Rep. Joe Crowley had himself a whisper campaign going for leadership, and perhaps held thoughts of becoming Speaker of the House if the much discussed “blue wave” came ashore just right in November. Instead, he finds himself being compared to Eric Cantor on the list of stunning incumbent upsets:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina running her first campaign, ousted 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th congressional district on Tuesday, CNN projects, in the most shocking upset of a rollicking political season.
An activist and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Ocasio-Cortez won over voters in the minority-majority district with a ruthlessly efficient grassroots bid, even as Crowley — the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House — outraised her by a 10-to-1 margin.This was the first time in 14 years a member of his own party has attempted to unseat Crowley, who chairs the Queens County Democrats. His defeat marks a potential sea change in the broader sphere of liberal politics — a result with implications for Democrats nationwide that would recall, as optimistic progressives routinely noted during the campaign, former GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s loss to the insurgent, tea party-backed Dave Brat in June 2014.
So, now that Ocasio-Cortez appears to be on her way to the House, how did she get this far? And what will she do once she is there?
Washington Post
She wasn’t inclined to back House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi for speaker, name-checking one of the House’s most left-wing members as a better choice.
“I’d like to see new leadership, but I don’t even know what our options are,” she said. “I mean, is Barbara Lee running? Call me when she does!”
Ocasio-Cortez’s politics are substantially to the left of most of the party, and even Sanders. In her campaign videos and posters, designed by friends from New York’s socialist circles, she came out for the abolition of ICE, universal Medicare, a federal jobs guarantee and free college tuition. The ads also made it clear that she was a different candidate — a young Latina from the Bronx, not a white man from Queens. The posters, which she said were designed to look “revolutionary,” were bilingual and centered her face; her viral campaign video, created by a socialist team called Means of Production, began with her saying that “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office” over an image of her getting ready for the day in a busy apartment building.
“The only time we create any kind of substantive change is when we reach out to a disaffected electorate and inspire and motivate them to vote,” Ocasio-Cortez told the left-wing magazine In These Times, in one of many interviews she gave as her campaign seemed to surge in the final weeks. “That is how Obama won and got reelected, and that’s how Bernie Sanders did so well.”
In interviews last week, as Ocasio-Cortez canvassed voters in Queens, she said her campaign began with grass-roots organizers and took off once national left-wing media noticed what she was doing. An early profile in the Intercept, she said, was “a game-changer,” leading to more interviews and profiles that led with the audacity of her challenge, then got to her policies. By the final week of the campaign, when she briefly left the state to see conditions at immigrant detention centers in Texas, she was updating Vogue on how the campaign was going.
In an interview given to John Iadarola days before the election to, Ocasio-Cortez opines on her campaign and opponent, and in describing Crowley as out of touch and no longer living in the district, you can see the Cantor comparisons.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byj4-dqOiX4&w=560&h=315]
Well-earned as the plaudits for an underdog winning may be, excitement from the progressive left over Ocasio-Cortez success may be getting just a bit ahead of itself. NY14 is a +29 Democrat district, and the “New York socialist circles” that facilitate things like media assistance and Vogue write-ups is not translatable to, say, Wisconsin or Iowa. Safely Democrat seat is still safely Democrat, but the aging leadership on the left side of the aisle in Congress (Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn are 78, 79, 77 years old, respectively) makes for a sharp contrast from the younger, rising progressives that see them as “establishment”. There is also the still smoldering “Bernie wing vs Hillary wing” narrative that former Sanders supporter and volunteer Ocasio-Corte openly embraces.
Still, at least for one night in NYC, the progressive wing of the Democratic party has a young, charismatic, card-carrying democratic socialist with a mark in the win column, and a clear path to congress.
Here is the thing, NYC and often NYS Democrats rarely face serious challenges. Crowley is a progressive Democrat but he was handpicked by his successor and then never faced a serious primary or general election. The district is D plus 29, no one is spending money here.
He was also at odds demographically with his district. But his challenger ran a real boots on the ground campaign which is more than you can say for many DSA types. She also overcame a fund raising disadvantage because Crowley does have Wall Street connections.Report
Drop the pretense this person is a communistReport
You know, communism has a meaning and it is different from democratic socialism, unless you are so far to the right that false perspective blurs the difference.Report
@dragonfrog
Haven’t we seen U.S. conservatives do that for decades without any sense that they will ever calm down?Report
Conservatives define everything even slightly liberal as communist in the United States even when it doesn’t deal with economics at all. Integrated schools and public spaces, same sex marriage, abortion rights, etc. All Communist.Report
What I am seeing is how little the old socialist/ capitalist divide matters any more.
Aside from political wonks and bloggers, economic theories don’t seem to drive political votes.
Trump won by explicitly promising to use government intervention to help his base, and the massive Republican deficits have elicited only yawns of indifference from the base.
Meanwhile even on our side, no one is seriously promising to completely put all the factors of producting under public control.Report
An excellent and true point. Few theories stand up to “I’m going to give you what you want”, and once someone makes that bargain it’s almost impossible to convince them it was the wrong thing, either in theory or practice, to do.Report
I largely agree but I think this is overstating the case. Crowley was just a demographic mismatch with his district. He was a good guy but this wasn’t Eric Cantor being replaced by someone even nuttier. He also did some boneheaded things like not show up for debates. That should cost someone the primary.
I think people are reading too much into this one primary victory. There were plenty of other further-left, DSA, or whatever candidates who went down in flames in their primaries.
Where you are correct is that the right-wing guys are overstating their case by calling everything socialism and refusing to budge even an inch. The House Freedom Caucus is not doing themselves any favors by saying “Argh Communism!” to everything the left wants. But they seemingly don’t realize this.
However, it might all be moot when a judiciary of relatively young Federalist Society firebreathers overturns every action done by a Democratic Congress and President. Trump’s lasting legacy besides performative cruelty will be the stacking of the judiciary with right-wing ideologues.Report
I do think there’s some over-reading here, and it’s not so different to what we saw with Mark Sanford, who may have just lost his primary because he barely ran a campaign.
Also, this seems as good a place as any to point out that it was really slightly annoying to see three “true progressives” running in my Congressional district against the establishment pick who beat them easily, when one of them could have taken a run at Bob Menendez and actually could have won.
I’m still mad that that crooked piece of shit is going to be reelected in November.Report
And to be clear, Menendez is the real problem, and the way the national and state Dem establishment covered him for is a disgrace. It’s just frustrating that the Leftward anti-establishment types passed up an opportunity to win some real power for themselves and take out perhaps the worst element of the Dem establishment in the Senate.
It’s a YOU HAD ONE JOB kind of thing.Report
Partly that may be because the Overton window in the US stretches waaaay out on the right, but not far enough left that most people have any kind of serious appreciation of what socialism and communism are, how they differ in practice, how this reflects itself in the differences between modern Sweden and 70’s East Germany, etc.Report
It isn’t new though, it is decades old. Maybe centuries. There is a contingent of Boomers still fighting the Cold War.Report
It could also be that your positions aren’t as strong as you think they are, and who better to debate that with than me?
I’m game…Report
You can argue that it doesn’t matter to the voters (which I think is an overstatement), but you can’t argue that it doesn’t matter.Report
In retrospect, it should’ve mattered a lot more to Venezuelans. Third-way socialism is paved with good intentions but invariably ends up in the same place, with the army guarding the last remaining toilet paper factory and charging people for water delivery.Report
It’s like that old line, you may not be interested in economic systems, but economic systems are interested in you. And I assume that economic systems matter to Chip, so I’m not sure why he said that.Report
Well of course economic policy matters, but economic systems much less so.
Aside from North Korea, there really aren’t any purely “socialist” countries in the world, and there really aren’t any purely “capitalist” ones either.
Instead, virtually all nations have some form of mixed economies,where there is a mix of public and private ownership of the factors of production.
And moreover, the mix isn’t determinative. That is, how much is public and how much is private doesn’t correlate with the final outcome.Report
Good for her. I’d like to think this would serve as a wake up call to the Dem party leadership, which needs to stop putting its thumb on the scale in primaries.Report
I agree that this victory is a bit less than some are saying (i.e. those that are saying the left revolution is now at hand, both from the side ginning up fears of it and the side that would embrace it)
Donna Edwards is a cautionary tale for how much a “too moderate incumbent slayer” can be forgotten a few cycles later.Report
I think its great… hope she campaigns on her big ideas and fleshes them out.
Abolition of ICE
Universal Medicare
Federal jobs guarantee
Free college tuition
I will say that I think the Federal Jobs Guarantee is probably a horribad idea, but not from the perspective of communism v. socialism v. capitalism… but because it is morally fraught and I think fundamentally likely to produce adverse effects no matter the intentions. Don’t do it.Report
I know its anathema but whenever I hear this proposed all I can think is ‘if this makes policy sense what’s wrong with just giving people money?’Report
The oddest thing about the result is right-wing tweets and their otter incoherence.Report
Unsuprising, really, if you think them a bunch of weasels.Report
While I acknowledge that we could do a better job with all Mustelids, sometimes the Otter constituency in particular is sadly overlooked.Report
Ha. Didn’t see my typo!Report