EX-WAITRESS SPARKS DEMOCRAT REVOLT IN UPSET WIN.
28-year-old leftist wins stunning upset
NEW YORK • She has never held elected office. She is still paying off her student loans. She is 28 years old.
“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a viral campaign video released last month.
They certainly weren’t supposed to win.
But in a stunning upset Tuesday that ignited the New York and national political worlds, Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated Rep. Joseph Crowley, a 19-year incumbent who had been favoured to become Speaker if the Democrats retook the lower chamber this fall.
If Ocasio-Cortez defeats Republican Anthony Pappas in the predominantly Democratic district in November, she would become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
It was the first defeat of the primary season for a Democratic incumbent and it strongly suggested that lingering splits between the Democratic Party’s pragmatic and more liberal wings might be widening in the early years of the Donald Trump presidency.
“Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!” Trump tweeted, taking credit for a victory by a candidate more liberal than Crowley.
History suggests that Trump’s Republican Party, like the parties of virtually every first-term president dating back to Ronald Reagan in 1982, will suffer losses this autumn.
Yet Crowley’s loss suggests Democrats must overcome intra-party divisions if they hope to take control of Congress and key governors’ offices nationwide.
After conceding, Crowley said he would support Ocasio-Cortez in the general election.
Ocasio-Cortez ran as a working-class daughter of an immigrant, casting Crowley as elitist and out of touch with the community.
“These results are also a shot across the bow of the Democratic establishment in Washington: a young, diverse, and boldly progressive Resistance Movement isn’t waiting to be anointed by the powers that be,” said Matt Blizek, of MoveOn, which backed Crowley’s challenger.
Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress who failed to secure the Democratic party’s support for her campaign for governor of New York last month, said “the progressive revolution has begun.”
“We endorsed (Ocasio Cortez) because we believe she is the future of the Democratic Party. …Here in New York, the progressive revolution has begun, and we could not be more proud to be a part of that movement,” she tweeted.
“I’m an organizer in this community, and I knew living here and being here and seeing and organizing with families here, that it was possible,” a visibly shocked Ocasio-Cortez said at her victory party Tuesday.
“I knew that it was long odds and I knew that it was uphill, but I always knew it was possible.”
The daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Bronxborn father, Ocasio-Cortez earned a degree in economics and international relations from Boston University but worked as a waitress and bartender after graduating in 2011 to supplement her mother’s income as a house cleaner and bus driver.
Her father, a small-business owner, had died three years earlier of cancer; after his death, her family fought foreclosure and her mother and grandmother eventually moved to Florida.
She dabbled in establishment politics during college, working for Sen. Ted Kennedy on immigration issues, but soon turned her attention to the grassroots work that would come to define her candidacy.
Returning to the Bronx after graduation, she began advocating improved childhood education and literacy, starting a children’s book publishing company that sought to portray her home borough in a positive light, according to a 2012 article in the New York Daily News.
She returned to national politics when she worked as an organizer for the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
But even then the idea of one day seeking office herself seemed unattainable.
“I never really saw myself running on my own,” she told New York magazine this month.
“I counted out that possibility because I felt that possibility had counted out me. I felt like the only way to effectively run for office is if you had access to a lot of wealth, high social influence, a lot of dynastic power, and I knew that I didn’t have any of those things.”
She has credited her decision to seek office with her experience protesting at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Soon after, she was contacted by Brand New Congress, a newly formed progressive organization that asked her to run.
“These communities have been so ignored,” she said earlier this month. “What other leaders or what other choices does this community even have? For me, I just feel like it’s a responsibility to show up for this community.”
“Not all Democrats are the same,” she said in her May campaign video, adding — her voice rising with emotion — that a Democrat who “doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us.”
“Congress is too old,” she told a reporter. “They don’t have a stake in the game.”
“I’m hoping that this is a beginning,” Ocasio-Cortez said at her victory party Tuesday. “That we can continue this organizing and continue what we’ve learned.”