Surrounded by more than 2,000 rain-soaked supporters at the Cuban Club courtyard in Ybor City last Saturday, Rebecca Dean made an admission: She’s casting a ballot for Angie Nixon.
The 61-year-old teacher from Gulfport told the crowd she’s known the Florida lawmaker for years, from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where Nixon, now running for U.S. Senate against appointed Sen. Ashley Moody, is a dues-paying member.
“I’m a registered Republican,” she explained, nervously, “and I’m voting for Angie.”
Dean was met with a roar from a crowd that braved the weather, even bringing their kids, and climbing the back wall of the courtyard where pink plumeria blooms matched the bright ponchos Nixon’s campaign volunteers wore as they navigated the crowd.
Dean, of course, is not alone.
Ted Leo, the punk musician, warmed up the crowd while wearing a staff t-shirt from working class Tampa dive bar The Hub. He closed his set with a cover of The Ramones’ “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg),” a song about President Ronald Reagan’s controversial 1985 visit to a German cemetery that contained the Nazi soldiers and SS men.
But the throngs of people came not just to hear from him or Nixon, but from Sen. Bernie Sanders, too.
The famously independent was barnstorming Florida last weekend, and suggested that Florida might not be as red as politicos have painted it this year.
“Angie can win it. She can win it if working people come out to vote. If working people are out there knocking on doors, making phone calls, all the things we need,” Sanders, 85, said. “They got the money, we got the people.”
It won’t be easy.
Nixon, who’s spent six years in the Florida legislature, earned 705,835 votes in the primary, and she’ll need way more to defeat her Republican opponent, former Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody who was chosen for the seat by Gov. Ron DeSantis after Sen. Marco Rubio got called up to serve in the Trump administration.
With voter registration closed ahead of this midterm, Republicans hold a 1.55 million advantage over Democrats in Florida.
At the rally, newly-minted attorney and strategist Jackson McMillan echoed what everyone knows (that Florida’s 3.3 million NPA voters will decide the race) while adding that young voters will have to play a part. “By young voter I mean under-40, not 18-22,” the 24-year-old told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Last year, McMillan’s four-year-old firm, Key Lime Strategies, raised $25 million for Gay Valimont and Josh Weil in their failed congressional and senate races. He said that standard polling has failed because it samples people who are consistent voters.
“Where Angie is going to make up that math and potentially carry other candidates over the line with her is with people who wouldn’t have shown up otherwise,” he said, noting how significant it was that Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before him, think Florida is in play.
“That kind of thing doesn’t happen if they’re not pretty confident that their presence actually means something,” McMillan added.
Nixon—a 42-year-old who stunned Democratic party lifers with a resounding victory in a primary race where she was outspent 16-to-1 by an anointed candidate—is easy to get behind.
Creative Loafing Tampa Bay is recommending readers select her to represent Florida in the U.S. Senate.
Nixon was a single mom for 12 years and runs Jacksonville’s Café Resistance Bookstore and Coffee Shop. During her six years in the Florida legislature, she filed bills that enhanced early learning and worked on panels pushing back against cuts to public education or restrictions on a woman’s right to choose.
She was even arrested for her vocal protests against Florida’s new gerrymandered voting maps.
SEIU President April Verrett told Ybor City that Nixon, “doesn’t need a focus group to know what working a double shift feels like.”
At the Cuban Club last Saturday, Nixon’s walked out to the sound of Jay Rock’s 2018 hit “Win.”
From the stump, she did what many Florida Democrats seem incapable of—effectively, and viscerally, dismantling her opponent, calling her “lying, cheating, scheming, thieving Ashley Moody.”
She went in on Moody’s role in the Hope Florida scandal where allegations in a now expunged grand jury report detailed how a “sophisticated scheme” moved $10 million that could’ve gone to children’s healthcare to PACs supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political priorities.
Nixon noted how Moody’s stock trading volume while in Washington D.C. have made her millions of dollars richer and how the Tampa-based lawyer’s “Big Beautiful Bill” vote ushered in the largest cut in Medicaid funding in history.
Over the summer, Nixon joined this reporter on-air at WMNF Tampa public affairs radio show and said that if elected, her first order of business will be to file legislation that extends ACA subsidies. “Ashley Moody voted against that, and it knocked nearly 300,000 people off of the Affordable Care Act rolls here in this state, and it caused everyone on private insurance for their health insurance to skyrocket,” Nixon added.
“She works for the corrupt and powerful to advance herself and put millions in her own pocket. But I know who I work for,” Nixon told the crowd. “I work for you. I fight for you.”
Nixon did not let up in Ybor City last Saturday, also bringing up the fact that Moody refuses to debate her.
“Ashley Moody is running scared. She doesn’t want to talk about her record,” Nixon told supporters. “Instead of talking about your cost and her corruption, Ashley Moody just wants to talk about little old me.”
Nixon noted how Republicans are now painting her as radical because she wants to lower costs, shore up social security, and protect families from bankruptcy and exorbitant medical bills—partly by increasing taxes on ultra-wealthy Americans.
“If believing that our teachers should be able to afford to live in the communities where they teach is radical. Then call me radical,” Nixon said.
“If believing that a child with cancer should get treatment they need, whether their parents can afford it or not, is radical,” she went on. “Then call me radical.”
“If believing that we should spend more money taking care of our children than fighting endless wars is radical, then what?,” she then asked the crowd.
“Call me radical,” they screamed back.
Republicans, if you’ve turned on a TV these days, are painting any Democrat—even former Republican, and current Democratic nominee for governor David Jolly—as a radical socialist.
The connection was ironic in the shadow of Ybor City’s 109-year-old Cuban Club, which functioned not just as a social club for immigrants, but a place where they would organize to rally for workers rights and take care of each other through socialized, localized, healthcare.
Right-wingers tried to attack Nixon and Sanders’ rally at the Cuban Club, claiming Cubans who fled communism should be apalled.
Alba Lopes wasn’t giving in to that simplistic assessment.
“I think there’s a misconstrued concept of socialism. Socialism is not just getting things for free; it’s just helping a sector for a society that is vulnerable,” Lopes told CL. “And we as a society do have the responsibility to care for one another.”
Lopez told CL she drove her family 90 minutes from Venice to be at the rally, because of her own beliefs.
“I’m here today because of hope. I believe in change. I believe in our leaders. I believe in our democracy,” she said, and I do believe in the goodness of people.”
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This article appears in Oct. 15 – 21, 2026.
