Florida Democrats Just Made the GOP’s Case for Them

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

 

Charlie will no doubt have a more detailed take on last night’s seismic political events in Florida. Jeff, workhorse that he is, already has one. But this race now has national implications, too. The Democratic Socialists of America scored their biggest victory last night. But it’s also likely to be their most pyrrhic victory.

 

As I told my fellow CNN guests on Tuesday night, there are two things I would not want to be if I were running a statewide race in Florida: anti-Israel and communist-curious. The Democratic nominee for Senate, Angie Nixon, is both.

 

Within one month of the October 7 massacre, Nixon introduced legislation calling for Israel to back down from its military campaigns in “occupied Palestine.” Her colleagues turned their backs on her as she spoke. Her fellow Democrats tried to persuade her to withdraw the bill. She would not, and it went down to a dramatic defeat (104–2 in the Florida House).

 

Nixon has a demonstrated penchant for performative politics, but she’s a true believer when it comes to her Democratic Socialist-standard anti-Zionism. That will complicate her pathway to victory in a state in which more than 60 percent of every age cohort over the age of 35 views Israel more favorably than the “Palestinians.”

 

But being anti-Zionist in what is arguably the most Zionist state in the Union is only the beginning of Nixon’s troubles. The nominee joined the DSA recently, but her platform suggests she’s been on board for a while. It includes Medicare for All, “free” childcare as well as family and sick leave, a national rent freeze and a moratorium on evictions, and a “universal jobs program with inflation-adjusted wages.”

 

Translated from DSA-speak, what she means is: nationalize the health insurance industry, collectivize the family services industry, abrogate property owners’ rights in advance of a massive public takeover of private property holdings (see Zohran Mamdani’s New York City), and create a bunch of taxpayer-funded make-work jobs — presumably, only to sever the worker’s relationship with the private sector. The Soviet constitution wasn’t so ambitious.

 

There’s more than a whiff of capital “S” socialism in all this. Given the scale of the Cuban and Venezuelan diaspora in Florida — demographics with living memory of the horrors that attend life inside the socialist world — the Sunshine State’s voters are likely to sniff it out.

 

Even if the race for Senate in Florida is now a foregone conclusion, this race will still feature prominently in the national conversation. Why? Because it demonstrates that Republicans are right when they warn that the socialist phenomenon is coming to a town near you.

 

We’re no longer talking about the bluest of far-left enclaves in urban America. We’re not even talking about Michigan, a purple state with a long history of labor activism in which the DSA candidate just barely won his race. We’re now talking about a DSA candidate winning statewide in one of the most populous and diverse states in America — a candidate who won in the cities but also in exurban, suburban, and rural districts.

 

Moreover, she ran against her opponent’s explicit acknowledgment of the reality that Florida is a red state, and any successful Democrat would have to make accommodations with that fact. The DSA rejects the notion that it must countenance the legitimacy of their political adversaries. They want power unadulterated by pesky conventions like the separation of powers. Anything that gets in their way — the Constitution very much included — has to go.

 

For weeks, as DSA candidates won primary race after primary race, Democrats accused the GOP of overhyping the socialist threat as a diversionary tactic. The press called it a new “Red Scare” — the return of “McCarthyism” to America. But the Democratic Party’s argument is not with the GOP or Donald Trump. It’s with their own voters.

 

The GOP has struggled to formulate an argument in favor of itself in this midterm cycle, but the party has not floundered similarly in its effort to negatively define the socialist left. Florida’s Democrats just handed Republicans an invaluable gift. Perhaps they’ll even make the most of it.