Sen. Ashley Moody Beats Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon to Hold Florida Seat
The appointed Republican will serve out the rest of Marco Rubio's term, while three Florida Democrats survived GOP-friendly redistricting.
Republican Sen. Ashley Moody won the Florida special Senate election Tuesday night, CBS News projected, defeating Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon and keeping the seat in GOP hands. Moody, 51, will serve out the remainder of the term of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which ends in early 2029.
Moody was appointed last year to fill the vacancy Rubio left when he joined the Trump administration. She previously served as Florida's attorney general and worked as a commercial litigator and federal prosecutor. The seat has been reliably Republican in recent cycles, and President Donald Trump carried Florida by 13 points in 2024.
Nixon, 42, has represented parts of the Jacksonville area in the Florida House since 2020. She is a democratic socialist who pulled off an upset in the Democratic primary against a more moderate opponent, one of a series of victories for progressive-left candidates this cycle. CBS News described those wins as a key midterm dynamic as Democrats debated competing visions for their party's future.
General election contests, CBS noted, were a different matter, particularly in a state that has grown steadily more Republican. Moody's allies seized on Nixon's socialist label, a line of attack that CBS said may have alienated some immigrant communities in Florida who fled socialist governments. Nixon pushed back repeatedly, saying "it's not about labels," and emphasized health care and housing affordability.
The race was closer in the early count than the final result suggests. As of 8 p.m., with roughly 90 percent of the vote counted, CBS News still classified both the Senate and governor's races in Florida as toss-ups, because votes were still coming in from the Republican-leaning Panhandle. NPR later reported that Republican Byron Donalds won the governor's race.
Florida also produced a bright spot for Democrats in the House. CBS News projected that two Democrats whose districts were redrawn to favor Republicans survived. Rep. Kathy Castor, in Congress since 2007, won reelection in the 14th District, and Rep. Jared Moskowitz won in the 25th District after beating a democratic socialist in the primary. In the redrawn 22nd District, Democratic candidate Pia Dandiya was also projected to win.
Voting in the state was complicated by severe weather. CBS News reported flooding from what it called a "1,000-year rain event" in Florida on Election Day, and NPR said some polling places were closed because of flooding.
For Republicans, Moody's win was a relief on a night when Democrats flipped North Carolina's Senate seat and held Georgia and New Hampshire. Republicans hold a six-seat Senate majority and Democrats need a net gain of four seats for control, so every hold in a state Trump won matters to the GOP's effort to keep the chamber.
