Trending
The most surprising result in the batch of primaries held last week over the vast stretch of America from Florida through Wyoming to Alaska was the defeat of famed anti-Trump whistleblower Alexander Vindman by state Rep. Angie Nixon in the contest for the Democratic nomination against appointed Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody in Florida.
Of these candidates, Vindman was by far the best known nationally. His role in spurring the House’s 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump made him a hero to Democratic money-givers large and small. That helped his twin brother Eugene finance a successful race for a Virginia congressional seat in 2024 and helped Alexander raise $16 million for this year’s U.S. Senate race.
The big surprise - and a disagreeable one for Vindman, whose campaign was evidently husbanding funds for the general election - is that he lost the Democratic primary by a 56% to 44% margin to Nixon, who raised only $974,000.
Nixon entered the campaign known to those Floridians who pay close heed to goings-on in Tallahassee as a legislator who charged the podium, speaking through a pink bullhorn, to protest a redistricting bill and who sponsored a 2023 bill for a ceasefire in Gaza that was voted down 104-2.
During the campaign, she signed up with the Democratic Socialists of America and campaigned on its more presentable platform planks, such as “Medicare for All” and a $25 minimum wage.
Nixon carried her home base, Jacksonville, with 80% of the primary vote, and won 80% in Florida’s one Black-majority county, Gadsden, as well. Her winning percentages in counties including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando suggest she owes much of her margin to Black voters, plus, like DSA-adjacent candidates in other states, support from college-educated voters with low incomes (including the two counties, Alachua and Leon, with the highest percentages of campus-oriented voters).
In contrast, she failed to carry the more affluent - and more elderly - counties centered on West Palm Beach, Naples and Sarasota. We seem to be witnessing a passing of the guard here, from the Democrats of the Resistance scrolling through Bluesky in search of candidates and causes with which to display their loathing of Trump to a younger generation of Democrats determined to display their support of “socialism” and opposition to “Zionists.”
There is something redolent here of the seeming takeover of the Democratic Party half a century ago by a younger generation of voters and activists opposed to the Vietnam War that resulted in the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and had a continual influence on elected Democrats and policymakers through most of the 1970s and 1980s. That came from a protest movement incubated on college and university campuses, centered on Vietnam but also influenced by tomes such as Charles Reich’s 1970 “The Greening of America.”
Similarly, the great motivating cause of DSA-adjacent Democrats seems to be statehood for Gaza, opposition to Israel, and, in very many cases, hostility toward Jews.
I see one highly visible difference between the 1970s and today: the composition of campuses and the ascendant groups of the Democratic Party.
In 1970, 58% of college and university students were men, while today an almost identical 57% are women. Similarly, men formed most of the leadership cadres and masses of support in the campus and political movements of half a century ago. Today, or so it seems to me, women do.