Who is Ashley Moody? Florida voters already know Gov. DeSantis’ pick to succeed Marco Rubio

Ashley Moody takes the fight with Big Tech to the Supreme Court. Image via AP.

Attorney General Ashley Moody will soon go to Washington. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he is appointing the Plant City Republican to replace U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State.

That means Moody will soon introduce herself to colleagues in the upper chamber of Congress. But she has been well known to Florida political observers for nearly a decade, and in some cases longer.

The Plant City native first tasted wide acclaim when she was named the Florida Strawberry Queen in 1993, barely a month shy of her 18th birthday. But she already had ambitions beyond the beauty pageant circuit, attending the University of Florida (UF) and quickly becoming politically engaged. The onetime Democrat joined the Republican Party while Gov. Jeb Bush still held office, and was named as a student representative to the state Board of Regents (later replaced by the State University System Board of Governors).

After earning a master’s degree in international law at Stetson University College of Law, she completed her Juris Doctor at UF. Following a stint at Holland & Knight, one of Florida’s most prominent law firms, Moody became an Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting drug, firearm and fraud cases in Florida’s Middle District. Then, at age 31, she ran successfully to become a Hillsborough County circuit court Judge, the youngest in state history.

A few years later, Moody was introduced to more voters outside Tampa Bay when she ran for Attorney General in 2018, the same year DeSantis first ran for Governor. That year, she won the Republican nomination by double digits over state Rep. Frank White and defeated Democrat Sean Shaw in the General Election.

That election cycle, she won more votes than any statewide candidate in Florida, including DeSantis or U.S. Senate candidate Rick Scott. Four years later, in 2022, she repeated that feat, winning a second term with nearly 61% of the vote and attracting more votes than DeSantis or Rubio earned in their own landslide victories.

Moody ran for office with the support of her predecessor, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, another veteran prosecutor with roots in Hillsborough County. That’s especially notable, as Trump nominated Bondi as U.S. Attorney General in his second term. The Senate will hold the first confirmation hearings for Bondi this week.

Over Moody’s tenure as Attorney General, she has remained closely allied with DeSantis. After campaigning together in the lead-up to the 2018 General Election when Florida remained very much a swing state, Moody has rarely taken a position at odds with the state’s Republican executive, and her office has often defended DeSantis’ policies in the courts. That included controversial actions like DeSantis threatening TV stations who ran ads supporting an abortion rights amendments that ultimately fell short of passage on the statewide ballot this year.

Moody’s Office negotiated a state settlement with opioid manufacturers and distributors and this week touted a drop in Florida in opioid-related deaths. Moody also has often taken an aggressive legal stance against policies during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, including suing earlier this year to force the release of information on how many criminals were released after illegally crossing the southern border. A year prior, she successfully argued in court the catch-and-release policy violated federal law.

Moody’s Office in 2020 controversially supported a Texas lawsuit challenging the certification of Biden’s electoral victory over Trump in the Presidential Election that year. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit days later.