If elected, Ocasio-Cortez would become the youngest woman ever elected to congress.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a political newcomer who stunned Rep. Joe Crowley in the Queens-Bronx district, came across as “an extremely compelling candidate” – a young, hard-working, articulate woman – “in a year when people are looking for change”, said Huffman, a San Rafael Democrat who represents the solidly blue North Coast. Instead, she managed to raise more small donations than any other congressional candidate in NY, which allowed her to campaign sincerely on a platform for economic justice, while exposing Crowley as a centrist who does not represent real change. “And you know, in certain seats where it’s appropriate, I think that a new leaf could actually mean a lot of opportunity for the party and future”.
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.
ANOA CHANGA: Well, to talk about another race in NY, we just saw Dana Balter up in, I think it’s New York’s 24th Congressional District, had an wonderful win last night as well against an anti-choice DCCC-backed candidate. “I think that is, first and foremost, one of the basic elements and violations”.
“We’ve got people. They’ve got money”, Ocasio-Cortez said in her viral campaign commercial.
Ocasio-Cortez’s victory should be seen as a test for Democrats.
Political analysts cast Ocasio-Cortez’s win as the biggest upset since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican, lost in 2014 to a little-known right-wing professor, Dave Brat. He is the current chair of the house democratic caucus. The head of the House Democratic caucus is by all accounts a nice guy, and he might have made a competent speaker of the House.
Nevertheless, progressive candidates ready to make change are winning elections and changing the dynamic of electoral politics. “Everything about Ocasio-Cortez, they could get from that fact about her”, he said.
It might seem unbelievable that after Bernie Sanders’ enormous success in the 2016 democratic primaries running on a grassroots campaign that condemned Wall Street’s influence and called for social justice that Democrats can still be caught off guard by progressives unseating their heavyweights.
She ran on heavily progressive platform: free health care, free college education, a federal jobs guarantee and she wants to abolish ICE. They aren’t going to Washington to compromise, to shake hands with an enemy that would prefer to kick the working class, the poor, and people of color to the gutter and leave them there.
Her message resonated with the voters of New York’s 14th congressional district, and it’s one we could hear more frequently as more Millennial candidates run for office.
“I hope that this reminds us of what the Democratic Party should be about, which is, first and foremost, accountability from the working-class people”, she said Tuesday night.
“You proved that when we stand up for what we believe in, we win”, Pressley tweeted.
But Ocasio-Cortez instead framed her campaign as a return to the party’s roots.
In Colorado, an establishment-backed Democrat defeated a liberal insurgent to win the right to take on incumbent Republican Representative Mike Coffman, whose district favored Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016.
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“I have to do it quietly because of who I am and because the press will go wild”, he said, possibly overstating his influence on the media.
