State Rep. Angie Nixon, the Democratic candidate challenging U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody for her seat, used a get-out-the-vote rally in Tallahassee to highlight her arrest during a May protest over redistricting and to push back on critics who have labeled her policy positions “radical.”
Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, described herself at the rally as a “former single mom and a union organizer” who “ran to fight the corruption that’s making our costs rise.” She drew a contrast with Moody, saying, “Unlike Ashley Moody, I wasn’t appointed as a thank you for my loyalty to a corrupt system. I was elected to fight that corrupt system, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing in the state House.”
She went on to recount the May incident in which she used a bullhorn to interrupt redistricting proceedings, an act that led to her arrest. “Y’all know I took out a pink bullhorn and shut those proceedings down. Sometimes you gotta get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Y’all know they arrested me. Shameful,” Nixon told the crowd.
She also described her background as an organizer before holding office. “Before I was ever elected to public office, I was out there organizing, organizing workers, organizing families, organizing people who had been told over and over and over again that no one in power cared what happened to them,” she said.
Framing Her Agenda
Nixon told supporters she is running for the U.S. Senate because she is “tired of watching corrupt politicians like Ashley Moody get richer and richer while the rest of us work harder and harder and still struggle just to barely make it.”
She addressed criticism that her positions are too far left by reframing them as basic economic fairness.
If believing that a mother working two jobs should earn enough food to put food on the table, if that is radical, then she should call me a radical. If believing that a senior who worked their entire life should be able to retire with dignity is radical, then they can call me a radical, or believing that a child with cancer should get the treatment that they need, whether their parents can afford it or not, or believing that no family should go bankrupt because somebody got sick is radical, then call me radical.
“They call me radical as hell,” she added later in her remarks.
Nixon urged the audience to go beyond simply supporting her candidacy. “This is not my campaign. This is our campaign, and I am asking you all to join this People Power Campaign,” she said, asking attendees to knock on doors, make phone calls and reach out to their personal networks, including, as she put it, “your boyfriends, your girlfriends, your exes, your sneaky links, all of them.”
“We are going to send a working-class union organizer to the United States Senate,” Nixon said.
Minimal Mention of Socialist Label
Nixon referenced her affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America only once during the rally, instead emphasizing a working-class, anti-corruption message. She argued that Moody’s campaign dismisses her proposals as extreme because it is simpler than engaging with the substance. “Now Ashley Moody thinks these basic and commonsense things are extreme, radical, even socialist,” Nixon said. “Someone said because it’s easier to call me names than for her to explain why she keeps voting to make life harder for working people.”
Nixon is a state representative and co-owner of Cafe Resistance, a Tallahassee cafe and bookstore. She has previously attributed a nosebleed to the “trauma” of working alongside Republicans in the state House.
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