ORLANDO — Standing in the rain at the University of Central Florida on Wednesday, state Rep. Angie Nixon surveyed the roughly 100 students gathered in front of her.

“I'm just looking at y'all. Ashley Moody could never,” she said of her Republican opponent in the U.S. Senate race, while standing under the American flag. “Y'all so diverse. Y'all so colorful. And this is what America looks like.”The stop had students follow her directly to the polls to vote. It was the latest push from Nixon — who has a background in union and community organizing — to turn out the base in Central Florida in a state where Republicans have outregistered Democrats by 1.5 million voters.

And the Orlando metro area, that includes Orange and Osceola counties, isn’t simply crucial for any chance of Florida Democrats garnering a statewide win: It has also become an epicenter for visits from national progressive figures and potential Democratic 2028 candidates.

On Tuesday night, Nixon rallied alongside progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York at a “Boricuas for Angie” rally in nearby Kissimmee, focused on appealing to Puerto Rican voters who’ve generally favored Democrats.

“This is the area of Florida where Democrats can blow out the margins and help elect a statewide candidate,” Democratic state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith of Orlando said. “Not only do we have voters on the outskirts that are so important — especially Latinos and Puerto Ricans in Osceola County — but you also have the quantity of Democratic voters in places like Orange County that need to turn out in order for them to win.”

The region has the second-highest number of Puerto Ricans outside Puerto Rico. Nixon is banking on turning them out as well as progressive and young voters in her underdog race to try to beat the odds in red-leaning Florida. It’s a strategy that could be potent as Republicans’ vote-by-mail and early voting stats appear to be falling behind recent cycles, and the candidates in the Senate race appear to be within single digits of each other. But Nixon’s progressive views could also limit her appeal to other Hispanic voters from Cuba and Venezuela, who largely live in South Florida and have deeply negative views and experiences with socialism and communism.

Still, parts of Central Florida along the storied I-4 corridor, with its high number of Puerto Rican voters and history as a Democratic stronghold, is a critical area for them to win statewide. Ocasio-Cortez, who acknowledged weighing a bid for president in 2028 and is herself of Puerto Rican descent, told the 1,500-person crowd at Osceola Heritage Park on Tuesday night that Central Florida would be “deciding the future of Florida and, consequently, this country.”

Her appearance with Nixon marks the second time she has come to Florida since Nixon staged an upset primary victory in August against establishment favorite retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Another potential 2028 presidential candidate, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, visited UCF with Nixon on Oct. 20, and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders rallied with her on campus a couple days earlier.

During her speech Tuesday night, Nixon brought attention to Puerto Rico’s “unfair” status as a U.S. territory, including shipping restrictions, aging infrastructure and concerns about private development on beaches. She asked the crowd gathered not just to vote but knock on doors for her to help get more people to the polls.

“Whether your family has been in Florida for generations, or you came here from somewhere looking for a better opportunity and a better future, you deserve more than a life where every single month is a struggle to get by,” she said. “You deserve to get ahead. You deserve to thrive and to flourish.”Nixon, like many other Democrats, has been working to appeal to Hispanic voters across Florida, an influential, diverse voting bloc of nearly 2.6 million people.

And polling from Florida and other states indicates that GOP inroads among Latino voters that President Donald Trump brought into his coalition — including some Puerto Ricans in Florida who swung right amid economic concerns in the 2024 election — are now trending in the opposite direction.

Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, an early backer of Nixon who noted his Central Florida district is among the most racially and religiously diverse parts of the state, said Democrats in office from the region worked to “build a broad coalition,” noting Nixon’s events included not just her but Democratic groups and other candidates running locally and for the state Legislature. “We all organize together,” he said.

Yet even as allies are confident about Nixon’s prospects in Central Florida, she faces headwinds, especially with voters of Cuban and Venezuelan descent — a diaspora largely centered in South Florida — given her associations with the Democratic Socialists of America, a group she joined in June but that hasn’t endorsed her.

Nixon has taken pains since her upset primary victory to explain where she splits with DSA, and has worked to raise other concerns Hispanic voters in Florida face — including high costs, record deportations of Cubans being sent to third-country destinations and the Trump administration's ending of protections for workers from Venezuela. She has held press conferences outside ICE detention centers and frequently raises the now-defunct Alligator Alcatraz tented immigration facility Florida built in the Everglades.

But she also made comments on CBS News this week that many Democrats saw as an unforced error. When asked whether Cuba was a dictatorship, Nixon responded with: “That is what people have told me. I have never been to Cuba, and so I will have to take their word for it.”Nixon later took issue with the way CBS News framed her quote on social media as her avoiding answering the question, saying that she meant to say she had spoken to Cubans about their experiences — and that she believed them. CBS removed the post and reissued it with an editor’s note.

Nixon further solidified her position in another post calling Cuba an “authoritarian regime.”And during her Kissimmee rally Tuesday night, she described Cuba as “a failed system, a dictatorship.”

Republicans and even many Democrats contended Nixon should have just answered yes to the question from CBS, even as she did so in other interviews. “It's been under a communist dictatorship,” GOP gubernatorial candidate Rep. Byron Donalds said during a campaign stop in Brooksville on Wednesday, as Republicans have been trying to tie all Democrats to the far left. “This is not even up for debate. Everybody knows this, but she couldn't say the plain truth."

Farther south in Florida, the Miami-Dade GOP plans to amplify Nixon’s comments by dubbing over the video in Spanish and blasting it out over text message to Cuban-American voters Thursday. “Christmas came late, but not too late,” said Miami-Dade GOP Chair Kevin Cooper.

Moody frequently criticizes Nixon’s positions, but her own views are tightly guarded. She has avoided tough interviews from the press that include questions about where she splits with the Trump administration’s immigration policies involving Latinos, or whether she’s pushing the Trump administration to take action in Cuba.

When DeSantis appointed her to the seat last year to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he said he picked her in part because she wouldn’t be a “squish” on illegal immigration. While she has infrequently campaigned in Miami compared to GOP Sen. Rick Scott, she is scheduled to attend a rally in Cuban-heavy Hialeah in the Miami-Dade area with the GOP gubernatorial ticket Thursday.

Ocasio-Cortez defended Nixon against some of the GOP backlash over her progressive views and aimed to flip the script toward Republicans, accusing the Trump administration of “lining the White House with gold,” engaging in mass deportations and “dealing in corruption while everyday working people starve.”

“Good schools is not communism,” she said. “Funding hospitals is not communism. And guaranteeing health care as a right to every American is not communism. It's common sense.”