By Frank Bruni, Opinion Columnist, June 27, 2018<\/p>\n
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\u2019s primary results \u2014 New York Representative Joseph Crowley\u2019s defeat by a 28-year-old newcomer named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez \u2014 and suggested that Crowley\u2019s comeuppance reflected his insufficient deference and kindness to Trump.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Crowley, 56, has been in Congress for nearly two decades and, since 2013, has represented New York\u2019s 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens. He hadn\u2019t even drawn a primary challenger since 2004.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s the chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party. His name came up frequently in discussions about who might succeed Nancy Pelosi as the party\u2019s leader in the House. In other words, he\u2019s the establishment incarnate.<\/p>\n
Ocasio-Cortez is the insurgency galore. She worked as an organizer for Bernie Sanders\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Emphasizing her gender and her Latina heritage, Ocasio-Cortez said in a biographical video, \u201cWomen like me aren\u2019t supposed to run for office.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Crowley\u2019s loss was characterized in The Times as the \u201cmost 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
But there are other aspects of Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s victory that are important to note. An understandable rap against the Democratic Party is that it\u2019s too old, especially in its leadership ranks, and Ocasio-Cortez is young. She\u2019s a woman in an election year when women are exerting their power. She\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t even try to win the money race against Crowley. That intensified her aura of independence and accentuated his status as an insider.<\/p>\n
Is her triumph also a validation of the progressive banner and of candidates who ally themselves with Sanders?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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\u2019s race, Sanders-aligned candidates weren\u2019t performing as well across the country this year as their backers had hoped they would.<\/p>\n
Just last weekend, The Times\u2019s Sydney Ember and Alexander Burns wrote that while Sanders\u2019s \u201cpolicy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And voters who feel that they\u2019re 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 <\/em>a link between what happened in New York\u2019s 14th Congressional District on Tuesday and what happened nationally in November 2016. Maybe Trump does<\/em> hover in the picture in some way.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n