OK, But Can We Talk About Florida?

Everyone fire Lis Smith and hire Angie Nixon to run your campaigns, post haste!

We sure won a lot on Tuesday night, but we did not win Florida. However, we came really, really, really close in Florida and that’s something worth discussing. Sure, Democrats did better in practically every state than they did in 2024, but those candidates had support from the Democratic establishment, they had national media attention. Angie Nixon had none of that and still managed to get 47 percent of the vote in a state where Kamala Harris had gotten 44, flipping several counties (including Miami-Dade and Hillsborough) from red to blue in the process. Former Republican-turned-Democrat David Jolly did well, too, and while he did get some late-in-the-game money from the Democratic Governors Association, I highly suspect that his success also had a lot to do with Nixon’s campaigning. After all, a rising tide lifts all boats.

In 2024, Rick Scott beat Debbie Murcasel-Powell 56-43. And this time, Nixon got 47 percent with a campaign chest of just $11 million. Did she have any help from the party leadership? Well.

For instance, the Senate Majority PAC dropped $87.4 million to support Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown in his challenge against incumbent Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH); the DSCC doled out $10.4 million to promote Brown. The Senate Majority PAC spent $46.5 million in support of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, $37.3 million for Troy Jackson in Maine, and $27.6 million in favor of James Talarico in Texas.

Nixon is a Black woman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and unapologetically left-wing. She was, without question, one of my two favorite candidates this election (Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan being the other). Her passion, her wit, her willingness to get out there and engage with people and work to persuade them that she could really help them were all incredibly impressive — and had she been in just a slightly bluer or even lighter red state, she probably would have won in a landslide.

By traditional consultant class wisdom, however, she should have had no chance at even winning her primary against Alexander Vindman. Vindman is a white man, he’s a centrist, he’s former military, he had name recognition from his involvement as a witness against Donald Trump in Congress’s impeachment inquiry regarding the Ukraine scandal. He raised $16 million from prominent Democratic donors all over the country. He hit every possible “electability” mark, had every possible quality we’ve been told for years a Democrat would have to possess to win in a state like Florida. Meanwhile, Nixon was literally the exact opposite of that. She raised only $975,000 in the primary, she campaigned on taxing the rich, Medicare for All, and raising the minimum wage in the state to $25 an hour. She was everything we keep being told voters — even Democratic voters — find “scary.” But she beat Vindman, and it wasn’t even close. She came in at 56 percent to his 43.

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That’s a big, big deal, especially in Florida. If you will recall, back during the 2020 election, there was an enormous last minute push against Bernie Sanders. For most of the campaign, the media had largely decided to pretend that Sanders wasn’t running at all. I’ll admit that even I was anxious every time I mentioned his name because people online would go absolutely ballistic every time it was even acknowledged that he was running. Despite this, he still ended up winning the first few primaries, and that was when the panic set in. So the powers that be, whoever they were, settled on pushing three major talking points. First, that he just hadn’t been vetted by the media (because of how they had been graciously pretending he wasn’t running) in all the time he’d been in government and/or during his last presidential campaign. Second, that no primary wins counted until South Carolina, and that we should all collectively agree that whoever won South Carolina should be the apparent nominee. Third, that he could never win Florida because the Cubans (who have largely been voting Republican since they first started immigrating to Florida) would be scared by the term “socialist” and because the media’s last-minute “vetting” had determined that he was BFFs with Fidel Castro. Or, rather, that he had a more nuanced idea of Cuba, determining that they did really well with things like childhood literacy and health care and very badly with things like political repression, which is, of course, the exact same thing as being BFFs with Fidel Castro and loving all of the bad things that happened in Cuba.

These tactics were extraordinarily successful in terms of allowing Joe Biden to remain the presumptive nominee and hold on to his momentum despite having lost the first few races, and certainly contributed to his eventual nomination. People wanted to vote for someone who could beat Trump, so they sure as hell didn’t want to scare off those anti-socialist Republican Cubans in Florida!

Given this, the fact that Nixon did as well as she did, while being a member of DSA, while promoting pretty much the same platform as Sanders, is pretty damned impressive.

While I do think her platform was a huge part of the reason she was successful, what does need to be studied by every damn Democrat planning on running in 2028 is Angie Nixon’s goddamned ground game.

Having previously been a union organizer, Nixon had some serious experience when it came to engaging with people and she had a whole lot of hustle. She went door-to-door herself, she talked directly to people of all political stripes about what she could do to help them, and, perhaps most importantly, she didn’t write anyone off as unreachable. As a result, she reached a hell of a lot of people.

I have long cringed whenever Democrats talk about various areas of the country being “unreachable,” or even when they do the “Well, someone like Mamdani could win in liberal New York, but not where the Real Americans live!” Admittedly, this is partly because I am always going to be a little idealistic and because I do believe that we have policies that can really help people. It also comes across as elitist and a little “if you have to ask, you’ll never know” to me, and I don’t love that.

What I do love about candidates like Angie Nixon, like Abdul El-Sayed, is that they don’t just take it for granted that “some people” are never going to vote for them. They actually take the time and do the work to explain how and why the policies they advocate for are going to put more money in people’s pockets, how their lives can improve materially, how they will have fewer things to worry about if these policies are implemented. They get into specifics and people need to hear those specifics.

There’s always a lot of talk about how Democrats win college-educated voters, and the presumption there is always that people who vote for Democrats are just smarter, or more intellectual. I would argue that it just means that those people have had more opportunities to have things explained to them in a way that wasn’t condescending or combative, and perhaps even tailored to their personal experiences and concerns. That was what Angie Nixon was doing all across the state of Florida. And it worked!

Recently, Mehdi Hasan conducted an interview with Matt Yglesias, a ridiculous person who identifies as a “popularist.” Yglesias argued that Democrats should campaign only on policies that are already popular, to stay away from issues like trans rights and immigration, from anything where they’d have to do any convincing. The idea behind this, of course, is that it would reel in people who were more in the center, while everyone on the Left would implicitly understand the things they “actually” believe and that once they were in office, they could do more to achieve them. He’s not the only person who sees things this way. This is what I’ve referred to for years as the “vegetti” or “hide the peas in the mashed potatoes” theory of politics. The idea is that left-wing ideas are good for people but that they are so vastly unappealing that they have to be disguised and hidden somehow in order to get anyone to swallow them.

A good example of this is how “we all knew” that Barack Obama was in favor of same-sex marriage, but he only went as far as backing civil unions until it was safe for him to say otherwise, after Biden tested the waters by coming out in favor of it himself. There are those who say he’d never have become president if he’d come out in favor of them from the start, but it’s also worth noting that, in the years since, this is also something that the Right has now been able to use as cudgel against us for years. Same thing with Democrats supporting the Iraq War and going along with all the jingoism that defined Bush’s first term. I know that I, at least, felt that “they knew better but were going along with it because they had to, because they’re scared and they don’t want anyone to say they love terrorism.”

But that era is very, very much over. Sincerity and strength are what gets rewarded now. I’d argue that half the reason why people like Republicans is because they interpret their willingness to say incredibly cruel things as “sincerity.” As an “I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking!” or “I’m not here to make friends!” kind of truthfulness. The Democratic version of that seems to be a willingness to actually explain what we want and what we stand for and why those things are good for everyone, even when it comes to ideas that have, for years, been relegated to the “Well, we’d love that, too, but the people will never go for it, so we have to do it so incrementally that they don’t even know it’s happening” pile.

The Democratic version of that is also being willing to say “Hey! I know you’ve spent your whole life watching sitcom bits about how terrible they are, but Brussels sprouts are actually delicious and I think you’d like them!” instead of assuming that they’re just something that only those with especially refined palettes can enjoy.

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Even though she lost, Nixon’s campaign was one of the biggest successes of this cycle and something we really need to be looking at if we’re going to take it all in 2028. A very big takeaway from this election season, from the New York City mayoral election on, is that “electability” just may not be what everyone thought it was. Not only have we seen extremely well-funded, focus-grouped-to-oblivion, moderate Democrats lose their primaries to left-wing candidates with far less money and support but incredible ground games and community organizing skills — we also saw those candidates go on to beat their Republican rivals or, in Nixon’s case, come incredibly close to beating them.

Naturally, the consultant class that previously said “Well, maybe a progressive candidate like Mamdani can win in New York, but definitely not in a swing state like Michigan!” is now saying “Well sure, a progressive like El-Sayed can win in Michigan, but certainly not in a state like Kansas!”

Is Lis Smith saying this because she believes it for real or because her income relies on candidates paying her money to tell them to pivot to the center and be as bland and generic as humanly possible? Hard to tell, but either way, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong and that we should really stop listening to her and the whole lot of them.

Now, like I’ve said before, I think progressive ideas, once explained properly to people, have the potential to be extremely popular, and I think this election cycle has done a lot to prove that’s true. But I also think that, wherever a Democratic candidate may lie on the political spectrum, they should now be paying more attention to the kind of on-the-ground, getting involved with the people campaigning that El-Sayed, Mamdani, and Nixon engaged in than in the more traditional route that really just does not appear to be working as well anymore. Maybe instead of hiring Lis Smith, campaigns should hire Angie Nixon.

Of course, that’s probably not in the cards just yet. The Senate spot she was campaigning for was a special election for what used to be Marco Rubio’s seat, so it will be open again in 2028. Nixon has already said she’s running, and with that time and hopefully more support, I think we can definitely say we’ll be calling her Senator by 2029.

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