On Friday, the Tampa City Council approved a deal to construct a new stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays. The public will be on the hook for nearly a billion dollars in development, an open-ended commitment to structural maintenance on the baseball stadium and the cost of razing a local college and rebuilding it elsewhere. The defense of this arrangement was so empty and so rote that it might have been taken verbatim from the title of the book debunking every public stadium deal : “This One Will Be Different.”
That last sentence gets a lot of work in Florida, but then it gets a lot of work everywhere, often more intensely after being again disproved. It is the constant refuge for those who have incentives to refuse to learn things they already know. It serves as a capable stand-in, for instance, for the Florida Democratic Party ’s theory of politics, sending out ex-Republican David Jolly to succeed as a Florida gubernatorial candidate where ex-Republican Charlie Crist failed twice. It’s a thought that allows something like Angie Nixon defeating Alexander Vindman in the Democratic Senate primary to remain an outlier every time.
Nixon, a woman of color, defeated a Democratic semi-celebrity by 12 points despite his outspending her by a factor of 13, and did it all on a progressive platform. If you were under 10 years old, it defied imagination. But that’s the great thing about imagination: No matter how old you are, you give yourself the gift of lifelong surprise by looking at less preferable aspects of reality and saying you imagine they don’t amount to much.
This week, one imagines that Nixon’s opponent, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, wishes he had directed his campaign energies toward a different constituency or manifesting much at all. Vindman came packaged with the moderate coding deemed necessary to win Florida: a white, decorated combat veteran and an Army lieutenant colonel with experience in the national security community. On the 24-hour news channels that analysts on 24-hour news channels like to watch, he wrapped the libidinal appeal of Oliver North’s Iran-Contra testimony in the kind of morally upright “West Wing”-inflected cosplay that has become synonymous with Democratic politics.
Vindman came packaged with the moderate coding deemed necessary to win Florida.
It wasn’t crazy to think that the campaign of a Black former union organizer unafraid to get loud would be DOA in Florida, even on financials alone. Despite its particulars — such as getting norther the souther you go — Florida has produced a conventional electability theory mirroring a familiar national strategy of tweaking the “potency” dial on Diet Conservatism. It’s a state with enormous blue coastal metro areas, red agricultural stuff in the middle with blue dots representing students at large state universities good at football, and bespoke political talk radio dementia. To win statewide, you need to get your message into seven major media markets every day. As such, desirable candidates tend to be white guys who show up with money and lots of clips from TV.
But Vindman campaigned, not like a hero, but like a guy who plays one on TV. When your career is combat, when you are the presumptive nominee and when you are expected to be a strong enough candidate to win the general in a right-leaning state, keeping one’s payroll powder dry for the general election is fundamentally a chickenshit move. The sales pitch, after all, is not that the candidate was unafraid to run straight into live-fired appropriations. Vindman not only didn’t debate Nixon, he seemed like someone in no hurry to become fluent in a state he’s lived in for only three years or a flesh-and-blood person to the people who live in it.
And while Vindman arrived with his own set of iconography from vicious earned-media experience, he also arrived with the negative polarization of being part of Trump ’s serialized, ceaseless crass cash-in drama. For one voter, maybe he’s The Good Ollie North. For someone experiencing the Trump era as an exhaustingly real-life Star Wars universe — where the fates of billions are decided by collectible personalities orbiting the same 10 people again — voting for Vindman might have felt like the chance to send “ Glup Shitto ” to Coruscant give the emperor a piece of your mind.
Between her Service Employees International Union experience, traditional Souls to the Polls-style networking and her focus on young voters in the state’s urban areas, Angie Nixon’s grassroots success shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise. Not just because Nixon has demonstrated an aptitude for getting media attention disproportionate to being a state representative from Jacksonville, but because we were just here eight years ago.
In 2018, Gwen Graham, former member of Congress and daughter of beloved former Gov. Bob Graham, started a slow-walk to Tallahassee with her eyes so fixed on candidates to the right that she got out-organized by Andrew Gillum, a Black candidate running to her left on Medicare for All. If the subject even comes up at all, which it usually doesn’t, that primary tends to be handwaved away as the freak outcome of a crowded primary. It’s tactically safer than seriously engaging with the fact that a Black man running on democratic socialist policies — mayor of a Florida city that regularly gets the GOP “Black crime” treatment and falsely smeared as the subject of an FBI investigation — came closest to winning the governorship than any Democrat since Lawton Chiles in 1994. Arguably the most aberrant part of this outcome was responding to it by returning to making candidates of milquetoast opposition apostates.
If the refusal to learn is human, universal and hence funny, what makes this especially funny is that the level of sophistication required to engage with any of the dynamics at play above is “sports fan.” Though they often end up voting with their fandom and against their own interests when it comes to their franchises, online sports nerds have been leading the charge against publicly financed stadiums for years by roasting their opponents over getting bilked for billions by those with billions. And while they usually want to start the backup too early, in the sports fans’ cosmology, at least Tom Brady has a bunch of rings, while one can’t help but imagine, say, Debbie Wasserman Schultz pumping Drew Bledsoe’s hand and congratulating him on his $60 million AAV contract and starting his 33rd season.
Angie Nixon grassroots success shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise.
No one wants to be around — and certainly not in the beer line in a later inning — when the Tampa Bay Rays fans realize “this one wasn’t different.” There are not fun times ahead when those who told themselves that they didn’t know better already look down and finally realize they are wearing the exact same shoes as the Miami Marlins fans they’ve been razzing for 15 years about their $2.5 billion public financing bill for an abandoned crypt with a moonroof. Whether you acknowledge its existence, the bill comes due either way. Mercifully, it won’t feel nearly so grim when more members of the Democratic Party , leaders, candidates and pundit cheerleaders stand up, dust themselves off and shift a paradigm.
Credit in this case goes to both Vindman and the state party for knowing at least when they are beaten. Each rapidly mutually disclaimed any hostilities with the Nixon campaign, and all three sent a message of unity for the general election. Credit especially goes to Vindman, who seems not only to have accepted the outcome but understood the why of it: In addition to his support, he pledged that the war chest he was saving for the general would go to other candidates in state.
Nixon didn’t come from nowhere, after all. She has loudly and visibly been willing to throw elbows for civil rights. Watching her with a bullhorn in the Florida House and getting arrested standing up for her beliefs means something to Democratic voters for whom the most pressing question for candidates is, “Are you going to actually fight for me or not?” While it’s difficult to know how far that goes with voters, you might ask how far it would go with you. If you are from neither Florida nor the tri-state area ask yourself whether your 2025 journey of understanding progressed from, “The comptroller of the City of New York is a job that might be elected or appointed but definitely exists,” to, “The comptroller of the City of New York is Brad fucking Lander.”
While it’s a solid bet that the media will balloon Vindman campaign’s mistakes — in order to diminish Nixon’s significance and fill any voids where blame could be assigned to anyone else — Nixon’s victory happened. That a progressive Black candidate won statewide is something new to learn only if you’ve excluded the last time that happened from your model as noise. Eventually, if you keep choosing to be surprised when the same thing keeps happening, that’s its own bias.
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Angie Nixon’s Not-So-Surprising Victory
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