Moody Holds Florida Senate Seat, Beats Progressive Nixon

Ashley Moody is keeping her Senate seat. The Florida Republican beat back a challenge from Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist, in Tuesday's special election. It marks the first time Moody has actually won an election — she got the job by appointment, not a vote.

Governor Ron DeSantis tapped Moody in January 2025 when Marco Rubio left the Senate to become US secretary of state. She'll serve out the rest of his term, which runs until 2028. Now she has voters' blessing stamped on it.

Polls going into election day gave Moody a clear but narrow edge, and Nixon tried to claw it back. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both rallied with her last month in central Florida, an immigrant-heavy stretch of the state where the Trump administration's detention and deportation push has landed badly.

Moody's playbook was simple: paint Nixon as a socialist. She tied her to the Democratic Socialists of America, accusing her of wanting to defund police and the military, abolish prisons and back unchecked immigration and noncitizen voting. Moody praised Trump's immigration policies but kept her distance from the president himself, reading the room on his poor approval numbers over the Iran war and high gas prices.

Nixon swung on affordability and political corruption, hammering Moody over the Hope Florida scandal — the DeSantis administration's diversion of a $10m Medicaid payout to political committees, which happened while Moody served as Florida's attorney general. Her sharpest line came in an interview and went viral: she wanted prisons kept open, she said, because she wanted Moody in one of them.

The contest doubled as a temperature check on Florida. Republicans have stacked up a 1.5 million-voter registration advantage, and Democrats have been shut out of statewide races for a decade. Nixon's run was a test of whether that lock is cracking. Tuesday's answer: not yet.