Angie Nixon won Florida’s special Democratic Senate primary on two ideas — Medicare for All and a $25-an-hour federal minimum wage — beating Alex Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel at the center of Trump’s first impeachment, who significantly outraised her. The Republican Party is about to spend ten weeks calling her a socialist. She won on the policy. They should look at what Medicare already is before they do.
Let me get the disclaimer out of the way first, because I’m tired of waiting for the dodge. Communism, as it was actually built in the 20th century — Russia, China, Cambodia — was a catastrophe. It killed tens of millions of people and crushed the workers it claimed to free. That verdict is in and I’m not here to relitigate it. What I’m here for is a different question: when the Republican Party calls Nixon’s two ideas “socialist,” do they mean the things we already do for our grandparents, or do they mean something else? Because the policies aren’t the dangerous part. The word is.
Let me also say what’s owed to the readers across the table. Vindman was genuinely heroic in 2019, and the administration’s treatment of him was ugly. The seat Nixon is now running for is one Republicans are heavily favored to hold: Marco Rubio left it to become Secretary of State, Gov. Ron DeSantis filled it with appointee Ashley Moody, and the Trump endorsement machinery will be pointed at Nixon by Labor Day. Nixon will probably lose in November. She’ll be called a socialist in every ad, op-ed, and donor email until then, which will be tedious but entirely predictable.
What’s also predictable is that Medicare for All is not socialism. Medicare — the program we already run, for everyone over 65 and certain younger Americans with specific disabilities like end-stage renal disease — is a single-payer health insurance system, run by the United States government, that more than 65 million Americans are currently enrolled in. Republicans have tried to cut it for decades; Democrats have tried to expand it for decades; every Republican presidential nominee who made cutting Medicare a central plank of their general-election campaign lost, because the people who use it like it. Expanding Medicare to everyone under 65 is the same mechanism, extended to a different age bracket. If you told a Florida retiree on Medicare that this was a socialist program and he had to give it up, he’d laugh you out of the waiting room before his doctor came in. We already do this; we just won’t say the word. Sick people make terrible shoppers — that’s not a slogan, it’s the structural reason the health market misbehaves, and no amount of “consumer choice” fixes a market whose customers are on a gurney.
Now the minimum wage. Twenty-five dollars an hour, full-time, is $52,000 a year. That is a modest wage in 2026. It’s roughly what a first-year public school teacher makes in many districts, what a brand-new firefighter makes, what a starting RN makes in a non-union hospital. It is not a utopia number. It is a “you can pay rent and a car payment and not skip the dentist” number. Every other rich country has something in this neighborhood as its wage floor; ours has been stuck at $7.25 federal since 2009, which is the policy equivalent of letting the mileage pile up on the odometer because you don’t want to look at the engine. The argument the right has run against minimum-wage increases for forty years is that they “kill jobs,” which has a small evidence problem: the economists who study monopsony — the single-buyer problem in labor markets, the condition where your employer has more power over wages than you do — have found that for most of the income range, raising the wage floor actually raises employment, because it lets workers leave the trap where they can’t afford to quit a job that mistreats them. A $15-an-hour minimum wage was already approved in Florida by referendum, with the final step taking effect next month. Nixon is asking for roughly ten dollars above that. The state has already decided the first $15 was fine. The next step is arithmetic, not ideology.
And the countries that landed on a $25-ish floor did it the slow way — they built sectoral bargaining, organized labor, universal health coverage over a century. They built the institutions first. Australia sets its wage by tribunal, the U.K. by sector, some countries by law, some by collective bargaining, some by sectoral wage boards. The point isn’t the mechanism. The point is that they have one, and they don’t apologize for it. America, for its part, spent forty years dismantling the unions and sectoral bargaining that could have made Nixon’s arithmetic a normal Tuesday. So the comparison isn’t “do what Denmark does.” It’s “Denmark did this because it built the things, and we stopped building them.” That’s the harder beat. But the waiting room doesn’t wait for the harder beat. The alternative is what we have right now, which is a 33-year-old who can’t afford to break an arm.
The word “socialist” is supposed to mean state ownership of the means of production — that’s the technical definition. Medicare for All is a public option that competes with private insurers, which is a market mechanism the comfortable used to claim to love. A $25 minimum wage is not collectivization. The fact that we have to spend this much time explaining what should be obvious is itself the receipt for how badly the vocabulary has been broken.
Here’s the part the catechism of the comfortable doesn’t want you to notice. Nixon didn’t win because Florida suddenly turned socialist. She won because she ran on two concrete policy proposals and beat a better-funded opponent anyway — joining Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan on the same working-policy beat. The consensus read on the Florida primaries going into Tuesday was that the moderates were the ones consolidating. Two democratic socialists winning their primaries in two states in two months is not a coincidence. It is a reading of the room that the donor class has decided to call radical rather than answer. The donors who wrote Vindman the bigger checks got the smaller return.
So what does a working policy platform look like in 2026? It looks like a thing we already do, repeated for a different population. Medicare for All is Medicare, plus fifty years younger. A $25 minimum wage is the wage your local union negotiated twenty years ago, plus inflation. Co-ops are the credit union in your wallet, plus a board you can stand for. A public option is the public library, plus healthcare. None of this requires the gulag.
My grandfather sat on the boards of a dairy cooperative and a rural electric cooperative and would have laughed in your face if you’d called him a socialist. He’d have said: that’s a co-op. We own it. We pay for it. We use it. If that makes me a socialist, then the credit union in your wallet makes you one too. Ace Hardware is a co-op. Land O’Lakes is a co-op. REI is a co-op. Rural electric co-ops serve 42 million Americans across roughly 56 percent of the country’s landmass, and ninety years in, nobody’s put a for-sale sign on them — because they work.
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction. I’m not going to defend a one-party state. I am going to defend the proposition that an American worker who works full-time should not be bankrupted by a single hospital visit. That proposition is not radical. It is the floor. It is what every other wealthy country has decided. The fact that we are still arguing about it, in 2026, is the scandal — and the word “socialist” is the trick that keeps us from admitting we lost the argument to the rest of the developed world twenty years ago.
Nixon’s two ideas aren’t radical. They’re the floor. The Republican Party is going to spend ten weeks calling them socialism. The trick is in the calling, not the thing. The catechism of the comfortable has had a hard week.