The Angie Nixon Caucus

One week from today, between interviewing prospective staffers and logging on to back-to-back orientation Zooms and finding a place to live in Washington, D.C., freshman Rep. LaKesha Womack (D-NC) will have to show up to a hearing at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse to explain why she didn’t promptly return a Toyota Corolla she rented from Budget Rental Car seven years ago during a bout of homelessness.

Womack, a 49-year-old consultant, ordained minister, and executive coach who raised just over $59,000 ($3,200 of it a personal loan from herself) for her successful campaign to unseat Republican Rep. Tim Moore in a seat Donald Trump won by 15 points two years ago, is one of two freshmen-elect who flipped GOP-held seats despite raising less than $100,000. The other is Victoria Broderick of Fayetteville, Tennessee, a 34-year-old tech support staffer who was expecting to clock in for a full day of work on Wednesday until the Davidson County votes started piling up around 9 p.m., and she realized she might have a shot at actually winning her Trump +24 district, beating eight-term congressman Scott DesJarlais, a Freedom Caucus member with a famously checkered past to whom she’d lost in a blowout back in 2024. (Womack’s race has been called by the Associated Press; Broderick leads by 280 votes with nearly all votes in, but it hasn’t been called for her yet.)

Both women belong to an emerging “Angie Nixon caucus” of grassroots populist candidates who won by forgoing fancy fundraisers, “call time,” and political consultants, and instead building political brands around their own struggles to put food on the table.

Broderick, a longtime Democratic Party organizer, was originally motivated to run for office back in April 2024, a couple of years after the Dobbs decision, which itself had come just a year after she’d experienced a painful miscarriage in a state that had passed something like a dozen laws restricting or criminalizing abortion in the preceding decade. DesJarlais had famously encouraged both his ex-wife and his former, then 24-year-old mistress to get abortions while staunchly defending the most draconian efforts to criminalize the procedure, a scandal opposition researchers unearthed during a 2012 effort to unseat vulnerable Tea Party freshmen. (DesJarlais won by 12 points anyway, though he came 38 votes away from losing a primary challenge the following cycle after local newspapers revealed a raft of related sexual and ethical infractions in 2013.)

Since then, however, the congressman had sailed to re-election so easily that as of April 2024 he was running completely unopposed—something Broderick was so incensed to learn at a state party meeting that she resolved then and there to run a last-ditch campaign against a man she viewed as the apotheosis of the rich Republican elitist who would deny women the right to a procedure he had personally arranged for the women in his life.

Broderick’s videos articulated a worldview held by many under-35 progressives, in which abortion and trans rights aren’t “culture war” issues but central plotlines in the overarching saga of wealthy and cynical men conspiring to deprive regular people of basic human rights and dignities. And by the time she lost the 2024 election by more than 43 points, she and the thousands of TikTok followers who had grown invested in her political career and/or her constant stream of new rescue kittens, hairstyles, and toddler toy disasters knew exactly how hard Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would be working to demonstrate the accuracy of her worldview.

In a video filmed standing in her kitchen the week before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, she made the case for running again by listing all the things she desperately wanted but didn’t have: “I don’t have bodily autonomy. I don’t have good health care, or universal income. I don’t have a secure income, because corporations are … insane. And I don’t have and I can’t guarantee a decent public education for my children. What I can guarantee them is …” She trailed off, possibly on the verge of breaking down before regaining her composure with a goofy half-smile and concluding: “I’m unhinged. And … feral. And willing to fight for a better future.”

WOMACK, BY CONTRAST, NEVER IMAGINED unburdening herself to supporters in quite the same way. Fifteen years Broderick’s senior, she’d graduated from Vanderbilt in 1999 and spent most of her life marketing her services through the alumni network as an executive coach, a marketing guru, a personal finance expert, and even a spiritual adviser, becoming an ordained minister in 2020. But her life had started to spiral out of control around 2017 after a diabetic seizure turned into a prolonged hospital stay that left her broke and, by 2019, homeless and living in a motel. Her son was placed in foster care during the hospitalization and she says she struggled to get him back. “There were days that I wanted to end my life, that I did not think I was strong enough to push forward,” she told an online “family meeting” of her supporters and volunteers in October.

But Womack had never intended to relive those darkest moments on the campaign trail until a process server approached her in the parking lot after a campaign barbecue in Gastonia in early October and informed her she had been charged with a felony for failing to return the Corolla she had rented from a Charlotte Avis when she was living at the motel. The rental was supposed to last two weeks, a police report states, but she never returned it, assuming the agency would hunt her down and repossess it when they got around to it.

Indeed, they did, Womack says, though she told the Prospect she could not comment on the specifics of when and where because of the litigation. A VIN search of the vehicle suggests it was never formally reported as stolen and that the rental agency sold it to another buyer at some point in 2020. That November, however, someone with the rental agency had reported the missing vehicle to local police, who in turn issued a criminal summons the following January, though Womack says she never received it, likely because she was living in a motel and the rental agency had sent it to the address listed on her driver’s license. Rental car agencies frequently misreport cars as stolen in an effort to collect the often steep penalties they charge for returning cars late; Hertz paid a $168 million settlement to customers it had wrongly accused of stealing its cars in 2022. But by all appearances the agency abandoned its efforts to collect on Womack’s case for six and a half years after that.

Until, that is, the polls began to portend what Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) characterized in October as an impending “bloodbath” in the midterm elections. Moore, a freshman Republican who spent a decade as the Speaker of the North Carolina House and who notoriously authored the transgender “bathroom bill” in 2016 that started Republicans down the path of picking on trans youth for political expediency, had barely acknowledged Womack since she’d announced her candidacy a year earlier. But a sudden uptick in hostile media attention toward the end of September made her wonder if Moore knew something her $4,000 “war chest” couldn’t afford. A Spectrum News reporter asked Womack if she would “denounce socialism,” as fellow North Carolina Democrat Don Davis had over the summer, drawing an exasperated reply: “If we denounce socialism we’re denouncing the fire department.” Then, a bizarre series of interactions and anonymous text messages had preceded the criminal summons, and a reporter had called for comment mere hours after she had been served.

They’re starting to dig for dirt, she thought. They don’t start digging for dirt and slinging mud unless they’re scared.

Womack had another epiphany a few days after the barbecue, while distributing campaign literature and T-shirts to Charlotte airport workers staging an informal 24-hour strike for better pay. “Before the campaign I used to fly all the time,” she told followers on a Facebook video. “And I used to see the workers who would come into the plane and clean. What I didn’t know was the pressure these workers are under to get those planes clean on time for takeoff. What I didn’t know is that most of these workers don’t have health care. What I didn’t know is that some of these workers are spending as much money as they make in a day on Uber rides getting to and from the airport because they couldn’t afford a car or they don’t have transportation.” Her voice began to crack just a little bit.

“What I didn’t know was that there was a lady who passed away a couple months ago because she was a Type 1 diabetic, just like me. And she was sick, but she still had to go to work because she had bills to pay. And she was about to leave for the night, but they asked her to just clean one more plane. She ended up passing out there and she never made it home.” Adding insult to death, her daughter, who also worked at the airport, got written up for taking time off to grieve. Another airport worker said she worried that she’d have to institutionalize her developmentally disabled daughter if she couldn’t get medical benefits that would cover home health assistance.

“I get [that] some of y’all really get off on cruelty,” Womack continued, tearing up. “But we do not have to live like this! I came into this protest thinking, ‘These are worker issues,’ but they’re not. These are policy issues.”

Womack’s campaign “family” agreed wholeheartedly: “We need you in the House & Angie Nixon in the Senate flipping tables!” replied a volunteer in the comments, invoking the Gospel story that inspired Sen.-elect James Talarico’s best-selling T-shirt.

IN A TSUNAMI ELECTION LIKE WHAT we experienced Tuesday, candidates like Broderick and Womack are often dismissed as aberrations, warm bodies with a “D” next to their names. Axios portrayed both in a feature on incoming freshmen who “shocked even their own party.” But both women are well on their way to becoming legends in their area codes. A Broderick campaign staffer the Prospect reached Wednesday morning at the gym said he never had any doubt she would win her race, and in the final stretch before Election Day North Carolina state Democratic chair Anderson Clayton spent several days shadowing Womack, whom she called a “phenomenal firebrand” in a glowing speech. The national Democratic women’s political recruitment group Emerge America, which trained Womack at a candidate boot camp and featured her at a luncheon last month, is promoting both women as role models for aspiring Angie Nixons.

“In a campaign cycle that is all about cost of living and the economy, stupid,” Emerge CEO A’shanti Gholar told the Prospect, “it’s really those people who are actually from the community, who can go out and have fun with constituents in a way that can only come from a deep understanding that people have to live with the decisions being made when Congress passes legislation that makes its biggest supporters richer.” Looking over the list of House candidates who came within two or three thousand votes of flipping seats, Gholar expressed regret that the national campaign slush funds had lavished cash on certain races but withheld serious assistance from Nixon and candidates with obvious “star” quality like Womack.

But both women assured the Prospect that a shoestring campaign budget has some distinct advantages, and that they fought hard to avoid the slippery slope of “fundraising brain.” In Womack’s district, consultants started to come calling when she beat a prominent Charlotte attorney with a center-left platform and about $78,000 in his coffers in the primary. But Womack had worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, when she lost to Trump despite a 2-to-1 cash advantage, almost entirely due to diminished Black turnout in a few key states—among them North Carolina, where Black turnout fell higher between 2012 and 2016 than in any state other than Wisconsin. Ten years later, she saw the opposite dynamics begin to take shape every time she showed up at a church, an Indivisible rally, or a town hall. Being in the community and talking to people who could vote for her took precedence over everything else. “I prioritized yard signs, T-shirts, and keeping gas in my car,” she told the Prospect.

Despite even longer odds on paper, Broderick faced even more consultant-class pressure to lobotomize her campaign. When we talked and I mentioned one of my favorite of her videos, in which she responds to a follower’s question about what word she substitutes for the f-word around her toddlers with the disarming admission that “I use the word, ‘fuck,’ so … Follow me for more parenting tips!,” she began to list all the times a consultant or well-meaning political veteran advised her to delete her entire social media feed. Instead of following their advice, she began posting videos critiquing consultant-class conventional wisdom. “Viability is a weapon of the donor class and the politics-as-usual crowd,” she declared in a video posted in May.

The blob had migrated to a Nashville councilman who had been running in a neighboring district until the last-minute redistricting effort touched off by the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, at which point he announced he was throwing his hat into the Fourth District primary to challenge Broderick. The councilman, music executive Mike Cortese, had raised an astonishing $788,000 from such luminaries as Don Henley and the Simon mall developer family, and Broderick was hearing that party elders were hoping she might drop out. Instead, she vented to her followers: “Money isn’t just a tool of the donor class, it’s a gatekeeper. Instead of policy, it becomes a question of money. How much money have you raised? Where are your donors from? How much call time have you logged? All of these questions are meant to gatekeep the system and keep working people out.”

Like Womack, Broderick viewed the dreaded “call time” as a trap for locking candidates in a cycle of dependence on the donor class and a destructive distraction from more important endeavors, like a video proposing legislation requiring all politicians in public appearances to wear jackets emblazoned with the names of corporations and wealthy donors who had contributed to their campaigns, or traveling to DesJarlais’s office with a hidden camera to ask about the Epstein files, or weighing in on the burgeoning political career of the pageant queen daughter of pardoned real estate fraudsters Todd and Julie Chrisley. Referencing her oft-repeated vow not to accept contributions from the Israel lobby or corporate PACs, she encouraged viewers, often with wriggling child in tow, to donate money or time because “the system hates us for it and they’re working to keep us out.”

Not hard enough, it turns out: Following Tuesday’s blowout, the Democratic Party ranks are increasingly populated by populists who outworked the system.