Ashley Moody wins Florida special election to keep US Senate seat

Republican Ashley Moody has won Florida’s special US Senate election, defeating democratic socialist Angie Nixon and retaining the seat she was appointed to in January 2025. The result means Moody will remain in the Senate for the rest of Marco Rubio’s term, which runs until the 2028 election.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis selected Moody for the vacancy after Rubio became US secretary of state. Tuesday’s victory gave her an electoral mandate to continue serving in the seat. Polls before the vote had shown Moody with a clear but narrow lead, leaving Nixon seeking to make up ground with backing from prominent progressive Democrats.

The race also offered a test of Florida’s political direction. Republicans had established an advantage of 1.5 million registered voters, while Democrats had gone a decade without winning a statewide race. The contest provided a measure of whether Democrats were making progress towards returning Florida to its former position as a major electoral battleground.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared at rallies with Nixon in central Florida in October. The area has a large immigrant population, and the Trump administration’s harsh approach to detention and deportation has been unpopular there. Their appearances brought prominent progressive support to Nixon’s effort to overcome Moody’s polling advantage.

Moody repeatedly attacked Nixon’s politics during the campaign, calling her a “socialist”. She pointed to Nixon’s association with the Democratic Socialists of America to argue that her opponent wanted to defund police and the US military, eliminate prisons, permit unchecked immigration and allow noncitizens to vote. Those positions were presented as accusations by Moody.

On immigration, Moody praised Trump’s policies. She was more restrained in her personal praise of the president, however, as he faced strong disapproval over the Iran war and high gasoline prices. Her campaign thus combined support for his immigration agenda with limited public praise of Trump himself.

Nixon placed affordability and political corruption at the centre of her campaign. She repeatedly raised Moody’s role as Florida attorney general in the Hope Florida scandal, in which the DeSantis administration diverted a $10 million Medicaid payout to political committees.

Nixon also answered the attacks over prisons with a pointed remark about her opponent. “I don’t want to abolish prisons, because I want Ashley Moody in one of them,” she said in an interview. The comment became one of the most widely circulated moments of her campaign.