Ashley Moody Controversy Florida

Ashley Moody Called Democrats 'Termites' Eating Away at America. She Said It Twice in Two Days.

At a Hialeah rally and again on Fox Business, Florida's appointed senator compared the people running against her party to termites who 'eat away at the strength of America.' Even the Fox host was caught off guard.

MAGA Report Cards · Nov 01, 2026

Ashley Moody is a United States Senator from Florida. Nobody elected her to the job — Governor Ron DeSantis appointed her. Now, in the last days before Florida votes, she is closing her campaign by calling the other party an infestation.

"Don't fall for these termites in the house of the floor of America," Moody told Fox Business host Stuart Varney on Friday, October 30, according to the Palm Beach Post. "All they want to do is eat away at the strength of America and weaken it. That's their goal."

Even Varney seemed thrown. "Termites. We heard. Termites," he said, before pointing out that some polls had Moody comfortably ahead.

It wasn't a slip

A senator can misspeak once on live TV. This wasn't that.

The day before, Thursday, October 29, Moody used the same line at a Republican rally in Hialeah, the Post reported. She said that Democrats nominating members of a socialist group "is like unleashing termites in the house of America."

Two days, two audiences, the same word. That is a campaign line, not an accident.

Why the word matters

Termites aren't an opponent you argue with. They're a pest you kill. Every Floridian knows what happens to a house with termites: it gets tented and fumigated.

That's the point Democratic recruiter Dr. Fergie Reid Jr. made to the Post. "Have you ever seen the houses with the tents over them in Florida? It's about extermination," he said.

Describing political opponents as bugs and pests has an ugly history. When Donald Trump called his opponents "radical left thugs that live like vermin" in a 2023 Veterans Day speech, NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told the Washington Post that calling people vermin "was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people," as the Post reported. Some Democrats drew a similar comparison to Moody's line, likening it to the rhetoric of 1930s Nazi Germany, the Palm Beach Post reported.

You don't have to agree with that comparison to see the problem. A sitting U.S. senator told a national TV audience that the people on the other side of an election are not fellow Americans with different ideas — they are something eating the country from the inside.

The person she's talking about

Moody's opponent is Democrat Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Moody has leaned hard on that in the campaign's final stretch, the Post reported.

She's also been loose with the facts while doing it. In her primary victory speech, Moody read four positions off the DSA platform — defund the police, defund the military, open borders, noncitizen voting — and pinned them on Nixon. PolitiFact checked all four and found no evidence Nixon holds any of them. Nixon has said on the record that she doesn't support defunding the police.

So the "termites" line is the next step in the same pattern. First Moody told voters her opponent holds positions she has rejected or never taken. Now she's telling them her opponent and her party aren't really people with positions at all.

Nixon's answer, on social media, was that Moody is "looking in the mirror." "The real termites are already sitting in power," she wrote, "and come election day, voters are going to do some pest control."

The promise she made in 2018

When Moody ran for Florida attorney general in 2018, she promised to keep partisan politics out of that office, Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried noted in a statement Saturday.

"I am deeply disappointed in who she has become," Fried said. "Her disgusting, dehumanizing comments are just the latest example of how far she has strayed from those promises."

The Post put Moody's line in a wider frame: Republicans in Florida and nationwide have leaned into personal attacks this cycle, in a campaign the New York Times described as having "devolved into the most negative campaign in modern American history."

Who she's supposed to represent

Here is the part that should bother every Floridian, whatever their party. Moody's job is to represent the whole state — including the Floridians who vote for Democrats. She has now said, twice, on purpose, that those people's party exists to eat away at America.

That's not a debate about taxes or borders or Medicaid. It's a senator telling a large share of her own constituents that they are a pest problem.

In summary

On October 29 at a Hialeah rally and again on October 30 on Fox Business, Senator Ashley Moody compared Democrats to "termites" who, in her words, "eat away at the strength of America and weaken it." She is an appointed senator who, earlier in the same race, pinned four positions on her opponent that PolitiFact found no evidence the opponent holds.