Senator Ashley Moody of Florida, the Republican appointed last year to replace Marco Rubio, won a special election on Tuesday to complete his term, according to The Associated Press. She fended off a challenge from State Representative Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee, who had mounted a grass-roots campaign that kept the race closer than expected.
Ms. Moody’s victory cemented Republicans’ dominance in recent Florida Senate races. Republican Senate candidates have won every time they have been on the ballot in the state since 2018 as the former political battleground has become more reliably Republican.
Ms. Moody, 51, will now get to serve two more years in the Senate. She will be able to seek re-election to a full term in 2028.
That she faced so much of a contest this year in a state that President Trump won by 13 percentage points two years ago was surprising. Florida Republicans won Senate races by double-digit margins in 2022 and 2024, and Ms. Moody was expected to continue that streak when Gov. Ron DeSantis picked her for the job last year. She was serving a second term as the state’s attorney general at the time.
But Ms. Nixon’s shocking win in the Democratic Senate primary in August jolted the race. She deployed her skills as a former union organizer to score an upset despite having been at a vast fund-raising disadvantage compared with a rival favored by the party establishment.
In the general election, Ms. Nixon, 42, bet that she would be more successful by leaning into progressive policies, such as single-payer health care and universal child care, than by moving to the political center like past Democratic Senate nominees in the state had done. Ms. Nixon would have been Florida’s first Black senator.
She joined the Democratic Socialists of America in June. That party did not endorse her campaign, but Ms. Moody used the democratic socialist label to cast Ms. Nixon as much too radical for the “free state of Florida.”
Ms. Moody had endorsements from Mr. DeSantis and from Mr. Trump, whose unpopularity dragged down Republican candidates across the country. The president rallied twice in Florida in the last days of the campaign, getting loyal supporters to the polls.
Ms. Moody ran as something of a generic Republican, little known to many Florida voters because she had never run for the Senate before — and because her Senate campaign was not very visible, especially compared with Ms. Nixon’s.
But Ms. Nixon was not well known, either, and had much less money to introduce herself to Florida’s big and diverse electorate.
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