MS NOW’s Take on Why Cuban Voters Reject Socialism Is Not Going Over Well

Cuban families fled Fidel Castro's firing squads on rafts built from inner tubes and scrap wood.

An MS NOW correspondent just went on air to defend a democratic socialist that voters like them are supposed to fear.

What he said about their memory of communism is what has Florida Republicans howling tonight.

Alex Tabet Tells Peter Alexander the Voters Have It Backward

Tabet went on State of Play on August 19 to explain why Democratic socialist Angie Nixon just won Florida's Democratic Senate primary.

He warned that Republicans were tying Nixon to communism.

Then he said the quiet part.

He called it "a conflation, an incorrect conflation, of communism and democratic socialism."

Tabet noted that Florida's 1.6 million Cuban exiles "often lean conservative."

He said they carry "a strong aversion towards communism."

Then he suggested that aversion was based on a mistake.

Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference in values. A misunderstanding.

According to a paid MS NOW correspondent, people who buried relatives under Castro simply can't tell a labor camp from a Bernie Sanders rally.

Nixon just beat Alex Vindman in the Democrat primary after joining the Democratic Socialists of America.

She will face sitting Republican Senator Ashley Moody in November.

Moody's campaign has already hammered the DSA connection, and Tabet's segment was built to defend Nixon against exactly that attack.

Florida's voter rolls already lean more than 1.5 million registrations toward Republicans.

Another DSA-aligned candidate, Oliver Larkin, lost his own Florida congressional race by nearly 30 points this cycle.

Nixon beat Vindman anyway, but she did it despite being badly outspent, not because Florida forgot what socialism looks like.

Nixon's Own Party Chair Warned Her About This Exact Problem

Tabet isn't the only Democrat who has had to answer for the DSA label.

Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried called Nixon directly to warn her the DSA connection was a liability, according to Axios.

Fried told Nixon the label risked alienating Hispanic voters with roots in socialist-wrecked countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

Nixon didn't thank her for the warning.

"Stop gaslighting me!" Nixon shot back, according to Axios.

"You never gave a care about me from the beginning, and now you're telling me how to run my campaign?"

Even Nixon has been walking back specific DSA positions, distancing herself from prison abolition, defunding the police, and the group's Castro commemorations.

Her own party chair saw the same problem with Cuban voters that Tabet dismissed as a misunderstanding.

That is not confusion on Fried's part either. That is a Democrat who knows exactly how this plays in Florida.

The Same Diaspora Fled Communism and Rejected Bernie Sanders

Cuban Americans have heard this lecture before.

Bernie Sanders learned that lesson the hard way in 2020.

He defended Fidel Castro's literacy programs on national television.

Cuban and Venezuelan voters in Florida did not treat that as a nuanced historical point.

Fox News reported they came out swinging, and Sanders never recovered in the state.

These voters do not need a cable news correspondent to explain socialism to them.

Many of them lived it before they lived here.

They watched neighbors disappear for saying the wrong thing about the government.

They watched a "workers' revolution" turn into ration cards, secret police, and families torn apart at sea.

They know exactly what a government promising equality can become when it controls everything.

That is not confusion. That is a memory.

MS NOW Renamed Itself and Still Can't Read the Room

MSNBC spent a fortune rebranding itself as MS NOW this year.

New name, same instinct to talk down to anyone who doesn't vote the way network executives think they should.

Tabet didn't call Cuban voters racist or extreme.

He did something almost more revealing.

He called them ignorant of their own history, live on the air, while defending a candidate who campaigned as a proud democratic socialist.

A reporter with a press badge does not get to rewrite what an entire community survived.

Ashley Moody doesn't need attack ads when MS NOW keeps handing her the argument for free.

Sources:

• Mike LaChance, "MSNOW Reporter Suggests Cuban Voters in Florida Might Not Understand the Difference Between Communism and Democratic Socialism," The Gateway Pundit, August 21, 2026.
• Nicholas Spinnato, "MS NOW: Cubans May Not Vote for DSA Because of Incorrect Communism Conflation," Newsbusters, August 20, 2026.
• Fox News Staff, "Florida Democrat Senate nominee Angie Nixon insists I'm not a socialist after joining DSA," Fox News, August 21, 2026.
• Fox News Staff, "Florida's Cuban, Venezuelan voters alarmed by socialist Bernie Sanders' rise," Fox News, 2020.
• "'Stop gaslighting me!': Florida Democrats' Senate nominee and party chair have heated call over socialism," Axios, August 21, 2026.