Tomorrow, June 25, a relatively obscure election in Queens, N.Y. looms large in the career of Alexandra Ortasio Cortez — AOC, the whirling dervish of new “progressive” politics.
I put progressive in quotes because my father worked in and for the Progressive Party, successor in New York State to the American Labor Party, for which he also worked as one of its chief fundraisers. In my father’s house, there were not liberals, there were progressives committed to all the same things today’s progressives are.
In that era, progressives were for affordable national health coverage and care, civil and voting rights when there were none, strong unions, fair wages, and continued amelioration of markets through public regulation to avoid capitalism’s most wretched excesses.
Those excesses are different from the wretched excesses of Communism, which actually imprisoned and killed a great many people for disagreeing with its doctrine and the doctrine’s manifestation in the then Soviet Union – as opposed to the lesser sins of manipulating and constraining the incomes and lives of most people in favor of a favored few and using race baiting to keep people’s focus away from such inequalities.
Today’s progressives are different from those of 1948 in one important aspect. There are a whole lot more of them now than then.
But they are not really far different from those of the past in their admonishments of capital and capitalism and their general and specific programs, proposals and platforms. Today, though, the tug is not between progressives outside the mainstream of the two major parties but between those who have pried open a generational gap to appeal to younger voters by carving out new territory inside a centrist Democratic Party.
The most recognized among them are Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren. A main difference between the three is that Sanders and AOC call themselves Democratic Socialists. In the history of the left, Democratic Socialists were arch enemies of the Communists, who in turn considered Democratic Socialists a discordant, misguided breakaway faction within socialism worse than capitalists.
In the eyes of Communists, the Democratic Socialists were a wrong divergence from classic Marxist thought and belief who would not tow a party line. It’s pretty arcane stuff, especially now that Communism is in all ways “the god that failed,” unless you were into all that (and from the sounds of him, Bernie is still stuck mired in that stuff). Neither Sanders or AOC is a Democrat even though one of them is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Warren differs from Sanders and AOC in this very fundamental way. She is a Democrat, elected as a Democrat although until about 25 years ago she was and had been a lifelong Republican. Sanders and AOC ran as Democrats — Sanders’s practice is to run for and capture the party’s nomination and then resign from the party once he has used it and prevented someone else from getting its nomination.
Now, AOC faces a test of her new found fame and her political wherewithal in the contest tomorrow in Queens. It is a story about primary elections in New York State.
Next June, New York state will have a unified primary for federal and state offices. For the past eight years, however, it held two primaries, one in June for federal office and another in early Septemeber for state and local offices.
The split primary calendar came out of a court decision in which New York State’s third party, the Working Families Party, led a challenge to what had until been a unified September primary. Working Families won its case with the result being split federal and state primary elections.
This year as election reform, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill to re-establish a unified June primary.
Let’s go back to June 2018 when the New York federal primary was conducted under the now abandoned split primary system that pushed the primary for state and local offices off to September.
AOC challenged the Democratic incumbent in New York’s 14th Congressional District, Joseph Crowley, a seven-term member of the House of Representatives who had risen to the fourth-ranking leader of the House Democratic Caucus. Washington generally expected Crowley, 57, to become Speaker of the House when his generation succeeded that of Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants– Stenny Hoyer of Maryland and James Clymer of South Carolina, who are all in their late 70s.
But a funny thing happened on his way to the speakership. Crowley got knocked off on the way up by AOC, an insurgent who came from the Sanders 2016 campaign and otherwise pretty much out of nowhere politically.
On federal primary day in New York in 2018, AOC got 57% of the vote to 42% for Crowley. It sounds like a lot right. Well, it does, but it wasn’t because hardly anyone voted. It translated into about 16,000 votes for AOC to about 12,000 for Crowley. The political world was stunned, a star was born and little note was given to the dynamics or the fundamental fact of her victory – really low turnout in an election the Queens Democratic organization took very much for granted.
AOC is young and has all the energy a young person needs to carry out a guerrilla campaign street to street and door to door. She did. No one in New York State, New York City, Washington or the House of Representatives really noticed that and expected Crowley to do what he had always done: to win election by 70 percent or better in his overwhelmingly Democratic district comprising parts of Queens and the Bronx as the candidate of the strong local Democratic Party organizations in both boroughs.
Crowley is from Queens, AOC is from the Bronx but two-thirds of the district’s 230,000 active registered Democrats live in Queens. While both boroughs have strong Democratic organizations, the one in Queens contains twice as many 14th District Democratic voters as the Bronx. That didn’t look to matter anyway because as always Crowley had the support of both county organizations and all their key allies in New York City unions and up and down a long list of state and local Democratic officeholders.
Ordinarily, a challenger would have been a conventional Bronx Democrat but Crowley didn’t have that problem anymore. He had a new one he didn’t see coming.
In any case, those organizations don’t really care about federal elections. Their meat and potato dish is the state primary that chooses the party’s candidates for state and local office — the offices that control who gets what from Albany and City Hall over in Manhattan.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is the way of politics and what most people who don’t work in politics don’t always understand is that politicians do this for a living. Along the way they might do some good, they can and sometimes do a lot of harm but mostly and firstly, they do it for a living.
And the Queens and Bronx organizations, like those of every other professional political organization, have a first focus on winning because winning is about who gets what in jobs, community programs and support, legislation, contracts, subsidies, grants, public services, etc.
In the 2018 federal primary 11% of New York 14th District Democrats turned out. Three months later in the September primary that re-nominated Mario Cuomo for governor and chose a slate of legislative candidates that won full Democratic control in Albany for the first time in 50 years, the turnout was nearly 26% in the district. Turnout was nearly 150% greater in September than June.
Had it been the same in June and had the Queens organization pulled its weight, even if AOC had had the support of the Bronx organization, which she did not, Crowley would almost certainly have won nomination easily.
But they weren’t paying attention and they didn’t see any reason to, regarding AOC as a nuisance — as reform candidates always are regarded — and one who could not possibly beat a leader of the House like Crowley. Bad thinking.
In the year since that primary — and it is only a year — we watched AOC become an icon. Love her, hate her, or both love and dislike her as some Democrats do, you’ve heard of her. She is in everyone’s face all the time even when what’s at issue is probably not her business anyway, and generally making life difficult for Nancy Pelosi.
But tomorrow, in Queens there is this primary election. It is a special election to fill out the DA’s term because the District Attorney of Queens, who had been expected to finish out the present term and retire, died early this year after 28 years in office.
The contest to succeed him, because the Democratic nominee is all but certain to win a general election in Queens, has attracted seven candidates. More than two but not all seven seem consequential but the contest has taken a sharp focus on two particularly.
One is the Queens Borough President, Melinda Katz, a classic New York clubhouse politician who as described in New York Times reports has the support of the Queens Democratic organization, the bog unions and real estate interests that classically are the spine of Democratic Party politics in New York City. Did I mention among her backers is Crowley and his personal political organization with deep ties to the county Democratic organization? Well, he is.
(Note: New York City has five boroughs. Each has an elected Borough President, offices with some influence over city budgets and a great deal of sway over patronage within the boroughs, each of which is also a county of the State of New York. Except for conservative Staten Island, the other four are overwhelmingly Democratic. They are the Bronx (same county name), Queens (same county name), Brooklyn (Kings County) and Manhattan (New York County).
The other of the top two candidates is Tiffany Caban, a former public defender seeking to move into and reform the prosecutorial world. At age 31, Cagan is a peer of AOC and the congresswoman’s endorsed choice in a borough, Queens, that is the most diverse in the nation’s most diverse city. Pick any cuisine from around the world. You’ll find it in Queens. If Caban has achieved real support in those diverse minority communities it could be her strength, though it could also be for other candidates outside the organization.
Besides AOC’s support, Caban has endorsements from Sanders and Warren, from the reform District Attorney of Philadelphia (Larry Krasner) and Boston’s reform DA, Rachel Rollins, all as reported by the Times. Last week the paper endorsed Caban.
Caban’s celebrity political endorsers are all well and good, but none of them lives in Queens, not even AOC, who makes her home in the Bronx.
It has been a brief, hurried campaign mostly under the radar and not at all in view on the cable networks, which are busy frying the much bigger political fish of the Democratic Party presidential contest and all things Trump, while juicing impeachment as they salivate over the ratings such proceedings would give them.
It could be there will be a substantial vote split among the top four candidates (for detail on who all is running and why and with what support, please search The NY Times).
Or it could be that it will come down to Ms. Katz and Ms. Caban. It is being viewed with a perspective that if either win and the other finishes second it could read out a potential 2020 contest between AOC and the Queens Democratic organization. In a very real sense for AOC, Caban has to win because if she doesn’t the Queens organization might get the notion it can challenge AOC next year in the primary – the unified primary when it matters to the organization to get out its vote.
This election is only in Queens but it is in ALL of QUEENS. There, as of Feb. 1, there were 766,000 active Democratic registered voters (active meaning they have voted recently). Only 140,000 of them live in AOC’s piece of Queens.
Ordinarily, turnout for an election like this would be low. But with AOC and her followers having a substantial stake, with the Queens Democratic organization wanting to keep control over a key county office it has dominated forever, and with five other candidates including at least two more with substantial backgrounds who have also made a mark in the campaign, Queens could see a larger than usual turnout for a by-election.
If Caban wins it surely will be touted as a big gain for AOC and her brand of politics. If Katz wins it will be seen as a resurgence of organization politics portending a possible primary challenge to AOC next year. If another of the candidates wins it may be viewed as a draw but even that will depend on the vote that Caban, the AOC candidate, and Katz, the organization candidate receive and the order of the finish.
As in any election, a lot of people have a lot riding on this one. But excepting the actual candidates, the one who seems to have the most riding on it just a year after she shocked politics by winning her primary would seem to be AOC. At least it seems so the night before the polls open.
Peeling the Onion 