FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida does not jump off the electoral map as fertile territory for democratic socialists. President Donald Trump won the state, which has shifted right in recent years, by 13 percentage points in 2024. And in many Latin American communities in South Florida, socialism is a dirty word.

Yet three underdog democratic socialist candidates are trying to prove that the way for the Democratic Party to regain relevance in a state that not long ago was the nation’s premier political battleground is by embracing the left, not recoiling from it.

They are running in primaries for the House and the Senate on Tuesday on a message of change, championing “Medicare for All,” rent stabilization and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their campaigns, which have stoked tensions inside the Democratic Party, offer a fresh test of the bounds of a left-wing movement that has built some momentum in a primary season where they have had mixed results.

“It does not have to be this way,” state Rep. Angie Nixon of Jacksonville, a progressive firebrand who is seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate, said at a campaign event on Friday night that drew a mostly young crowd. “We deserve the opportunity to be healthy, to be prosperous, to be safe, to experience joy.”

Nixon made her comments at a joint rally in Fort Lauderdale with two House candidates, Oliver Larkin and Elijah Manley, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

The event divided Florida Democrats. Organizers changed venues after state Rep. Michael Gottlieb, a Democrat who is the chair of the Florida Legislative Jewish Caucus, objected to the inclusion of Tlaib, an outspoken critic of the Israeli government. Gottlieb also expressed concern that the rally was supporting people who are running against Jewish candidates.

A win by any of the three candidates would be considered a major upset. Nixon, 42, a three-term state lawmaker, is running against Alex Vindman, a top witness in Trump’s first impeachment trial, who has far outraised her in the Democratic Senate race.

Larkin, 34, is challenging Rep. Jared Moskowitz, after Republican state lawmakers redrew the congressional map and eliminated Moskowitz’s old district. Manley, 27, is one of several candidates running against Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a former Democratic National Committee chair. Her old seat was also eliminated, and she is now running in a historically Black district.

The front-runners have engaged little, if at all, with their left-wing challengers.

“Do I think that Broward County Democrats are moving towards embracing the fringe left?” Wasserman Schultz asked The South Florida Sun Sentinel. “No, firmly no.”

Larkin has been a democratic socialist since 2020. Nixon joined the Democratic Socialists of America this year, though she has downplayed that affiliation. Manley is not a member of the organization but campaigns with it and said he identifies as a democratic socialist.

That any strain of progressivism is alive in Florida might surprise even some Floridians. Since taking office, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, turned the state into a laboratory for right-wing policy that was at the forefront of the national culture wars.

But during that time, Florida has also gotten more expensive. Wealthier people have moved to the state, driving up home prices and pushing out working-age residents who can no longer afford the cost of living, especially in big cities such as Miami and Orlando.

“We are not a conservative state,” Richie Floyd, the vice chair of the City Council in St. Petersburg, Florida, said at the rally. In 2021, he became the first democratic socialist elected to office in what appeared to be more than a century. “We are not a right-wing state, he said. “We are a working-class state.”

Since Trump first won Florida in 2016, the state has elected Republicans to many offices while also approving liberal ballot measures restoring felons’ voting rights, raising the minimum wage and legalizing medical marijuana. Those outcomes have led Florida Democrats to believe that liberal policies can win favor even if their party’s brand has struggled.

But to run as any kind of socialist is especially difficult in South Florida, which has been shaped by the politics of Cuban exiles who fled the island’s 1959 Communist revolution. Other Latin American immigrants, including from Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua, also settled in the area after fleeing left-wing governments or violence.

Progressives say they have been buoyed by the success of left-wing and progressive candidates across the country, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York and democratic socialists who have ousted House incumbents. And they have tried to make a Florida-specific argument, pointing to a progressive candidate for governor who came close to winning in 2018, during Trump’s first midterm.

Centrist Democrats in Florida have rolled their eyes at progressives’ contention, countering that a more moderate candidate could have defeated DeSantis in 2018.

Democrats have since tended to follow the centrist line and failed to recapture the state’s most powerful offices. The party front-runners this year follow that trend with Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, in the Senate race, and David Jolly, a former Republican congressman, in the governor’s race.

“I’m a former Republican,” Jolly recently told MS NOW. “I spent five years as an independent.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Patricia Mazzei/Saul Martinez
c. 2026 The New York Times Company