It is one month before Election Day, and a crowd of faithful Democrats has gathered near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for what should be a tense occasion. The audience in the Lauderhill Performing Arts Center is mostly older and white, the kind of “Vote Blue” stalwarts from surrounding Broward County who sport I MISS BARACK caps and pine for the days when the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was algae free. Angie Nixon, the candidate here to address them, is running what looks like a doomed campaign for the U.S. Senate. She has significantly less money than her Republican opponent, is trailing in most polls, and has broken with party leaders in almost every internal dispute of the past ten years, from Bernie versus Hillary in 2016 to whether Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

And yet inside the air-conditioned lobby of the auditorium, a minor miracle is occurring. These partisans love her. “You finally feel a momentum,” says a delighted John McRae, who’s there with his wife, Nancy. “She’s very exciting,” says Deborah Webb, a local substitute teacher, practically giddy. “She’s kind of like Christ coming into the Temple and throwing over the tables,” says Tim Singer, who plans to volunteer for Nixon, leaning closer to be heard over the buzzing crowd.

The fact that Nixon has this audience so amped up might surprise national Democrats. Her reputation as a bullhorn-toting agitator in the Florida house of representatives made Nixon a divisive figure in the state party. She won her seat by primarying a fellow Democrat, Kimberly Daniels, and has conducted protests on the house floor without the say-so of party leaders. After a policy disagreement, Nixon and one colleague, state representative Michele Rayner, did not speak for two months. (Rayner, now an adviser to Nixon’s campaign and a close friend, admits Nixon was right.)

Many of the party’s moderates were against Nixon’s Senate bid during the primary. And in general, Establishment Democrats have been “not supportive” of her confrontational methods, Rayner tells me. They worry she will push out faithful, if centrist, Democrats. In 2023, Nixon introduced a cease-fire resolution to halt Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It infuriated the Democratic state senate minority leader, Jason Pizzo, who went so far as to publicly apologize to Israel’s consul general to Miami. A year and a half later, Pizzo declared the Democratic Party in Florida “dead” and dramatically quit to become an independent.

In spite of these concerns from party officials, on August 18, when given the choice between her and Alex Vindman, a stiff, poll-tested moderate of the kind Democrats have been foisting upon Floridians for years, voters chose Nixon by a decisive 12-point margin. The result shocked national commentators. Vindman is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who became an MSNBC darling after testifying at President Trump’s impeachment hearings. He had out-fundraised Nixon 16-to-1 and was so confident she posed no threat to his nomination that he barely bothered to campaign against her. It was a testament to how poorly Vindman understood Florida — “He says he’s lived here for three years,” Nixon tells me, “but I had never heard of him” — that he failed to see what was obvious on the ground: Democratic voters were fed up with the status quo.

For them, the past decade has been one agonizing defeat after another. Since 2016, what was once the most prized swing state on the electoral map has become a reliable GOP stronghold. Trump has carried Florida in three consecutive presidential elections, increasing his margin of victory every time. The 2022 midterms were such a bloodbath for Democrats — Governor Ron DeSantis and then-Senator Marco Rubio won reelection by 19 and 16 points, respectively — that strategists and donors started to write off the state. “Florida is off the board,” DeSantis bragged to Fox News in 2024. “It is a Republican state.”

Nixon, a dynamic 42-year-old Black single mother turned union organizer, has premised her campaign on the idea that GOP rule has been a disaster. Florida has become more repressive, with bans on abortion and public-school-curriculum materials going into effect, and less affordable, with analysts ranking its housing markets among the most hostile in the country toward renters. She caught fire because she seems to understand better than any other candidate that this election is about “rent, gas, food, and how Florida has become the Hamptons of the United States,” as one longtime Democratic donor, Mitchell Berger, puts it. The Democrats’ go-to response over the past 30 years has largely been to run the most anodyne candidates they can find, only to watch Florida become redder. Nixon has taken the opposite approach, seizing on a polarizing agenda of bigger government and universal programs that pundits long assumed would exclusively resonate in deep-blue states like New York.

Her primary win should be exciting for the party. She is an authentic working-class candidate with charisma, the kind of populist whom political strategists have salivated over this midterm season. “Donald Trump’s net worth has increased by over $4 billion since he’s been back in office. What y’all bank accounts look like?” Nixon asks the crowd. “I mean, seriously, what do your bank accounts look like?” People start calling out numbers. “Somebody said, ‘Double zero.’” Nixon bows her head in pity. “Lord. We going to work on that.” But the national party was initially cool to her efforts. It was galling for Nixon, in part because of Democrats’ lip service to how much they owe to Black women. “It’s like they want our labor,” she tells me, “but they don’t want our leadership.” It also seems shortsighted. For Nixon, November 3 will mark not the end but another beginning. The deeper reckoning comes after the election. She wants to reshape Florida politics — win or lose, with or without national Democrats’ approval.

When Nixon announced her Senate bid in January, she’d spent months trying to recruit someone else for the job. She had lots of good options, she says, including colleagues in the state legislature who she knew “had the back of the community and weren’t going to sell out.” But none of them could be convinced a statewide race was worth the headache. “They kept saying, ‘Where am I going to get the money from? It’s Florida; it’s deep red.’ They felt like it was just a suicide mission.” That Nixon rejected their defeatism is consistent with her longtime approach to politics. Rather than despair at subpar leadership, she runs for office herself, even when it means dispatching fellow Democrats. “I have no problem primarying people,” she says. “That’s what I have always done.”

The joke around Florida is that Nixon’s is a “friends and family” campaign. It heavily relies on her decades-old alliances and personal relationships instead of the usual consultants and party-assigned staffers. Former colleagues from the state legislature and SEIU and even Nixon’s eldest daughter, Natalie, who is 19 and joined her mom at a recent rally at the University of South Florida, can regularly be seen piling out of her pink-and-yellow campaign Sprinter van.

Still, Nixon does want the support of national Democrats. Days after winning the August primary, she spoke by phone with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. She says she asked Schumer for his help; Nixon wanted introductions to donors and assistance with press. (Florida, with its ten major media markets, is one of the most difficult and expensive states in which to advertise.) “We’ll see” was the gist of Schumer’s reply. His noncommittal answer became a minor cause célèbre in progressive corners of social media. The outrage appears to have motivated the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to act: Kirsten Gillibrand, Schumer’s fellow senator from New York who runs the organization, hosted a virtual fundraiser for Nixon earlier this month. Schumer and the DSCC are “now being supportive,” Nixon says, although it came late and only after a public campaign for help. “Elected officials don’t like bad press,” she says.

Most of the issues Nixon is running on — Medicare for All, the “Green New Deal,” free child care, Bernie Sanders’s proposed tax on billionaires — are factional third rails, emblematic of years of infighting between Establishment moderates and progressive insurgents. Many fellow Democrats, both national and local, believe these stances will torpedo her candidacy. Nixon’s polling numbers have been a grab bag, ranging from almost tied to a double-digit deficit. And she faces in Republican opponent Ashley Moody a candidate running with the unwavering support of her party.

A former state attorney general, Moody has never lost an election. She is the rare........

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