Angie Nixon says there are ‘$10 million reasons’ to oppose Ashley Moody

ST. PETERSBURG — Three weeks after her double-digit victory in the Florida Democratic U.S. Senate primary, Angie Nixon is making her case to general election voters by linking GOP incumbent Ashley Moody to Donald Trump, saying she “rubber-stamps everything he does.”

The Jacksonville state representative is also referencing Moody’s involvement in the Hope Florida saga.

The recently leaked grand jury report revealed that while no indictments resulted from an investigation led by State Attorney Jack Campbell in Leon County, the panel found that the DeSantis administration “misappropriated” $10 million of taxpayer money in 2024, and that Moody as the state’s attorney general was aware of those plans to divert those funds to the Hope Florida Foundation and authorized her former chief deputy to sign the settlement agreement.

Speaking at the Bethel Community Baptist Church in South St. Petersburg Tuesday night, Nixon said “two scammers” represent Florida in the U.S. Senate, noting that Rick Scott once ran a healthcare company that was hit with at that time the largest Medicare fraud fine in U.S. history.

“And now we have one who’s unelected who her reward for stealing $10 million dollars from medically needy kids and unhealthy children was to be appointed to this U.S. Senate by scamming,” she said.

She added that there are “$10 million reasons why y’all don’t need to vote for Ashley Moody.”

Spectrum News asked Moody in an interview broadcast Monday night whether, had she known in 2024 what she knows now, would she have signed off on the $10 million settlement agreement?

“I can tell you, as attorney general we fought hard to protect Floridians,” she said. “Make sure that we were protecting communities. Make sure that we were protecting citizens. That is why I have been endorsed by 64 of our 67 sheriffs. Republican, independent, and Democrat.  And every police organization. I will keep doing my job and doing it well with the interests of Floridians in mind.”

Health care cuts

Acknowledging her presence in a place of worship, Nixon said it was “not holy to steal $10 million,” nor was it a good thing to “end healthcare for over 440,000 people here in the state of Florida” — a reference to an Associated Press report that about 440,000 Floridians dropped Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage this year — more than any other state — after Republicans in Congress including Moody let enhanced federal subsidies expire in January as part of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025.

Nixon said she spoke earlier Tuesday with a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg and learned that close to 70% of the hospital’s funding comes from Medicaid. “Which was cut by y’all’s President Donald Trump. Because he cut that funding because he wanted to give his billionaire friends and family a tax break.”

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is projected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.

“And now, because of him, there are going to be children in this area and surrounding counties that are going to die,” Nixon said, “because they have to cut programs because of something that the guy in the White House did.”

Nixon’s agenda also includes supporting Medicare for All, a cornerstone of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — as well as with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which she joined in June.

“Universal healthcare would save over a trillion dollars if we were to pass it,” Nixon said. “Don’t take my word over it, take the Yale study that just came out last month. It would also save over 114,000 lives.”

That study she referenced is a new report led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health — not yet peer reviewed — positing that a single-payer universal health care system “could save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”

Nixon criticized the financial cost of the conflict with Iran; called for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour; and assailed the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.

No debate?

In her interview with Spectrum News, Moody said that, like vanquished Democratic Senate opponent Alex Vindman, she doesn’t intend to debate Nixon this fall.

“I am running against a self-proclaimed socialist who, when has been given a stage, likes to quote the Communist Manifesto and, very disturbingly, cop-killers,”Moody said. “I can tell you, as the wife of a law enforcement officer, I am not going to give attention or a stage to that. There is no reason that we would want to shine a light or any police organization would want us to shine a light on something like that.”

Moody has previously expressed her outrage that Nixon has cited quotations from Assata Shakur. She was a member of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army convicted in 1977 of the first-degree murder of a New Jersey state trooper, and who later escaped from prison to live in Cuba until she died in 2025.