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Cinderella Takes the Hill But No Sign of Coattails (Free Article)

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Two days after she shocked the political world by handily defeating Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary June 26, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was reaping one of the rewards of her instant status as a shining star: being interviewed by “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert.

It was the very end of the program, long after the extended guest spot Jon Stewart had done which might have seemed a more-appropriate segue for the new darling of the Democratic Party. But anyone starting to nod off in front of their TV as the clock struck 12:30 a.m. had reason to regain consciousness after Mr. Colbert mentioned President Trump had suggested Mr. Crowley’s defeat was payback for his not being nicer to him.

He asked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, whether she was prepared, assuming she rode her momentum and a huge registration edge Democrats hold in the district to victory against a Republican opponent in November, to be nicer to Mr. Trump once she arrived in Washington.

She offered an incandescent smile, then said, “You know, the President is from Queens, and with all due respect—half of my district is from Queens—I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from The Bronx.”

The burst of laughter from the audience made it seem almost beside the point whether she’d been given the question in advance or on the spot concocted a response as pitch-perfect as her campaign.

Shape of Things to Come?

It was as good an introduction to a late-night national audience as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez could get. But while her own short-term future is virtually assured, predictions that her win over Mr. Crowley signaled a wave that would be surfed by other Democratic insurgents—whether in congressional races around the country or State Senate contests here—seemed more of a reach.

“If it was a wave, Yvette Clarke would’ve lost, Carolyn Maloney would’ve lost, Meeks would have lost,” said State Sen. Diane Savino, referring to three other congressional veterans who survived tough challenges from younger opponents who accused them of not doing enough for their districts and not being strong enough against Mr. Trump.

While Ms. Clarke got a scare before winning by less than four points over Adem Bunkeddeko, Ms. Maloney won by nearly 18 over an opponent who outspent her, Suraj Patel, and Gregory Meeks got more than 81 percent of the vote against his two opponents.

In other words, Ms. Savino said, “Voters ultimately choose based on the candidates,” rather than on there being something in the air. And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s strengths combined with Mr. Crowley’s weaknesses proved more than enough to overcome the huge institutional advantages he brought into the race, from his role as head of the Queens Democratic Party and a longtime alliance with Bronx Democrats to the bacon he could bring home to his district as the fourth-ranking Democrat and the most-likely successor to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“I’ve done more events in The Bronx than Joe Crowley did,” said Ms. Savino, whose district is primarily in Staten Island, with a chunk of western Brooklyn completing it. “He was just not there that often. She tapped into the new gentrified parts of Astoria and Sunnyside.”

That was a key facet of her victory: not only did Ms. Ocasio-Cortez do well among the growing number of Latino voters in the district, she generally outperformed Mr. Crowley in primarily white neighborhoods as well, and not just among millennials.

Her social-media campaign, which unlike Mr. Crowley’s included appeals in Spanish as well as English, has been widely credited. But one union official noted that midway through the campaign, when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was still largely unknown and the only poll taken showed the incumbent winning by 36 points, she had made a favorable-enough impression that an official with experience in turning out the vote approached and offered help with that part of her outreach.

She Made the Rounds

Beyond that, Ms. Savino said, unlike Mr. Crowley, who had not faced a primary challenge for more than a decade, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was a constant presence in the district, knocking on doors—even those that belonged to older residents who would have seemed like sure votes for the incumbent.

“She was directly speaking to voters,” she said. “You can’t replace that.”

“Somehow or other, she tapped into this mood,” Ms. Savino said. “And Crowley wasn’t ready for her.”

For one debate, Mr. Crowley sent a Spanish-speaking surrogate. In the one in which he faced off with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez on NY1, she came off passionate while he appeared bland, and when she asked why his children attended school in a Washington, D.C. suburb in Virginia rather than in the city, he tap-danced, and did so awkwardly.

Asked about her showing a flair that Mr. Crowley lacked, political consultant George Arzt replied, “I think Joe is charismatic. I think the issue is how much attention he paid to his district. I think it has many Democrats looking at their districts and wondering what is in the minds of their constituents and whether they need to change their thinking.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by Liz Holtzman, who nearly a half-century ago was the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of her day—if a decidedly less-glamorous version—when she knocked off Emmanuel Celler, the most-senior member of Congress and the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, in 1972. She was 33, and the youngest woman elected to Congress at the time, a distinction that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will claim at age 28 if she wins the general election in four months.

‘A Lot of Similarities’

“There are a lot of similarities, and there are differences,” Ms. Holtzman said in a July 3 phone interview. “My predecessor had been there for 50 years; Crowley’s been there for only 20. But there were similarities with her: I was a brand-new face, I was a woman, someone who would not be a part of the establishment.”

Of course, she added, “There was no social media then. We had no money and we just campaigned with shoe leather morning and night. People still remember meeting me on the subway.”

Like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, she was running against a Democratic mainstay at a time when party members here were angry about a polarizing Republican President; in Ms. Holtzman’s case, it was Richard Nixon. And a big issue in the contest was the conflict in Vietnam that had been escalated by Mr. Nixon’s two Democratic predecessors, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

And, Ms. Holtzman said, there was something else she had in common with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who some political professionals chided as unrealistic in taking on a man regarded as a Goliath among city Democrats. “People also wrote me off—they said I had no chance.”

‘A New Face’s Excitement’

Her own breakthrough came at a time when sexism still ran strong in American politics and was rising up in a backlash against the feminist movement. In a time of #MeToo, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has found the climate more hospitable, and was able to turn being taken lightly by her opponent into an advantage.

“She represented a new way to attack the establishment,” Ms. Holtzman said, while also crediting “the excitement of a new face.”

Their surprising successes 46 years apart served as cautionary tales, Ms. Holtzman said, “to people if they have been in office for a long time: are you still showing the energy your constituents are looking for?”

One longtime uniformed-union official argued that the district’s voters had done themselves a disservice, saying in an email, “The voters of the NY 14th have traded in a chance to be represented by a senior congressman with a real shot at becoming, if not the Speaker of the House, at least the Minority Leader. What did that genius move cost them and the rest of NY State?”

But Ms. Savino—who as one of the original members of the Independent Democratic Conference has a vested interest in seeing those incumbent State Senators hold onto their seats against challenges from their left in the Sept. 13 primaries—said voters shouldn’t be blamed when a senior legislator loses sight of those who are his or her job evaluators.

Mr. Crowley clearly got distracted by congressional political maneuvering as the midterms approached, she said, just as, "It's very easy to get caught up in Albany. But the votes aren't in Albany. If you're not careful, you get knocked off, and it doesn't matter how powerful you were on the verge of becoming." 

Warning Shot for Cuomo?

Asked whether, as Cynthia Nixon argued in the wake of the victory by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez the day after the two women endorsed each other, the spirit driving that win might have a ripple effect in her attempt to unseat Governor Cuomo, Ms. Holtzman responded, “I don’t think it’s going to have a cross-over effect, but it should still be a wake-up call for any incumbent… I don’t think it portends that the Governor’s going to lose. But it should force him to consider, ‘Do my constituents think I’m serving them?’ Are you effectively representing them, do they think you have the vision and commitment they want to see?”

Mr. Cuomo the day after the vote discounted the possibility that this was a wave that could swallow him, arguing that it was specific to the district in which Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was running and her appeal to minority voters feeling anxiety and anger about what was happening in Washington, D.C. That analysis glossed over the reality that the challenger did quite well among white voters as well. But the Governor has insulated himself from some of those passions by moving left from the outset of Ms. Nixon's campaign; while Mr. Crowley in his TV ads described himself as anti-Trump, the Governor has been considerably more outspoken on the subject while also suing to halt the President's efforts to separate children from parents crossing the border in search of political asylum or a safer environment than in their native countries.

His determination not to get his political wires crossed may explain Mr. Cuomo’s lack of response when, in the wake of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, one of the city’s most-powerful union leaders, SEIU Local 32BJ President Hector Figueroa, announced that he was walking away from an agreement he had signed onto last fall at the Governor’s behest not to support challenges to the re-election bids of IDC members as a condition for their returning to the main Democratic Senate conference.

Mr. Arzt, asked why a man who sometimes seems determined to prove Mayor de Blasio's 2015 claim that he revels in vendettas would let this affront pass, said, "I think the Governor needs labor support, and that has always been the backbone of his campaign...even when they wander off on one issue. The ultimate goal for him is winning this race, and winning it by a margin that could project Andrew into a presidential bid."

Just a Coastal Surge?

Asked if he believed the Ocasio-Cortez win represented a wave that could pack a national wallop, Mr. Arzt said, “I think it’s confined to New York and perhaps California.”

If it’s too early to foresee whether her victory creates a tide that carries others on the left to unexpected triumphs, it’s also premature to venture a guess as to how far Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can go, particularly when Republican opponents look to shift the focus from her effervescent personality and idealism to caricatures of her political positions. As Ms. Holtzman’s career illustrates, there are too many twists and turns in politics to know how far a conscientious, ambitious neophyte can go.

While still a freshman in Congress, she caught a break when, after taking as one of her early committee assignments a seat on the Judiciary Committee that her predecessor had chaired, Ms. Holtzman became one of the stars of the Watergate hearings that eventually led to Mr. Nixon’s resignation from office in August 1974. Six years later, when she upset Bess Myerson in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and longtime incumbent Jacob Javits lost the Republican race to Al D’Amato, Ms. Holtzman seemed destined for higher office.

Then Mr. Javits, angered by Mr. D’Amato’s commercials during the primary that implied he might not live long enough to complete another term, decided to continue campaigning on the Liberal line. It was as if he was oblivious to the strong possibility that he would siphon more liberal and Jewish votes from Ms. Holtzman than from Mr. D’Amato, aided by a questionable endorsement by the New York Times, in an era before the term “Pale Male Stale” was used as a weapon. Mr. Javits’s presence on the ballot undoubtedly made the difference in giving Mr. D’Amato a 1-point victory over Ms. Holtzman and sidetracking her career.

A year later, she ran for Brooklyn District Attorney and won the first of two terms; in 1989 she was elected City Comptroller. But one city official from that era remarked last week that Ms. Holtzman’s heart was set on the Senate seat: “All the others were consolation prizes.”

In 1992, she made another try for Senate, running in a contentious Democratic field for the chance to knock off Mr. D’Amato, who was seeking his third term. She wound up well behind the party nominee, Bob Abrams, with enough acrimony lingering after the contest that she didn’t endorse him in what proved to be a losing race against the incumbent.

Learning the Game

And if Mr. Crowley’s defeat—the biggest shock in Congress since GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost a 2014 primary to Tea Party adherent David Brat—stands as a cautionary tale to other incumbents with visions of bigger prizes dancing in their heads, Ms. Holtzman’s misfortune in that 1980 Senate race offers the same yellow light to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Even Mr. Brat’s career since his upset winas just another Republican Congressman who hasn’t been in the forefront of his party’s drive to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible collaboration in the 2016 election between the Trump campaign and Russian interestsillustrates the limitations on less-senior members of the House making a big impact.

While Barack Obama was less than four years into his term as a freshman Senator from Illinois when he vanquished Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries and went on to be elected President, even before gaining that seat he had electrified the party faithful and millions watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention on TV with his keynote speech. By comparison, knocking them dead on Colbert represented a baby step toward what Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s mom said was her dream of becoming President.

Ms. Savino said that alongside her ideals—which include favoring "Medicare for all" and a Federal jobs guarantee—the soon-to-be Congresswoman is "gonna have to figure out how to balance the needs of people" to accomplish things for her constituents. 

“There’s no such thing as earmarks, so you can’t produce that for your district anymore,” she said. “If she’s smart, which she seems to be, she’ll go to Washington, she’ll learn, and she’ll become a good Congressperson.”


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