Ashley Moody wins Florida Senate seat, holding the Rubio seat for Republicans in a closer race than expected
Republican Ashley Moody has won re-election to the US Senate from Florida, defeating Democrat Angie Nixon in the special election for the seat once held by Marco Rubio, in a contest that finished far tighter than polls had suggested.
Republican Ashley Moody has won re-election to the United States Senate from Florida, defeating Democrat Angie Nixon in Tuesday’s special election for the seat once held by Marco Rubio.
The Associated Press declared Moody the winner at 8:34 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, and projection desks including CBS followed, as returns showed her narrowly ahead of Nixon after a campaign that had been rated as leaning Republican.
Final tallies varied slightly between outlets as counting continued, but the shape of the result was consistent: Moody took about 51 per cent of the vote against about 48 per cent for Nixon, with a no-party candidate taking roughly one per cent. The Associated Press results page later showed Moody with more than 4.19 million votes and nearly 99 per cent of precincts reporting.
Moody first entered the Senate in January 2025, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed her to succeed Rubio after Rubio left Congress to become secretary of state in President Donald Trump’s administration. Tuesday’s vote was therefore her first time facing Florida voters for the seat itself, rather than as an appointee.
A former Florida attorney general, Moody campaigned on her record in law enforcement and on her support for the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, and she was backed by the president during the campaign. She will now serve the remainder of the term Rubio won in 2022, which runs until the 2028 election, when she would need to win again to secure a full six-year term.
Nixon, a state lawmaker and democratic socialist, had mounted a grass-roots campaign that kept the race closer than many forecasters expected. Her surprise victory in the Democratic Senate primary in August had already jolted the contest, and her performance on Tuesday underlined the strength of the Democratic Party’s left flank in a state where the party has not won a US Senate seat since 2012.
That closeness was itself one of the night’s talking points. Florida is a state President Trump won by 13 percentage points two years ago, and the Cook Political Report had rated the race as likely Republican, yet Nixon’s challenge forced Republicans to treat the seat as genuinely contested in the closing weeks.
For Republicans, holding the seat matters beyond Florida. The party entered election night with a 53–47 Senate majority, and Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control of the chamber, so every hold narrows the Democrats’ path and keeps the Republican majority intact while other key races are still being counted.
The result also settles, for now, a question that had hung over Florida politics since Rubio’s departure: whether the seat he held would remain in Republican hands once voters, rather than the governor, had their say. Moody’s win answers that question in the Republicans’ favour, though the margin suggests Democrats will see Florida as more competitive than its recent history implies.
Moody addressed supporters after the result was called, while Nixon’s campaign had not conceded in the first hours after the projection, as final votes were still being tallied. Attention in Florida will now turn to Moody’s work in the Senate for the remaining two years of the term, and to whether she seeks a full term of her own in 2028.
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