Democratic socialist Angie Nixon has scored an upset victory in Florida’s Democratic primary race for the US Senate, as media outlets projected she defeated former national security official Alex Vindman.
Nixon, who has served in the Florida state legislature since 2020, will face Republican Senator Ashley Moody in November’s general election.
Vindman, a retired Army officer, rose to prominence in 2019 when he testified to Congress during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment about a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Nixon, 42, has been active in Florida’s labour movement and was reprimanded this year for disrupting a Florida House vote when she protested congressional redistricting legislation with a pink megaphone.
In her campaign, she urged voters to “make sure you wear your pink to the polls.”
She was backed by prominent progressives including Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
Non-partisan analysts say Moody is favoured to win the match-up and finish the remaining two years in the term of former Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who now serves as Trump’s secretary of state.
Republicans are also favoured to win the governor’s race, in which Republican Byron Donalds will face Republican-turned-Democrat David Jolly.
Nixon’s victory was a surprising result as Florida voters picked candidates to run in the November election, which will determine control of Congress.
Two veteran Democratic politicians cleared their first hurdle as they sought to survive a Republican redistricting that forced them to run in new seats.
Representative Jared Moskowitz was projected to win the Democratic primary in Florida’s 25th congressional district, fending off challenger Oliver Larkin, who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.
Moskowitz will face Republican Scott Singer, a former Boca Raton mayor, in one of the few congressional races in the state seen as competitive in November.
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, first elected to Congress in 2004, won her party’s nomination to represent a Black-majority district in Broward County.
Elsewhere in the state, Mike Beltran, a state representative, was projected to win the Republican nomination to face Democratic Representative Kathy Castor in a district redrawn to favour Republicans.
Florida’s new map, pushed through by the Republican-controlled legislature this spring, could leave the state with a House delegation of 24 Republicans and only four Democrats. Trump, a Republican, won Florida by 13 percentage points in 2024.
States usually redraw their congressional maps only at the beginning of every decade, to reflect census results. But several have redistricted over the past year at Trump’s urging to shore up the Republican majority in Congress, prompting some Democratic-led states to redraw their own maps in response.
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