Many Floridians Escaped Socialism; Now They Could Elect One to the Senate
Newsweek · C · trust 55/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville state representative and self-described member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), won Florida's Democratic Senate primary over retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vindman on Tuesday in an upset that stunned operatives in both parties.
If she wins in November, Nixon will become the first DSA member elected to the U.S. Senate, in a state whose modern political identity was built in large part on rejecting a word she has embraced.
The win puts a democratic socialist candidate on the ballot in the state with the largest concentration of Cuban Americans in the country, a community whose politics have long been shaped by opposition to the political ideology its families fled. Days before the primary, Nixon toured Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, stopping for Cuban coffee and campaigning in the fruterias and domino parks.
She will face Republican Senator Ashley Moody, who was appointed to the seat in 2025 after Marco Rubio left to become secretary of state. Moody has already signaled where the general election fight will be fought. She co-sponsored the DEMOCRACIA Act with Florida's other GOP U.S. senator, Rick Scott, in November 2025. The legislation aimed to freeze the assets of and denying entry to Cuban officials and has accused past administrations of appeasing Havana's government.
Nixon has staked out the opposite position. She has called the U.S. embargo on Cuba "a failure" that leaves ordinary Cubans hungry and says she wants to restore the Obama administration's policy of engagement with Havana. She has paired that with explicit criticism of the Cuban government, saying "the regime does need to change" and that power should return to the Cuban people. She has accused Moody of steering more Department of Homeland Security funding toward deporting Cubans.
Cuba previews a larger fight ahead: how much the word socialism still costs Democrats in a state built in part by exiles.
Related Video 00:47 Angie Nixon Wins Florida Democratic Senate Primary Why Angie Nixon's Primary Win Isn't a Senate Win A University of North Florida poll taken before the primary showed Moody leading Nixon by 8 points, 46 percent to 38 percent, with 14 percent undecided. Election forecasters at the University of Virginia's Sabato's Crystal Ball moved the race to safely Republican after Nixon's win.
The county-level returns complicate the simplest version of the socialism story. Nixon carried Miami-Dade County, home to the largest concentration of Cuban Americans in the country, by nearly 20 points over Vindman, who had built his campaign in part around his family's flight from the Soviet Union. She also dominated in Osceola and Orange counties, both anchored by large Puerto Rican populations. Vindman's strongest counties were not Florida's most Latino ones. He won Collier, Sarasota, Sumter, Charlotte and Monroe, coastal and retiree-heavy counties that lean toward the Democratic Party's older, more institutional wing.
Miami-Dade's Democratic primary electorate isn't representative of the county's broader voters, who have trended Republican for most of the past decade. Cuban American voters who lean Republican and don't take part in a Democratic primary are a large part of why.
Newsweek reached out to Nixon's campaign for comment on Wednesday.
Florida is home to roughly 1.9 million Cuban Americans, the largest concentration in the country, with at least 900,000 in Miami-Dade County alone. An April Miami Herald poll found that 79 percent of South Florida's Cuban Americans support some form of U.S. military intervention in Cuba, and 36 percent back overthrowing the island's government.
A separate March survey from Florida International University's (FIU) Latino Public Opinion Forum found Cuban-origin respondents and Florida Latinos broadly form the state's clearest bloc of support for tougher policy toward Venezuela , Cuba and Latin America, an outlier position compared with Puerto Rican, Mexican American and Central American voters, who were more likely to disapprove of the Trump administration's approach to the region.
Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried has acknowledged the problem, telling WPLG in Pembroke Pines that socialism is not a politically viable label in Florida given the state's Cuban and Venezuelan exile population. FIU's Cuba Poll, the longest-running survey of Cuban American opinion in South Florida, found support for the embargo climbing back to 60 percent by 2020, with 72 percent of respondents favoring a maximum-pressure approach toward regime change in Havana.
Yet a May survey by the Hispanic advocacy group UnidosUS found that 30 percent of Cuban respondents ranked the cost of living and inflation as the most important issue for Congress to address, a higher share than for any other issue tested. Immigration ranked sixth, behind housing, health care and border security.
Immigration enforcement presents another complication for Republicans in a community they have long relied on. The same Miami Herald poll that found 79 percent support among South Florida Cuban Americans for U.S. military intervention in Cuba also found that 68 percent disapproved of deporting Cubans specifically.
Republicans also hold a voter-registration advantage in 59 of Florida's 67 counties, underscoring the broader challenge Democrats face in a state where the GOP's organizational and electoral advantages extend well beyond South Florida.
Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor at FIU who has studied Cuban American and Venezuelan American voting behavior for decades, does not believe Nixon has a realistic path to defeating Moody in November. But he said that should not obscure what her primary victory revealed about the Democratic electorate in Florida.
"I don't think there's the…
Read the original at Newsweek →
Open in TruthVane →