right-wing voters are sometimes shocked to find she’s “not this horned beast” when she exhibits up at their doorsteps. Representative Maxwell Frost, the congressman from Orlando, says each Nixon occasion has a canvass hooked up to it. This is uncommon in Florida. “What it usually is,” he says, “is you show up, you go to the rally, they get your information, and then they ask you, like, a day or two later, ‘Can you come back and canvass with us?’ And the difference is, because Angie’s an organizer, she knows that every little hurdle you add in front of someone doing something makes it less likely that they’ll actually volunteer.” Instead, Frost says, individuals present as much as her occasions as spectators and depart as door-knockers.
Nixon is satisfied some Democrats don’t need her in D.C. as a result of they’re lazy. “I would force them to do more work,” she informed The Breakfast Club in September. She’s recognized in Duval County for her hands-on strategy to constituent companies. Brandon Davis, her senior adviser and media marketing consultant, remembers her as soon as taking time between marketing campaign stops to assist somebody whose residence ceiling had collapsed and who couldn’t get a response from their building-management firm. Nixon desires to scale this strategy if she’s elected, deploying aides throughout the state for weekly listening classes and personally internet hosting city halls in a special a part of Florida each month. “We’re going to have community office hours where we go to libraries and coffee shops and small businesses and welcome people to come talk to us about different issues,” she says.
Even Nixon’s opponents have admitted she is uniquely industrious. “Angie was working 24/7,” says Mitchell Berger, the donor, who backed Vindman within the major. “Not that Alex wasn’t working, but there is something to knocking on doors and showing up at community events as opposed to just working the phones for money and showing up at financial events.”
Nixon’s sturdy floor recreation helped make up for an astonishing spending hole. In July, Nixon had rather less than $975,000 available. Moody had $11 million, which she has used to fund adverts falsely accusing Nixon of being a socialist who desires to abolish the police and prisons. (Nixon’s retort is that she doesn’t wish to abolish prisons, she desires to place Moody in a single.) This capacity to outline the opposition is vital: A Stetson University ballot in September discovered that 32 p.c of Floridians surveyed — near one-third — nonetheless don’t know who Nixon is, in contrast with simply 19 p.c for Moody. “Nixon’s not getting anywhere near the resources to run a statewide race,” Susan MacManus, a veteran political analyst who has taught on the University of South Florida, stated earlier this yr.
That Nixon offset her disadvantages sufficient to be even barely aggressive with Moody holds classes for her fellow Democrats — together with her skeptics. In the first, she confirmed that she might win with much less by outworking an Establishment-favored opponent and leveraging relationships unconnected to occasion management. In the overall election, she is proving she has the pressure of character to convey nationwide consideration, and even nationwide cash, to a marketing campaign that donors and strategists have been inclined to put in writing off. Nixon’s most up-to-date FEC report indicated that she pulled in near $7.2 million. (Moody, who raised simply $1.8 million in the identical interval, nonetheless has a roughly $5 million benefit.) She completed it by prodding moderates and galvanizing progressives. Ro Khanna is planning to marketing campaign for Nixon in Florida later this month. Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have already achieved so. Most essential, the bottom has purchased in, undeterred by Florida’s pink hue.
On The Breakfast Club in the course of the marketing campaign.
Photo: Breakfast Club Power 105.1FM/YouTube
The final time Democratic voters in Florida have been this excited was in 2018. Like right this moment, President Trump was on the protection, and the nationwide highlight was on a statewide race: the gubernatorial marketing campaign of Andrew Gillum, then the mayor of Tallahassee.
Gillum is an apparent template for Nixon; Davis, her adviser, was Gillum’s marketing campaign supervisor. Both are Black multigenerational Floridians to the left of their occasion with a expertise for public talking. Both had the same projected path to statewide victory: overperforming in Jacksonville and the panhandle whereas operating up the rating round faculty areas in Tallahassee and Gainesville and banking on kitchen-table appeals attracting extra South Florida voters than the GOP’s red-baiting scared away. And each share a maximalist marketing campaign philosophy. “Just making sure we go everywhere,” Nixon says. “Making sure we have an aggressive 67-county strategy. Making sure I spend every dollar that I have.” Gillum misplaced to DeSantis by one of many slimmest margins in Florida gubernatorial historical past — a 0.4-point, 33,000-vote defeat.
Eight years later, the Gillum second has grow to be straightforward to dismiss. After the election, he spiraled into melancholy and was discovered inebriated in a motel room with a male escort. He checked himself into rehab, reportedly received sober, and launched a considerably profitable podcast. Then, in July, he was arrested on meth costs in Alabama. The fortunes of Florida Democrats have adopted a parallel trajectory. After 2018, they fell right into a now acquainted sample, operating reasonable statewide candidates like Val Demings and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell — and getting clobbered. The occasion hemorrhaged expertise because the individuals and cash that had coalesced round Gillum 2018 disappeared. By 2024, the concept that Kamala Harris might compete in Florida was by no means critically thought of.
How did issues get so dangerous so shortly? It’s conceivable {that a} sturdy state occasion might run again the Gillum playbook with extra success and assimilate inner disagreement with out issues spilling over. But the truth is that Nixon has needed to construct most of her personal marketing campaign infrastructure as a result of it didn’t exist. Steve Schale, the longtime strategist who directed Obama’s victorious statewide operation in 2008, scoffs at the concept that Florida’s Democratic Establishment was aligned in opposition to Nixon — that might indicate some significant measure of group and affect by the occasion. “You wield power with sticks and carrots, right?” he says. “What happens when you have no sticks and you have no carrots?”
The capacity of a state occasion to exert affect relies upon completely on the scope of its electoral energy. And Florida Democrats don’t have a senator, a governor, or any statewide officers. Their most influential determine within the House of Representatives is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who might be higher recognized for being ousted as chair of the Democratic National Committee months earlier than Hillary Clinton fumbled Florida in 2016. Democrats are a superminority within the state legislature, which is a part of the explanation Nixon’s weapon of selection has been the bullhorn moderately than the backroom deal. The indisputable fact that the state occasion is carrying $6,000 in debt as a substitute of the greater than $800,000 deficit it was operating in 2020 is arguably its largest success story of the previous ten years. Without electoral energy, the board that votes on how the occasion ought to proceed is “just a whole bunch of people with opinions,” Schale says. It couldn’t tip the scales of a major if it wished to.
Another drawback is that, for Florida Democrats, the individuals and establishments planning, funding, and operating elections are extraordinarily transient. “The only partisan infrastructure that’s ever existed here is whatever got built around whatever presidential election was happening at that point,” says Schale. “The other 42 months of that four-year cycle, the party can barely keep the lights on.” Diminishing returns — the final statewide workplace Democrats gained was when Fried was elected commissioner of agriculture in 2018 — has put the occasion in a form of demise spiral. “I will be 25 years old in less than a month,” says Jackson McMillan, a Tampa-based Democratic strategist who runs a agency referred to as Key Lime Strategies. “And I am considered a veteran strategist here in the state of Florida because I’ve been doing this for, like, eight years.” That’s the way you get a marketing campaign like Vindman’s, a lot of whose employees was chosen and imported by the Washington-based DSCC. The drawback is compounded for progressives like Nixon as a result of they’ve entry to a lot much less cash. “The president of Florida’s progressive caucus,” says McMillan, “works multiple jobs and lives with roommates.”
Fried is the eighth FDP chair since 2010 and — at practically 4 years into the job — has one of many longest tenures of this century. “We have to acknowledge first and foremost that that job sucks,” says McMillan; you spend plenty of time getting yelled at by activists who suppose you are able to do greater than you’ll be able to. People I spoke with credit score Fried for being the best chair in a very long time. From September to October, Democrats outpaced Republicans in month-over-month occasion registration for the primary time in 5 years. But at this level within the election cycle, that’s like taking part in catch-up on a hamster wheel. I ask Nixon how this race may look totally different if the FDP weren’t “dysfunctional,” as she says. “They would be registering a shit ton of voters and running commercials attacking Ashley Moody left and right, like the Republican Party does,” she says. “My campaign shouldn’t be going negative. I should just be speaking affirmatively about my policies.”
Some of those challenges is likely to be surmountable in a easier state. But successful a statewide marketing campaign in Florida is like assembling a “jigsaw puzzle,” says MacManus, the professor and political analyst. It’s the nation’s third most populous and racially numerous state, and inside its ethnic blocs are idiosyncrasies that render phrases like “the Black vote” (Haitian immigrants or the descendants of sharecroppers?) and “the Hispanic vote” (Mexican Democrats or Cuban Republicans?) deceptive at finest. Midway via his first time period as governor, DeSantis rebranded Florida the “free state,” bragging about his refusal to implement COVID restrictions. Lockdown refugees poured in from throughout blue America. From April 2020 to July 2023, no state noticed extra in-migration than Florida. More than 80 p.c of occasion registration occurs on the DMV, says Fried, and the variety of new Republicans exploded. A 3rd partisan class referred to as NPA — “no party affiliation” — has nearly overtaken registered Democrats. Fried calls these newcomers “soft Republicans.”
That doesn’t imply the state is fated to at all times elect members of the GOP. For a lot of the similar stretch when Florida received away from the occasion, Georgia appeared much more misplaced. Not even Obama, who gained Florida each occasions he ran for president, might peel Georgia away. Then issues modified. Demographic shifts have been a part of the equation. But Democrats additionally discovered methods to construct on their defeats. Jon Ossoff misplaced his first congressional race in 2017. Today, he’s favored to win reelection as considered one of Georgia’s two incumbent Democratic senators. A crucial issue that set the efforts of Georgia Democrats aside was their funding in top-tier expertise major voters have been excited to help.
“Angie’s a much better political athlete than Ashley Moody,” says Berger. “If you were to put them in an auditorium and you were running them for school president, Angie would win.” But the query is whether or not somebody with Nixon’s expertise and politics could be embraced by the Democratic Party. Or is that privilege reserved for extra palliative figures like Ossoff?
“Why,” says McMillan, “would they sink money into disrupting their own narrative?”
One of the underrated elements of operating a marketing campaign like Nixon’s — with its lesser sources and fixed rubber-burning — is that it’s bodily bruising. When we meet in Tampa, she’s gassed. Her shoulders are slumped, her eyelids are drooping, and he or she retains trying towards the door of the bookstore to see if her aide is bringing her one thing to eat. “I don’t know,” she says. “I can turn it on and off a little bit. Especially when I get around people, I get hyped up. Mm-hmm. But I’m exhausted right now. And so I just wanna go home.”
Nixon’s meals arrives, and as she nibbles half-heartedly on Five Guys fries and sips black espresso, she looks like a special particular person than the exuberant candidate who bounded into the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center with Jay Rock’s “Win” blaring over the loudspeakers the identical weekend. Soon, Nixon will journey 4 hours throughout the state for the second time that day, head dwelling to Jacksonville on Monday, see her youngest youngster, and possibly, if she’s fortunate, get a good evening of sleep. Then she’ll fold her worn-down body again into the pink-and-yellow Sprinter van and do it over again.
At the second, Moody, like Vindman, is refusing to debate her — “Because they don’t have records to run on,” Nixon says; Why trouble, Moody possible thinks — which has made the race surprisingly siloed. The Republican is content material to keep away from each the press and her opponent, letting her adverts do the speaking and assuming Florida’s Republican lean is stable sufficient to do the remainder.
This is the place Nixon’s background as an organizer is most evident. The public line is that she’s operating to win, even when the polls say that result’s unlikely. Less disputable is that, regardless of the end result of the election, she’s offering a template for the form of sturdy grassroots operation Democrats have uncared for when operating in Florida. What occasion leaders and donors appear to battle with is that as a result of Nixon has constructed a lot of her success regardless of them, the ensuing infrastructure shouldn’t be essentially theirs to make use of as they please. “I met with a donor the other day,” says Nixon, “who wanted me to no longer call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide. I said, ‘I respect you, but based on this, this, and this, I would have to disagree.’” Nixon shrugs. “I didn’t get a donation.”
It’s been such a dispiriting course of that Nixon is contemplating leaving the Democratic Party after the election, she tells me. “There may be a possibility that we look toward a third party, like the Working Families Party or something,” she says. It’s arduous for me to think about somebody so ascendant throwing a lot away, and I’m wondering if this revelation is a short-lived by-product of her exhaustion. But she doesn’t budge: “I want to stay a member of the Democratic Party, but there has to be a lot of changes. We can’t continue to be just foot soldiers. If the folks in leadership don’t want Black people to have leadership positions — and not just in name only — then we need to reassess what we do next. The way we navigate right now is that ain’t nobody safe — they better get on this train so we can win.”
A earlier model of this story misstated the age of Nixon’s youngest daughter.