Until this week’s Florida primary, corporate and AIPAC Democrats could comfort themselves with the belief that the surge of democratic socialists was largely limited to a few big cities and college towns. But then DSA member Angie Nixon, a three-term state rep from Jacksonville, trounced the impeccably credentialed centrist Alex Vindman by 12 points. Vindman, with heavy AIPAC and corporate support, had outraised Nixon 19-to-1, having a war chest of more than $16 million compared to Nixon’s less than a million.
Nixon’s victory was so improbable that she was not even on the radar of DSA, which did not bother to endorse her. Nixon had only joined DSA in June. Vindman, a lieutenant colonel and former national security aide, came to prominence for his 2019 testimony on Trump’s pressure on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Joe Biden. Expecting to cruise to victory in the primary, Vindman did not deign to campaign, saving his war chest for the general election.
How could a democratic socialist, and a Black woman no less, win such a resounding primary victory in conservative Florida?
Like other progressives and democratic socialists, she won by campaigning mainly on pocketbook issues, calling for Medicare for All, universal child care, and a national rent freeze. As the Miami Herald’s story on Nixon’s victory pointed out, “The Sunshine State is in the throes of an affordability crisis … the cost of things like housing, childcare and food [are] soaring. Wages haven’t kept up, pushing nearly half of Floridians into financial precarity.”
Nixon was also a formidable organizer. She was formerly state field director for Florida SEIU.
Nixon managed to create a coalition that has largely eluded democratic socialists elsewhere. While candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly won the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, won college-educated progressives and lost the working class and Black vote, Nixon won big in Florida counties with large minority and working-class populations, but also in college towns. And she won 63 percent of the vote in large urban areas.
Nixon was also helped by the arrogance of Vindman, who did not take her seriously and refused to meet her in debate. Vindman only moved to Florida three years ago.
Black turnout surged not only to support an African American candidate, but because the Black community is in a state of political rage because of shameless Republican racial gerrymandering. In the state legislature, Nixon channeled that rage, calling out her Republican colleagues with a bullhorn and getting herself arrested.
Florida in recent years has only elected Republicans to statewide offices, but it is not all that conservative, especially on pocketbook issues, which are now front and center. In 2004, Floridians passed a ballot initiative raising the minimum wage. It won every county, winning statewide with 71 percent; it got a million votes more than the winning presidential candidate George W. Bush and two million more than the losing candidate John Kerry. (Organizers begged Kerry to join them and campaign for it. He refused. Had he come, he might have been president.) But I digress.
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Could Nixon even win the general election? It would take a massive anti-Trump wave, with lots of Republican voters staying home. But that might happen. In 2018, the last Democratic wave year, Republican Ron DeSantis beat Democrat Andrew Gillum, the first Black nominee for Florida governor, by just four-tenths of one point.
Florida’s care and service economy is heavily dependent on Haitians, who are now basically unemployable because of Trump’s cruel revocation of TPS. That has produced broad resentment and backlash against the administration.
Politico’s morning-after story, headlined “Florida Dems Scramble to Regroup After Nixon Upset,” pointed to Nixon’s victory as a problem for Democrats, noting that Latino voters in Florida “have deeply held negative associations with the word ‘socialism’ after fleeing left-wing regimes in places like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.” In fact, Nixon did well in counties with large Hispanic populations.
As frosting on the progressive cake, the special election to succeed disgraced Congressman Eric Swalwell in California’s 14th Congressional District was called last night. With only about 5,000 votes left to count, progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-supported centrist Melissa Hernandez by about six points.
Wahab, a Muslim whose parents were refugees from Afghanistan, has represented roughly the same suburbs east of Oakland for two terms in the California State Senate. Wahab beat Hernandez in both the primary and the first round of this special election by over 20 points. AIPAC and its allies spent over $6 million on the election in the hope of beating Wahab in the final round. They failed.
Once again, the win demonstrates that pocketbook issues are king. The big-picture story in both elections is that economic progressives are winning and will keep on winning—because they speak to the lived experience of ordinary Americans, and because on-the-ground organizing is more potent than big money.
