The Jacksonville Democrat Who Joined the Socialists and Then Claimed She Was Not One of Them

Angie Nixon is the Democratic nominee for Florida’s special Senate seat. She has represented a Jacksonville district in the state House since 2020. In June she joined the Democratic Socialists of America. In August she beat a better-funded primary opponent by more than twelve points. She now faces appointed Senator Ashley Moody in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate in years. Polls show Moody ahead by roughly six to ten points. Nixon’s platform calls for Medicare for All, free child care, a national rent freeze, a five percent annual wealth tax on billionaires, and the abolition of the immigration enforcement agency. She says she is not a socialist. The record of what she has said tells a different story.

Ten Things She Has Said That Do Not Survive Ordinary Scrutiny

1. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America in the middle of her primary campaign and then told interviewers she is not a socialist. She described herself as “more of a social democrat” and said she joined the group only because it supports housing and health care. Membership in an organization whose platform includes those positions is not an accident. Denying the label afterward is.
2. In a church she quoted Assata Shakur, a convicted cop killer who escaped to Cuba, and attributed the lines to a “famous freedom fighter.” The lines include the phrase “we have nothing to lose but our chains,” which tracks the closing of the Communist Manifesto. After the primary she continued to use the same language while dropping the attribution.
3. She has a portrait of Shakur on the wall of the bookstore she owns and has defended it as “history.” When a visitor objected that she was celebrating a cop killer, she replied that people need the unvarnished version of the past, including the parts where people ended up in prison for fighting.
4. She has said there is “no sexualization at a drag show,” called such events “wholesome entertainment,” and stated that she has taken her own children to them. She offered this as a defense of allowing minors to attend.
5. On national television she was asked about Medicare for All, a national rent stabilization standard, raising the federal minimum wage, abolishing the immigration agency, and a five percent annual wealth tax on billionaires. She treated the list as ordinary policy rather than a fundamental reorganization of the economy.
6. She has argued that immigration is “not a criminal issue” and that the immigration enforcement agency should be abolished because other law enforcement can handle criminal conduct. She has also described certain enforcement actions as “kidnapping kids from elementary school” and placing parents “in cages.”
7. She has called for a national rent freeze and a moratorium on evictions lasting up to two years, along with a universal jobs program whose wages would be adjusted for inflation. These are not modest adjustments. They are price controls and open-ended public employment.
8. She has said that people commit crimes “because of a need, a lack of something,” and has framed public safety largely as a problem of housing, food, and jobs rather than of individual responsibility or enforcement. At the same time she has said she does not want to abolish prisons because she wants her opponent in one of them.
9. She has accused her opponent of diverting roughly ten million dollars from sick children into political accounts and has called for a federal investigation that would, in her telling, put the opponent in prison. The underlying facts of the Hope Florida matter remain disputed. Treating a political disagreement as grounds for imprisonment is not ordinary campaign rhetoric.
10. She has said that “if believing a mother working two jobs should earn enough to put food on the table is radical, then call me a radical,” and that none of her proposals are extreme once the labels are stripped away. The proposals themselves—abolishing an entire federal agency, imposing a wealth tax, freezing rents nationwide, and guaranteeing free child care and health care without premiums—are the policies. The claim that the labels are the problem does not change the substance.

The Race and the Record

Nixon won her primary despite being heavily outspent. She has raised competitive money in the general election cycle and has drawn large crowds in some places. She has also said she puts people over party and people over profit. The positions she has advanced, and the figures she has chosen to quote, are part of the public record. Florida voters will decide on November 3 whether those positions and those words describe the kind of senator they want.