Angie Nixon Won’t Stop Fighting

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It is one month before Election Day, and a crowd of faithful Democrats has gathered near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for what should be a tense occasion. The audience in the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center is mostly older and white, the kind of “Vote Blue” stalwarts from surrounding Broward County who sport I MISS BARACK caps and pine for the days when the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was algae free. Angie Nixon, the candidate here to address them, is running what looks like a doomed campaign for the U.S. Senate. She has significantly less money than her Republican opponent, is trailing in most polls, and has broken with party leaders in almost every internal dispute of the past ten years, from Bernie versus Hillary in 2016 to whether Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

And yet inside the air-conditioned lobby of the auditorium, a minor miracle is occurring. These partisans love her. “You finally feel a momentum,” says a delighted John McRae, who’s there with his wife, Nancy. “She’s very exciting,” says Deborah Webb, a local substitute teacher, practically 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 closer to be heard over the buzzing crowd.

The fact that Nixon has this audience so amped up might surprise national Democrats. Her reputation as a bullhorn-toting agitator in the Florida house of representatives made Nixon a divisive figure in the state party. She won her seat by primarying a fellow Democrat, Kimberly Daniels, and has conducted protests on the house floor without the say-so of party leaders. After a policy disagreement, Nixon and one colleague, state representative Michele Rayner, did not speak for two months. (Rayner, now an adviser to Nixon’s campaign and a close friend, admits Nixon was right.)

Many of the party’s moderates were against Nixon’s Senate bid during the primary. And in general, Establishment Democrats have been “not supportive” of her confrontational methods, Rayner tells me. They worry she will push out faithful, if centrist, Democrats. In 2023, Nixon introduced a cease-fire resolution to halt Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It infuriated the Democratic state senate minority leader, Jason Pizzo, who went so far as to publicly apologize to Israel’s consul general to Miami. A year and a half later, Pizzo declared the Democratic Party in Florida “dead” and dramatically quit to become an independent.

In spite of these concerns from party officials, on August 18, when given the choice between her and Alex Vindman, a stiff, poll-tested moderate of the kind Democrats have been foisting upon Floridians for years, voters chose Nixon by a decisive 12-point margin. The result shocked national commentators. Vindman is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who became an MSNBC darling after testifying at President Trump’s impeachment hearings. He had out-fundraised Nixon 16-to-1 and was so confident she posed no threat to his nomination that he barely bothered to campaign against her. It was a testament 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 failed to see what was obvious on the ground: Democratic voters were fed up with the status quo.

For them, the past decade has been one agonizing defeat after another. Since 2016, what was once the most prized swing state on the electoral map has become a reliable GOP stronghold. Trump has carried Florida in three consecutive presidential elections, increasing his margin of victory every time. The 2022 midterms were such a bloodbath for Democrats — Governor Ron DeSantis and then-Senator Marco Rubio won reelection by 19 and 16 points, respectively — that strategists and donors started to write 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 mother and union organizer, has premised her campaign on the idea that GOP rule has been a disaster. Florida has become more repressive, with bans on abortion and public-school-curriculum materials going into effect, and less affordable, with analysts ranking its housing markets among the most hostile in the country toward renters. She caught fire because she seems to understand better than any 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, puts it. The Democrats’ go-to response over the past 30 years has largely been to run the most anodyne candidates they can find, only to watch Florida become redder. Nixon has taken the opposite approach, seizing on a polarizing agenda of bigger government and universal programs that pundits long assumed would exclusively resonate in deep-blue states like New York.

Her primary win should be exciting for the party. She is an authentic working-class candidate with charisma, the kind 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 crowd. “I mean, seriously, what do your bank accounts look like?” People start calling out numbers. “Somebody said, ‘Double zero.’” Nixon bows her head in pity. “Lord. We going to work on that.” But the national party was initially cool to her efforts. It was galling for Nixon, in part because of Democrats’ lip service to how much they owe to Black women. “It’s like they want our labor,” she tells me, “but they don’t want our leadership.” It also seems shortsighted. For Nixon, November 3 will mark not the end but another beginning. The deeper reckoning comes after the election. She wants to reshape Florida politics — win or lose, with or without national Democrats’ approval.

In DeSantis’s office, where she vowed to stay until he met with her about Florida’s congressional maps.
Photo: Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat

When Nixon announced her Senate bid in January, she’d spent months trying to recruit someone else for the job. She had lots of good options, she says, including colleagues in the state legislature who she knew “had the back of the community and weren’t going to sell out.” But none of them could be convinced a statewide race was 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 consistent with her longtime approach to politics. Rather than despair at subpar leadership, she runs for office 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 around Florida is that Nixon’s is a “friends and family” campaign. It heavily relies on her decades-old alliances and personal relationships instead of the usual consultants and party-assigned staffers. Former colleagues from the state legislature and SEIU and even Nixon’s eldest daughter, Natalie, who is 19 and joined her mom at a recent rally at the University of South Florida, can regularly be seen piling out of her pink-and-yellow campaign Sprinter van.

Still, Nixon does want the support of national Democrats. Days after winning the August primary, she spoke by phone with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. She says she asked Schumer for his help; Nixon wanted introductions to donors and assistance with press. (Florida, with its ten major media markets, is one of the most difficult and expensive states in which to advertise.) “We’ll see” was the gist of Schumer’s reply. His noncommittal answer became a minor cause célèbre in progressive corners of social media. The outrage appears to have motivated the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to act: Kirsten Gillibrand, Schumer’s fellow senator from New York who runs the organization, hosted a virtual fundraiser for Nixon earlier this month. Schumer and the DSCC are “now being supportive,” Nixon says, although it came late and only after a public campaign for help. “Elected officials don’t like bad press,” she says.

Most of the issues Nixon is running on — Medicare for All, the “Green New Deal,” free child 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, both national and local, believe these stances will torpedo her candidacy. Nixon’s polling numbers have been a grab bag, ranging from almost tied to a double-digit deficit. And she faces in Republican opponent Ashley Moody a candidate running with the unwavering support of her party.

A former state attorney general, Moody has never lost an election. She is the rare Republican official who has outrun DeSantis in statewide races. Her alliance with the governor is a prime expression of the Florida GOP’s sense of impunity over the last decade. Moody defended DeSantis’s unpopular campaigns against abortion and recreational 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 wife, Casey; the money was then used to fund Republican political action committees. A grand jury this summer found that the transfer was an illegal misappropriation of the funds, but jurors could not determine who was at fault, so no criminal charges were filed. (Moody has called attacks on her involvement “disingenuous.” In October, an appellate court ordered the grand-jury report 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 became a reliable pro-Trump vote on Capitol Hill, backing the president’s refusal to extend Obamacare subsidies, his pillaging of Venezuela’s oil reserves, and his ongoing war on Iran.

Nixon is juggling making the case that Moody is corrupt with a frenetic campaign schedule that leaves her relative lack of resources more pronounced. When I meet her in Tampa between campaign stops, she has slept only two hours, has been on the road nonstop for the past week and a half, and hasn’t seen her youngest daughter, 6-year-old Ashanti, in as many days. Seated on a couch in the Black English Bookstore on East Oak Avenue, she lets loose about how frustrated she is with the party leadership. Nixon tells me about the list she’s been keeping of people who 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 a laugh. “After the race, we going to have some nice conversations.” I ask if she’ll share some 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 could be on Nixon’s list are easy enough to guess.

There are the Vindmans — Alex, her Democratic primary opponent, and his wife, Rachel, a politics Substacker who until 2024 co-hosted a podcast called The Suburban Women Problem. When Nixon started to seriously consider running for Senate, she was told the DSCC was already recruiting Vindman. She found his contact information and called him to gauge his interest. At the time, he was relatively unknown in state politics and had never run for public office. Vindman and Nixon never spoke at length about the run, and when Nixon asked around the state party, she got what sounded like a definitive answer: He wasn’t interested. She launched her campaign on January 22. On January 27, Vindman launched his.

It was an awkward way to kick things off, and it only grew more fraught as it became clear he intended to act like Nixon’s 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 potential debate with the same attitude. “We’re happy to let you know the second we make a decision,” his campaign manager, Blakely Wall, told reporters in July when asked if Vindman would participate. (He never agreed to a debate.) This posture rankled Nixon, one of whose many criticisms of “unelected Ashley Moody,” as she refers to the GOP incumbent, is that she, as an appointee, did not earn her office. Here was Vindman acting just as entitled, carrying on as if the nomination were a foregone conclusion and their primary just a formality.

By the end of July, Nixon’s momentum was harder to ignore, and at least one of Vindman’s surrogates decided she was worth taking on. His wife, Rachel, who had previously inspired 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 post. “Also, buy some professional clothes for the love of everything (shoes included).” It’s unclear which personal attacks Rachel was referring to. Nixon replied with a cheeky photo of herself in heels. “Are these OK?” she wrote. Rachel later apologized, and her husband has not publicly addressed his wife’s remarks. After losing the primary, Vindman endorsed Nixon, introduced her to his donors, and made a $400,000 contribution to the Florida Democratic Party.

The Friday after the primary, Nixon got on a call with FDP chair Nikki Fried — the third possible name on her list — whose official stance on the Democratic nomination was neutral. “We stay out of all those primaries,” Fried tells me, “and we make sure that everybody’s getting a fair shake.” The call between Fried and Nixon did not go well. According to Axios, some in the party believed Fried was disappointed when Nixon won, and their conversation, which Fried says started out as congratulatory, devolved into a heated disagreement. “Unfortunately, it became tense,” Fried tells me. Nixon reportedly bristled at the chair’s attempt to give advice, 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 the concerns she raised was about Nixon’s association with the Democratic Socialists of America and what Fried describes as the celebratory response by some chapters to Hamas’s October 7 attack 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 encouraged by Nixon’s distancing of herself from the most controversial parts of the DSA platform, namely abolishing the police and prisons. Nixon is not a socialist, and she tells me she joined the organization this summer purely because her campaign “needs to be all hands on deck” to beat back the right. While Fried seems intent on striking a conciliatory tone — “The most important part is that everybody’s united” — Nixon is less interested in doing so. “We are running a coordinated campaign,” Nixon tells me when I ask for more details about the call. Was she really upset that Fried gave her advice? “We are running a coordinated campaign,” she repeats.

Celebrating her Senate primary win.
Photo: Will Brown/Jacksonville Today

Nixon has always done things her own way. She ran her first campaign as a candidate — for a city council seat in her hometown of Jacksonville — right after graduating, in 2008, from the University of Florida. She had come back from school with her daughter Natalie, who was less than a year old, and found herself unhappy with local leadership. The Moncrief neighborhood where Nixon grew up had barely improved since she was a child. The community was on top of a Superfund site. The soil was toxic, and the local schools were in the same rough shape as when Nixon’s mother deemed them inadequate and had her bused across town. Nixon’s cousin was shot and killed when they were teenagers. “If he would’ve got bused across town like me,” she says, “I think he still would be alive.”

After Nixon announced 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 adds, laughing, “Damn, I’m really anal. I’m kind of type A.” She and Rayner, who is sitting beside Nixon as I ask about her start in politics, begin cackling. “I’ve learned a lot about myself on this campaign.”

Nixon lost the election, but she spent the next decade shuffling among positions in Duval County politics — as a district aide for a state representative, then as a field director and political director for the mayor of Jacksonville — and, eventually, as an organizer for policy nonprofits, like the advocacy group New Florida Majority, trying to boost civic engagement among Black and brown Floridians. In 2016, Nixon helped run Black outreach for Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign in Florida, a gig that came full circle when the Vermont senator committed $250,000 to back Nixon’s Senate campaign in early October. “I met Bernie maybe twice,” she says.

In 2018, SEIU’s Florida chapter recruited Nixon as a field director. She worked on various campaigns, including the push for a $15 minimum wage. (A law accomplishing just that went into effect last month.) Later, she was moved to a SEIU local that organizes college Head Start workers, the people who provide child care and early education for the children of low-income students. “I do not have words to describe how hardworking Angie is,” says Afifa Khaliq, the local’s president. In 2020, Nixon ran for state representative and won. She launched her Senate campaign as her third term in the legislature was ending.

What appears on the surface to set Nixon apart as a lawmaker is her pugnacity. She loves to fight. She has a line of tattoos along her right forearm — one is the Adinkra symbol for “call to war” — because that was the arm most visible 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. A few weeks before we meet, Nixon agreed to a $250 fine and 15 hours of community service to resolve two misdemeanor charges — trespassing and resisting arrest — from her refusal in May to vacate the governor’s office. She had been demanding a meeting about a recent Republican gerrymander in the state that reduced the number of Democratic-leaning congressional districts from eight to four. Nixon didn’t want a trial on the charges to distract from her campaign, so she took the community service and moved on. But if she had not been in the middle of the campaign? “She wanted to continue to fight,” says her lawyer, Mutaqee Akbar.

Her facility with conflict has proved a useful quality at a time when right-wing politics are distinguished more by their rancor than their substance. Laura Loomer, the influential pro-Trump conspiracist who successfully lobbied the president to fire several top aides last year, called Nixon on X “a ghetto, black, communist.” Vice-President J. D. Vance traveled to Florida on October 1 and told a rally crowd in Lakeland that Nixon doesn’t “belong in America.”

But what genuinely makes Nixon different, according to people 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 part of the Dream Defenders, a Black Lives Matter–era youth-activist group. She is unafraid to talk to anyone. Nixon says right-wing voters are often shocked to discover she’s “not this horned beast” when she shows up at their doorsteps. Representative Maxwell Frost, the congressman from Orlando, says every Nixon event has a canvass attached to it. This is rare 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, people show up to her events as spectators and leave as door-knockers.

Nixon is convinced some Democrats don’t want her in D.C. because they’re lazy. “I would force them to do more work,” she told The Breakfast Club in September. She’s known in Duval County for her hands-on approach to constituent services. Brandon Davis, her senior adviser and media consultant, remembers her once taking time between campaign stops to help someone whose apartment ceiling had collapsed and who couldn’t get a response from their building-management company. Nixon wants to scale this approach if she’s elected, deploying aides across the state for weekly listening sessions and personally hosting town halls in a different part of Florida every 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 in the primary. “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 strong ground game helped make up for an astonishing spending gap. In July, Nixon had a little less than $975,000 on hand. Moody had $11 million, which she has used to fund ads falsely accusing Nixon of being a socialist who wants to abolish the police and prisons. (Nixon’s retort is that she doesn’t want to abolish prisons, she wants to put Moody in one.) This ability to define the opposition is key: A Stetson University poll in September found that 32 percent of Floridians surveyed — close to one-third — still don’t know who Nixon is, compared with just 19 percent for Moody. “Nixon’s not getting anywhere near the resources to run a statewide race,” Susan MacManus, a veteran political analyst who has taught at the University of South Florida, said earlier this year.

That Nixon offset her disadvantages enough to be even slightly competitive with Moody holds lessons for her fellow Democrats — including her skeptics. In the primary, she showed that she could win with less by outworking an Establishment-favored opponent and leveraging relationships unconnected to party leadership. In the general election, she is proving she has the force of personality to bring national attention, and even national money, to a campaign that donors and strategists were inclined to write off. Nixon’s most recent FEC report indicated that she pulled in close to $7.2 million. (Moody, who raised just $1.8 million in the same period, still has a roughly $5 million advantage.) She accomplished it by prodding moderates and galvanizing progressives. Ro Khanna is planning to campaign for Nixon in Florida later this month. Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have already done so. Most important, the base has bought in, undeterred by Florida’s red hue.

On The Breakfast Club during the campaign.
Photo: Breakfast Club Power 105.1FM/YouTube

The last time Democratic voters in Florida were this excited was in 2018. Like today, President Trump was on the defense, and the national spotlight was on a statewide race: the gubernatorial campaign of Andrew Gillum, then the mayor of Tallahassee.

Gillum is an obvious template for Nixon; Davis, her adviser, was Gillum’s campaign manager. Both are Black multigenerational Floridians to the left of their party with a talent for public speaking. Both had a similar projected path to statewide victory: overperforming in Jacksonville and the panhandle while running up the score around college areas in Tallahassee and Gainesville and banking on kitchen-table appeals attracting more South Florida voters than the GOP’s red-baiting scared away. And both share a maximalist 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 lost to DeSantis by one of the slimmest margins in Florida gubernatorial history — a 0.4-point, 33,000-vote defeat.

Eight years later, the Gillum moment has become easy to dismiss. After the election, he spiraled into depression and was found inebriated in a motel room with a male escort. He checked himself into rehab, reportedly got sober, and launched a somewhat successful podcast. Then, in July, he was arrested on meth charges in Alabama. The fortunes of Florida Democrats have followed a parallel trajectory. After 2018, they fell into a now familiar pattern, running moderate statewide candidates like Val Demings and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell — and getting clobbered. The party hemorrhaged talent as the people and money that had coalesced around Gillum 2018 disappeared. By 2024, the idea that Kamala Harris could compete in Florida was never seriously considered.

How did things get so bad so quickly? It’s conceivable that a strong state party could run back the Gillum playbook with more success and assimilate internal disagreement without things spilling over. But the reality is that Nixon has had to build most of her own campaign infrastructure because it did not exist. Steve Schale, the longtime strategist who directed Obama’s victorious statewide operation in 2008, scoffs at the idea that Florida’s Democratic Establishment was aligned against Nixon — that would imply some meaningful measure of organization and influence by the party. “You wield power with sticks and carrots, right?” he says. “What happens when you have no sticks and you have no carrots?”

The ability of a state party to exert influence depends entirely on the scope of its electoral power. And Florida Democrats don’t have a senator, a governor, or any statewide officials. Their most influential figure in the House of Representatives is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is probably better known for being ousted as chair of the Democratic National Committee months before Hillary Clinton fumbled Florida in 2016. Democrats are a superminority in the state legislature, which is part of the reason Nixon’s weapon of choice has been the bullhorn rather than the backroom deal. The fact that the state party is carrying $6,000 in debt instead of the more than $800,000 deficit it was running in 2020 is arguably its biggest success story of the past ten years. Without electoral power, the board that votes on how the party should proceed is “just a whole bunch of people with opinions,” Schale says. It couldn’t tip the scales of a primary if it wanted to.

Another problem is that, for Florida Democrats, the people and institutions planning, funding, and running elections are extremely 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 last statewide office Democrats won was when Fried was elected commissioner of agriculture in 2018 — has put the party in a kind of death spiral. “I will be 25 years old in less than a month,” says Jackson McMillan, a Tampa-based Democratic strategist who runs a firm called 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 how you get a campaign like Vindman’s, much of whose staff was chosen and imported by the Washington-based DSCC. The problem is compounded for progressives like Nixon because they have access to so much less money. “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 nearly four years into the job — has one of the longest tenures of this century. “We have to acknowledge first and foremost that that job sucks,” says McMillan; you spend a lot of time getting yelled at by activists who think you can do more than you can. People I spoke with credit Fried for being the most productive chair in a long time. From September to October, Democrats outpaced Republicans in month-over-month party registration for the first time in five years. But at this point in the election cycle, that’s like playing catch-up on a hamster wheel. I ask Nixon how this race might look different if the FDP were not “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 these challenges might be surmountable in a less complicated state. But winning a statewide 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 diverse state, and within its ethnic blocs are idiosyncrasies that render terms like “the Black vote” (Haitian immigrants or the descendants of sharecroppers?) and “the Hispanic vote” (Mexican Democrats or Cuban Republicans?) misleading at best. Midway through his first term as governor, DeSantis rebranded Florida the “free state,” bragging about his refusal to enforce COVID restrictions. Lockdown refugees poured in from across blue America. From April 2020 to July 2023, no state saw more in-migration than Florida. More than 80 percent of party registration happens at the DMV, says Fried, and the number of new Republicans exploded. A third partisan category called NPA — “no party affiliation” — has almost overtaken registered Democrats. Fried calls these newcomers “soft Republicans.”

That does not mean the state is fated to always elect members of the GOP. For most of the same stretch when Florida got away from the party, Georgia seemed even more lost. Not even Obama, who won Florida both times he ran for president, could peel Georgia away. Then things changed. Demographic shifts were part of the equation. But Democrats also found ways to build on their defeats. Jon Ossoff lost his first congressional race in 2017. Today, he is favored to win reelection as one of Georgia’s two incumbent Democratic senators. A critical factor that set the efforts of Georgia Democrats apart was their investment in top-tier talent primary voters were excited to support.

“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 question is whether someone with Nixon’s talent and politics can be embraced by the Democratic Party. Or is that privilege reserved for more palliative figures like Ossoff?

“Why,” says McMillan, “would they sink money into disrupting their own narrative?”

One of the underrated aspects of running a campaign like Nixon’s — with its lesser resources and constant rubber-burning — is that it’s physically bruising. When we meet in Tampa, she’s gassed. Her shoulders are slumped, her eyelids are drooping, and she keeps looking toward the door of the bookstore to see if her aide is bringing her something 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 food arrives, and as she nibbles half-heartedly on Five Guys fries and sips black coffee, she seems like a different person than the exuberant candidate who bounded into the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center with Jay Rock’s “Win” blaring over the loudspeakers the same weekend. Soon, Nixon will ride four hours across the state for the second time that day, head home to Jacksonville on Monday, see her youngest child, and maybe, if she’s lucky, get a decent night of sleep. Then she’ll fold her worn-down frame back into the pink-and-yellow Sprinter van and do it all over again.

At the moment, Moody, like Vindman, is refusing to debate her — “Because they don’t have records to run on,” Nixon says; Why bother, Moody likely thinks — which has made the race strangely siloed. The Republican is content to avoid both the press and her opponent, letting her ads do the talking and assuming Florida’s Republican lean is solid enough to do the rest.

This is where Nixon’s background as an organizer is most evident. The public line is that she’s running to win, even if the polls say that result is unlikely. Less disputable is that, no matter the outcome of the election, she’s providing a template for the kind of durable grassroots operation Democrats have neglected when running in Florida. What party leaders and donors seem to struggle with is that because Nixon has built much of her success in spite of them, the resulting infrastructure is not necessarily theirs to use 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 process that Nixon is considering 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 hard for me to imagine someone so ascendant throwing so much away, and I wonder 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 previous version of this story misstated the age of Nixon’s youngest daughter.