“The Lessons of a Stunning New York Primary”, The New York Times
By Frank Bruni, Opinion Columnist, June 27, 2018
Never sated by the amount of attention that he gets and congenitally inclined to cast himself in the center of everything, President Trump tweeted about the most stunning of Tuesday’s primary results — New York Representative Joseph Crowley’s defeat by a 28-year-old newcomer named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and suggested that Crowley’s comeuppance reflected his insufficient deference and kindness to Trump.
I can say with great certainty that their relationship is not the first, second or third explanation for what happened to Crowley, the fourth-highest-ranking Democrat in the House. But I can’t tell you definitively what the moral of the story is, because there are many possible lessons here. Democrats should and will spend the weeks ahead analyzing them carefully.
Crowley, 56, has been in Congress for nearly two decades and, since 2013, has represented New York’s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. He hadn’t even drawn a primary challenger since 2004.
He’s the chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party. His name came up frequently in discussions about who might succeed Nancy Pelosi as the party’s leader in the House. In other words, he’s the establishment incarnate.
Ocasio-Cortez is the insurgency galore. She worked as an organizer for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. She ran on a progressive platform that included Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee and the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Emphasizing her gender and her Latina heritage, Ocasio-Cortez said in a biographical video, “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office.” But a woman like her is wise to campaign when a man like Crowley gets too comfortable and too assumptive and lets his guard down. Her video went viral, and she just won.
Crowley’s loss was characterized in The Times as the “most significant for a congressional incumbent since Eric Cantor, then the No. 2 Republican in the House, was defeated in 2014 by a Tea Party activist, David Brat.” The comparison is exactly right. Different parties, same dynamic: Someone associated with the status quo and with entrenched interests ran afoul of an anti-establishment, pro-change impulse in contemporary American politics that flares in different places under different circumstances at different times.
But there are other aspects of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory that are important to note. An understandable rap against the Democratic Party is that it’s too old, especially in its leadership ranks, and Ocasio-Cortez is young. She’s a woman in an election year when women are exerting their power. She’s a minority at a moment when many voters are less indulgent of privilege and more determined to look at governing bodies and see faces that mirror the mosaic of America.
She fashioned herself as a champion of people whom the economy has passed by, a message with proven resonance on both sides of the aisle. She spurned corporate PAC donations and didn’t even try to win the money race against Crowley. That intensified her aura of independence and accentuated his status as an insider.
Is her triumph also a validation of the progressive banner and of candidates who ally themselves with Sanders?
That’s harder to conclude, because before Tuesday, when she prevailed and the former N.A.A.C.P. head Ben Jealous won the Democratic primary in the Maryland governor’s race, Sanders-aligned candidates weren’t performing as well across the country this year as their backers had hoped they would.
Just last weekend, The Times’s Sydney Ember and Alexander Burns wrote that while Sanders’s “policy agenda had caught on widely among Democratic candidates and succeeded in moving the party to the left, Sanders himself has struggled so far to expand his political base and propel his personal allies to victory.”
What’s indisputable is that Ocasio-Cortez ran a spirited, pointed, smart campaign and that Crowley erred, especially when, less than two weeks before the primary, he skipped a debate with her and sent, as his surrogate, a Latina former city councilwoman.
And voters who feel that they’re overlooked and misunderstood by people versed and immersed in the ways of Washington will sometimes choose disruption, delivering a shock to the system. In that sense, maybe there is a link between what happened in New York’s 14th Congressional District on Tuesday and what happened nationally in November 2016. Maybe Trump does hover in the picture in some way.
He showed that in politics, absolutely nothing can be taken for granted. Ocasio-Cortez just demonstrated that to Democrats. I promise you that the party is perking up and paying heed.