DSA Goes for Florida
Plus: Fire Island, data center NIMBYism, cost-of-living discourse, and more...
Surprise victory for DSA candidate: In Florida's Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat, Angie Nixon—an underfunded, ultraprogressive, card-carrying Democratic Socialists of America member candidate—scored a victory against Alex Vindman, who had a fair bit of national name recognition as a witness in President Donald Trump's 2019 impeachment proceedings.
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Nixon will now go up against Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody in November—a race in which Moody is favored.
Nixon, a state representative from Jacksonville, joined the DSA earlier this summer. She promises Medicare for All, a $25-per-hour federal minimum wage, a billionaire tax, state-provided childcare (with "living wages" for those workers), and a national rent freeze. She wants to not only provide public college for all (at taxpayer expense), but also cancel student debt. "While the average American is struggling, corporate landlords, insurance companies, and grocery chains have posted record profits," reads her campaign website. (Questionable!) It's all pretty boilerplate as far as democratic socialists go, but insane that the platform was seemingly attractive enough to springboard a total underdog candidate to primary success. (It's also possible that Vindman just wasn't an attractive candidate to the state's Democrats.)
Nixon raised $975,000; Vindman raised $16.3 million. Nixon spent $60,000 on advertising; Vindman spent $2.2 million. Nixon was really not favored to win at all. Interestingly, Vindman refused to debate Nixon during the race, possibly not regarding her as a very serious contender.
Nixon's win is a reminder that we're being swept up in a wave of populist, socialist candidates who appeal to people without an understanding of basic economic concepts. Rent freezes don't make sense, because what landlord would choose to improve an apartment they can't profit from? Housing stock will fall into disrepair—or sit vacant, if landlords get to a point where renting it out is no longer lucrative. Forgiven student debt doesn't fix the problem of bloated tuition; it serves as a handout from all the taxpayers—including the plumbers and electricians who went to trade school and never got a fancy degree—to doctors and lawyers, who can afford their debt, but also to those in the humanities who maybe made bad decisions about how valuable their degree would end up being. Childcare paid by taxpayers just means childless people are forced to subsidize those who have kids, and families who choose nannies or to have one parent stay at home subsidize those who make a different choice.
Each promise made by socialists treats prices as inconveniences that ought to be legislated away, instead of information that can help us understand what things really cost and where resources are most needed. Socialists, on a fundamental level, don't want you to be in charge of your own destiny; they want to do it for you, for your own good.
Beware what's happening in Florida, and nationwide. Getting a critical mass of DSA types in the U.S. Senate could usher in a nightmare scenario.
Other victors: Thankfully, it wasn't just DSA types who won the day in Florida: "Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Moskowitz, both moderate, pro-Israel Democrats, easily fended off rivals after Republican gerrymandering led them to compete in new districts," reports The New York Times. "Ms. Wasserman Schultz, an 11-term incumbent, overcame frustration from Black Democrats who did not want her to represent a historically Black district. Mr. Moskowitz bested a democratic socialist." (Kind of wild that a party establishment stalwart like Wasserman Schultz winning is the good news when she also sucks so much.)
Scenes from Fire Island:
scenes from fire island pic.twitter.com/gX6hjVVZB3
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) August 18, 2026
Fire Island is a car-free barrier island parallel to Long Island's South Shore. My husband is from the ferry town, so we've started going there a few times each summer. It's pretty isolated in the off-season, when ferry service stops running, and it took a big beating during Hurricane Sandy (but beach renourishment efforts circa 2009 helped make the dunes sturdier and more protective, at substantial cost to residents through a property tax raise).
"Fire Island is like a farming community in the Midwest, but instead of acres and acres of wheat and corn separating best friends, it is sand dunes and sunken forests," reads a New York Times piece from 1992, on the island's year-round families. "Children are scattered all along the barrier island. The school's student body includes nine students who live in Coast Guard housing and three who are children of park rangers stationed at Sailor's Haven and the Fire Island Lighthouse. The rest are from various communities. To visit or have visitors is a transportation quandary. 'It's a restrictive kind of life,' Ms. [Louise] Gonan [principal of the island's only school] said." But the kids also get tons of independence: with the exception of limited construction and emergency vehicles, there are no cars around. Roving packs of children ride bicycles and wander and surf.
During the summer, it's vibrant and active, but not too packed with people (at least where we go).
QUICK HITS
- Data center NIMBYism, brought to you by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
- "A selloff in global bonds is driving up borrowing costs for governments, businesses and families across the developed world," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Bond yields are at 19-year highs, and investors are blaming the rout on everything from the continuing U.S.-Iran conflict, which has stoked inflation worries, to the deluge of tech-company bonds vying for debt funds' cash. They are also anxious about budget deficits and a lack of clarity from a new Federal Reserve chairman. Few see eye to eye on exactly how much weight to put on any one factor, but most agree on one thing: None of those conditions are likely going away soon."
- "Trump administration officials ignored the recommendations of their own investigators as they pushed to find civil rights violations at three Ivy League universities, according to a whistle-blower complaint released Tuesday," reports The New York Times. "The Aug. 17 account came from a former Department of Justice civil rights lawyer, Haley Van Erem, and colleagues whose names were redacted, who said they were assigned in 2025 to an administration task force on antisemitism. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released the account on Tuesday. In the complaint, the lawyers accuse administration officials of using campus antisemitism as a pretext to cut federal grants to pressure Brown, Columbia and Harvard. Trump officials had 'a predetermined, outcome‑driven approach to enforcement rather than a fact‑based investigative process,' it said, while investigators said they did not have the evidence to conclude the schools had broken the law."
- Beautiful mindset, re: cost-of-living discourse:
just before the birth of my second child, I had the realisation that we had already entered the permanent middle class and i hadn't even noticed.
even on one of our incomes we would be able to live a humble but comfortable life—much wealthier in material terms than my own… https://t.co/Ybn9MyOHFU
— Gabriel (@gbrl_dick) August 18, 2026
Another take. Props to all who get the reference.
https://t.co/RGU2aCYfMA pic.twitter.com/DENeHKxxUs
— Sam Rogers (@RealSamRogers) August 18, 2026
