Voting rights champion Angie Nixon wins Florida Dem primary for U.S. Senate

Progressive state Rep. Angie Nixon scored a surprise upset in the Florida Democratic U.S. Senate primary Tuesday, setting her up to take on Republican Sen. Ashley Moody in the November general election.

With Nixon’s victory, voting rights could take center stage in the race. 

Moody is an anti-voting hardliner who has repeatedly supported President Donald Trump’s efforts to suppress the vote. Nixon, on the other hand, made voting rights and democratic reform a key priority of her campaign.

Should she be elected, Nixon has said she would work to end partisan gerrymandering, pursue campaign finance reform, make Election Day a national holiday, re-enfranchise Americans with felony convictions and pursue automatic voter registration.

The Jacksonville representative also said she would strive to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which the Supreme Court has eviscerated through several landmark rulings in recent years. 

The Court’s most recent ruling against the VRA, Louisiana v. Callais, directly affected Florida voters by helping the state GOP to pass a partisan congressional gerrymander in April as part of Trump’s national push to use unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to give Republicans an advantage in the 2026 midterms.

In the Florida Legislature, Nixon protested the redistricting effort using a pink megaphone.

“This is a violation of the Constitution,” she said at the time. “You all are doing illegal things.” 

Republicans later reprimanded Nixon over the demonstration, which was just one of her many attempts to push back on the GOP’s efforts to restrict the vote.

In 2022, Nixon also led a sit-in protest on the Florida House floor to disrupt another GOP-backed congressional gerrymander. 

In Tuesday’s primary, Nixon defeated Alex Vindman, a former national security official who was a key witness in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. She won despite Vindman out-fundraising her 16-to-1.

Trump hailed Nixon’s victory in a social media post Wednesday morning.

“The most gratifying loss last night was that of a real treasonous creep, Alexander Vindman, to a Radical Left Lunatic, who can’t speak or think properly, and who will go down to certain defeat at the hands of Ashley Moody, a truly Fantastic Senator, from the Great State Florida,” the president wrote.

As a state legislator and public official, Moody has consistently supported restrictive voting legislation predicated on the phony claim that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread. She even co-sponsored Trump’s SAVE America Act when it was introduced in the Senate earlier this year.

If passed, the legislation would disenfranchise millions of eligible voters by requiring them to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. So far, the SAVE America Act has repeatedly failed to survive the Senate, though Republicans say they still aim to pass it.