I have been meaning to get to this story for a few days, but this political season moves so rapidly that keeping track of every ridiculous thing somebody says on cable news has become a full-time job, and I already have several of those. Still, I would be remiss if I did not address what Bakari Sellers recently said about Angie Nixon.
For those who missed it, Sellers ▶sat down with CNN’s Kasie Hunt and delivered what he called a blunt message for Democrats: “We won’t be wasting money in Florida now.” His broader argument was that Democratic donors and organizations had been prepared to pour resources into a Senate race he did not believe Vindman could win anyway, and that the wiser investment would be North Carolina, Ohio, and perhaps Iowa—states where Democrats supposedly have a more realistic chance of winning.
My God, there is so much to unpack here. I realize “there is so much to unpack” is the official liberal warning that somebody is about to turn one stupid sentence into a forty-five-minute panel discussion, but Sellers somehow managed to stuff an entire political science seminar into eleven words. We have candidate viability, resource allocation, regional abandonment, racial representation, institutional gatekeeping, and the Democratic Party’s enduring talent for declaring a place unwinnable shortly before explaining that it cannot win there because it never invested enough to build anything. Bakari did not give Kasie Hunt a sound bite. He assigned us homework.
I do not care whether Angie Nixon calls herself a centrist, a progressive, a democratic socialist, an FDR Democrat, or the assistant night manager at Waffle House. I care whether Democrats win elections. That is it. I am not interested in spending the next two months refereeing another intraparty cage match between centrists and the DSA while Republicans are outside stealing the catalytic converter off the country. Democrats have an actual general election to win, and Nixon is the Democratic nominee because Florida Democrats voted for her by more than twelve points. The ideological seminar is over. The voters turned in their papers.
Sellers, however, appears unable to move past the DSA label. Nixon could personally knock on every door in Florida, register half the state, cure citrus greening, repair the property-insurance market, and swim from Jacksonville to Key West carrying the Democratic platform above her head, and somebody would still wheel a television into the room so Bakari could explain that she once attended a DSA meeting. At some point, political analysis has to move beyond seeing three letters and reacting like somebody released a raccoon inside a country club.
Rejecting the idea that Nixon’s victory proves the DSA has conquered the Democratic Party is perfectly reasonable. Treating her victory as a fluke, an aberration, or a heartwarming little story that does nothing to alter the political calculus is astronomically stupid. There is a difference between resisting an ideological overcorrection and refusing to update your assumptions when voters hand you new evidence. Sellers somehow managed to do both before CNN could cut to commercial.
I should also say plainly that I respect Bakari Sellers. I think he has good political instincts, meaningful experience, and a career worth taking seriously. This is not coming from a place of hatred. It is not exactly coming from a place of love either, if I am honest. It is coming from confusion—the genuine, put-the-phone-down-and-stare-at-the-wall-for-a-minute kind of confusion that occurs when somebody who should understand the problem becomes part of the demonstration.
Sellers is not some random cable-news face who parachuted onto a set after reading three Politico newsletters and suddenly became an authority on Southern Black politics. He comes from a family with real skin in the struggle for Black political power in the South. His father, Cleveland Sellers, was a civil rights organizer whose work in South Carolina carried severe personal consequences, including imprisonment on charges for which he was later pardoned. Bakari built his own political career from that foundation, defeating a twenty-six-year incumbent at twenty-two and becoming the youngest Black elected official in the country.
This is a man who should understand better than almost anyone currently receiving a CNN makeup-room call time what it costs Black candidates in the South to construct political power without inherited institutions, unlimited money, or a national party waiting to carry them across the finish line. Political power in the South has never emerged because somebody in Washington examined a spreadsheet and graciously decided the numbers looked inviting. It has been built through long-term organization, voter registration, coalition formation, institutional investment, and people willing to contest races the experts had already pronounced dead. Sellers knows that history. Hell, his family helped write part of it. That is precisely what makes his announcement that Democrats should not “waste” money on Angie Nixon so difficult for me to reconcile.
So here is my actual question, and I am asking it in good faith: what does a person have to do to earn respect in the Democratic Party? Nixon did not merely run an admirable campaign or outperform expectations. She won. She won as a Black woman in the South against a nationally known opponent whose fundraising advantage eventually reached roughly sixteen to one. She organized, knocked on doors, and built a genuine electoral coalition with a fraction of her opponent’s resources. Her reward was watching a prominent Black Democrat go on national television the following day and explain why the party should not bother funding her next race. Apparently, winning the primary is no longer enough. Now you have to win the general election before the party decides whether to help you win the general election. That is one hell of a business model.
Let’s sit with what Nixon accomplished because I do not think it has fully registered. The final tally was 56.1 percent for Nixon to Vindman’s 43.9 percent—a margin of more than twelve percentage points. That was not a squeaker, a statistical accident, or the electoral equivalent of finding twenty dollars in an old coat. Nixon raised less than $1 million and had under $265,000 on hand by late July. Vindman raised approximately $16.27 million. He could have outspent her sixteen times, bought everybody lunch afterward, and still had enough left to hire a consultant to explain why losing by twelve points was secretly a victory for electability.
I already wrote about what happened the moment she won—how, before August 17, she was a state representative most of the country could not have picked out of a lineup, and by August 19, her phone had become a fire hazard because every network suddenly wanted five minutes with her. Everyone is paying attention to Angie Nixon now, and the reason is not complicated. She forced them to. She did what candidates without institutional support are always told to do: organize your community, build a coalition, prove that you can win, and make the political establishment notice you. Then she did all of it, and parts of the establishment responded by moving the goalposts so far away that somebody should check whether they have crossed into Georgia.
And she did not squeak by. Sellers’s framing treats Nixon’s victory like Buster Douglas catching Mike Tyson on one magical night in Tokyo—a historic upset that became even easier to dismiss after Douglas showed up eight months later looking as though training for Evander Holyfield had consisted largely of locating the nearest buffet. Douglas had the night of his life, collected his championship money, got knocked out by Holyfield in the third round, and never again approached the mountaintop. His subsequent career allowed people to treat the Tyson victory as an anomaly, even though Douglas thoroughly outboxed Tyson that night before knocking him out.
Nixon’s victory was different in the way that matters politically. She was not an unknown who materialized for one miraculous evening, caught the favorite slipping, and disappeared with the belt. She was already a state legislator and experienced organizer with an existing constituency, a record in office, and a campaign operation capable of translating grassroots enthusiasm into votes. With a fraction of Vindman’s resources, she outworked him, out-organized him, and out-earned him at the ballot box. She did not land a lucky punch. She mollywopped a nationally known candidate whose campaign raised more than $16 million and won so decisively that nobody can blame the judges, the referee, or Don King.
So explain to me, seriously, why national Democrats should not invest in her campaign. Nixon is not asking them to manufacture a candidacy from raw materials, introduce her to Florida voters, or build an organization where none exists. She has already demonstrated that she can assemble a winning Democratic primary coalition in a hostile media environment, without a television advertising budget and while confronting a financial disparity that would have buried most candidates beneath an avalanche of direct mail.
That does not prove she will defeat Ashley Moody in November. Florida remains an extremely difficult state for Democrats, and a primary electorate is not the same thing as a general-election electorate. But electoral difficulty is an argument for making strategic investments, not for publicly abandoning your nominee before she has finished sweeping the confetti off the floor. Nixon has already built the foundation and supplied compelling evidence that additional resources could expand her operation. National Democrats do not have to create the fire. They simply have to decide whether they are willing to add fuel—or whether they would prefer to stand across the street, watch it burn, and commission a poll explaining why nobody in Florida can feel the heat.
I am not the only person asking why Nixon’s victory has apparently earned her more scrutiny than support. Joy Reid ripped into Sellers on her podcast and called his logic “just wrong.” She emphasized that Nixon won despite a fundraising disadvantage of roughly sixteen to one and argued that Democrats repeatedly enter Southern races looking for the candidate who sounds safest to consultants, donors, and television producers—only to discover that the allegedly safe candidate has inspired approximately seven people and one editorial board. Reid’s larger point was about Black women who organize, build coalitions, win elections, and are still treated by their own party as though they wandered onto the ballot because somebody left a side door open.
That frustration becomes even more understandable when you consider the racist bullshit Nixon has already been forced to endure. Laura Loomer, a Trump ally with the temperament of an infected paper cut, called Nixon a “ghetto, Black, communist” and included her in a broader tirade against Black women she described as “ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive Black bitches.” Loomer also wrote that Nixon should “tug on her leash,” because apparently the Republican response to a Black woman winning an election is to reach into the historical sewer, scoop up whatever is floating nearest the top, and post it on social media.
The attack was so nakedly racist that Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned it. Sit with that for a moment. Laura Loomer managed to say something so racist that Marjorie Taylor Greene had to enter the conversation as the voice of racial restraint. That is like receiving a noise complaint from a leaf blower. Yet while Nixon has been defending herself against dehumanizing attacks from Trump’s political orbit, portions of her own party have remained preoccupied with whether her DSA affiliation makes her sufficiently respectable to receive financial support. Those are not morally equivalent responses, but they impose a familiar double burden: Black candidates must defeat the opposition’s racism while simultaneously proving to Democratic gatekeepers that the racism directed at them does not make them an electoral liability.
Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, was more direct on ▶Roland Martin Unfiltered. She rejected the idea that national pundits and donors sitting in studios outside Florida should be allowed to declare the state politically deceased and then instruct the people organizing there to abandon the body. Fried said Florida Democrats had already knocked on doors or made calls nearly 1.7 million times and pointed to a series of recent victories—including flipped state legislative seats—as evidence that an actual political infrastructure exists beneath the national party’s recurring obituary for Florida.
Roland Martin went further, calling the strategy ridiculous and connecting it to the way Democrats historically approached states such as Texas and Georgia. Georgia did not become competitive because a consultant in Washington stared deeply into a spreadsheet and suddenly received a prophecy. It became competitive because organizers, most notably Stacey Abrams and the network of groups working alongside her, spent years registering voters, developing local leadership, and constructing the institutional capacity necessary to contest statewide elections. Political competitiveness is not a naturally occurring mineral that consultants discover buried beneath a state. It is produced through sustained investment.
That is what makes the “Florida is unwinnable” argument so intellectually dishonest. Party organizations withhold money and infrastructure because a state is considered uncompetitive. Candidates operating without that money and infrastructure subsequently lose. The same organizations then cite those losses as proof that withholding the investment was correct. In political science, we call that an endogenous outcome or a self-fulfilling prophecy. In regular English, we call it setting the house on fire and then bragging that you correctly predicted smoke.
I agree with Reid completely, but the problem is larger than one comment from one commentator. Democrats have a longstanding habit of classifying certain states and districts as unwinnable before adequately competing in them. A disproportionate number are located in the South, and many contain substantial Black populations. Instead of treating voter mobilization as a long-term process, party institutions frequently concentrate resources in the relatively small collection of races consultants have already placed inside the circle marked “competitive.” The rest of the map is left dark, and Black voters living there are effectively told that their loyalty is deeply appreciated but unfortunately not in the budget.
This does not mean Democrats have unlimited money or that every long-shot campaign should receive a blank check. Resource allocation is a genuine strategic problem. Parties have to make choices based on polling, partisan composition, candidate quality, fundraising capacity, and opportunity cost. But there is a meaningful difference between declining to spend $100 million on a difficult race and announcing on national television, one day after a Black woman wins the nomination, that supporting her would be a “waste.” One is strategic prioritization. The other is institutional contempt wearing a calculator costume.
Republicans do n…
