This is unbelievable — and a crucially timed wakeup call for the Democratic Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old community organizer who is running an incredible insurgent campaign for Congress in New York, is about to defeat the 4th most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives, Joe Crowley, in the NY-14 primary.
Ocasio-Cortez has run an absolutely perfect campaign, blending hardcore grassroots organizing with social media savvy and national media attention. She put out perhaps the best ad of the election cycle and has (correctly) painted Crowley as an out-of-touch, corporate-friendly DC politico who has lost touch with his working class Queens and Bronx district. It wasn’t even close — she’s up 58-42 with 91 percent of the vote counted.
Stories about Crowley’s corruption — paying his brother’s company to rent office space outside his district, taking money from real estate interests — didn’t help. And none of that would have come out if it weren’t for this incredible challenge.
She also addressed the issues, not just the problem with Crowley’s time in office. Those things just happen to go hand-in-hand. Here’s what she told Progressives Everywhere in May about it:
We have a lot of these Democrats who are just laying as low as possible and hiding under the “D” next to their name, but they really aren’t doing the right thing. That’s our case here with Joe Crowley. He runs a profoundly corrupt local political machine, silences candidates of color, that silences women, that silences working class grassroots candidates in order to rezone New York City for luxury real estate interests. He hadn’t been challenged in 14 years.
Ocasio-Cortez is from the district and grew in a very working class home, with years of debt and the threat of foreclosure hanging over her family. She is in tune with her district and Democrats across the country, who are demanding strong and fearless leaders, not admonishments to be civil to Nazis. Let this be a message to Democratic candidates across the country.
New York has more intra-party primaries to go. The state senate has been controlled by turncoat fake Democrats in the IDC conference, which throws control to Republicans and stymies progressive legislation. Their primaries will be hard-fought, but we know they can win now.
CLICK HERE to donate to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, as well as the New York Democrats running against Republican-supporting IDC members.
They will need it now that corporate Democrats are going to be pouring even more resources into their races this summer and fall.
After all, look at who was powering Crowley’s campaign — read the tweets below for a small sampling: