At 28, Ocasio-Cortez hopes to shake up U.S. House
Newcomer to face Republican after upsetting Dem
NEW YORK — The video clip, shared widely on social media, shows a candidate in disbelief: It captures the moment Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez realizes that, at age 28, she has beaten a 10-term congressman in a Democratic primary.
Wide-eyed, she covers her mouth with her hands and appears to scream, “Oh, my God!”
Now, a more poised Ocasio-Cortez seems to have moved on from shock to ambition. She spent this week telling reporters of her hope of going to Washington “with an entire caucus of newly elected progressives” who aren’t beholden to corporate donors and are willing to shake things up.
“I’m hoping that more candidates like me are victorious in their primaries, and I hope that we can focus on getting money out of politics and championing the social economic and racial justice and rights of all working-class Americans,” she said.
On her wish list are lots of things unlikely to pass a Congress held by either Republicans or centrist Democrats. They include tuition-free public college, a $15 federal minimum wage, an expansion of the Medicare program to include people of all ages, a universal jobs guarantee and abolishing the country’s immigration law enforcement agency.
To underscore that position, she traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border region days before the election to protest the separation of immigrant families.
If she wins the general election in the fall — a strong possibility in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 6-to-1 — OcasioCortez would be the youngest member of Congress and one of its most leftleaning.
Supporters in her district said that’s what they were looking for when they picked her over U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley, a senior member of the Democratic leadership in the House and a longtime party boss in Queens.
“She understood us because she is one of us,” said Syed Ali, a 26-year-old Harvard University graduate student from the Bronx who volunteered for her campaign. “The real highlight of her campaign was just how genuine she was. Her voice felt very true.”
Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx to workingclass Puerto Rican parents and went to high school in Yorktown Heights, a suburb north of the city.
Her first love as a child was science, not politics. She was awarded second place in the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for a microbiology project and got an asteroid named after her.
She was a 19-year-old student at Boston University when her father died. After his death, the family worried it would lose its home to foreclosure.
While in college, OcasioCortez worked on immigration in the office of the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy. After graduating with a degree in economics and international relations, she worked as a waitress and bartender to supplement her mother’s income as a house cleaner and bus driver. She was still tending bar as recently as the spring of 2017.
Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Brand New Congress, a PAC formed by Sanders supporters, asked if she would consider a congressional run. It sounded like a crazy idea, but she said yes because Crowley hadn’t faced a primary opponent in 14 years.
Several factors may have allowed Ocasio-Cortez to pull off her upset of Crowley, who had been a candidate to succeed Nancy Pelosi as the party’s leader in the House.
One was low turnout. There are nearly 236,000 Democrats registered in the 14th Congressional District, which covers parts of the Bronx and Queens. Only about 12 percent voted.
Crowley didn’t ignore the race — he spent $3.4 million — but he may have hurt himself by failing to show up for two out of three scheduled debates with Ocasio-Cortez. For one, he sent a former City Council member to debate in his place, a move The New York Times said in an editorial was “galling to anyone who cares about the democratic process.”
She received some endorsements from national groups including Black Lives Caucus, MoveOn and Democratic Socialists of America.
Ethnicity might have also played a role. Crowley is white and of Irish descent, while the district is half Hispanic.