Lessons for both parties in NY race

DURING his 10 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York had ascended to a top leadership position in the Democratic caucus and was mentioned as a possible speaker of the House someday. Now he’s making retirement plans.

Crowley, 56, lost his primary election recently to a 28-year-old political newcomer, Alexandria OcasioCortez, a result that some pundits said was further evidence of the party’s move ever leftward.

That argument has validity — after all, Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and ran on a platform that included a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for all and tuition-free public college.

But the larger takeaways, as we see it, are that there is no substitute for hard work during a campaign and that politicians who become too entrenched in Washington do so at their peril.

In 2014, when Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia — the House majority leader at the time — lost in his primary to a little-known, lightly funded opponent, one of the explanations offered was that Cantor had “lost touch” with the folks back home. Ocasio-Cortez made the same argument against Crowley.

The incumbent, she said in a campaign video that went viral shortly before the election, “doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air” and thus “cannot possibly represent us.”

Clearly, that message struck a chord. Just three weeks before the June 26 election, polling by Crowley’s campaign showed him with a 36-point lead. He wound up losing by 15 points.

Did the big lead reflected in the polling make Crowley complacent? Perhaps — his campaign didn’t conduct another poll the rest of the way. Then again, his advisers may have figured, why bother? Crowley was a longtime party boss in Queens who had never even faced a competitive primary while in Congress and he enjoyed a large advantage in fundraising.

Ocasio-Cortez used those perceived strengths against him. “This race is about people versus money,” she said in the video. “We’ve got people, they’ve got money.”

Ocasio-Cortez also noted her Puerto Rican roots in a district that through the years had transformed into one that is now nearly 50 percent Hispanic and where fewer than 20 percent of residents are white.

The Times interviewed more than a half-dozen officials inside and close to Crowley’s campaign. Their assessment was that “no single factor” led to the defeat.

“It was demographics and generational change, insider versus outsider, traditional tactics versus modern-age digital organizing. It was the cumulative weight of them all,” the Times wrote.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., shrugged off the result, saying Democratic voters had “made a choice in one district.” Certainly, one blockbuster upset doesn’t mean more are on the way. But the assessment of Michael Blake, a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, seems more apropos: “It’s a wake-up for everybody.”

That’s true for Republicans and Democrats alike.