Just one year before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated a powerful 10-term New York congressman to have a chance at becoming the youngest person in Congress, she was mixing cocktails at Flats Fix tacos and tequila bar in Manhattan.
“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old progressive and member of the Democratic socialist party, says in a campaign ad.
But Ocasio-Cortez not only ran – she won.
Her victory is part of a larger story of a Democratic party in revolt. A wave of first-time female and progressive candidate are storming the ramparts of an establishment that has not only seen its power recede at every level of government – but also failed to keep Donald Trump out of office.
In an interview on cable channel MSNBC this morning she said: “Our campaign was focused on just a laser-focused message of economic, social and racial dignity for working-class Americans, especially those in Queens and the Bronx.”
Her win was all the more remarkable for having been outspent by Crowley during the campaign by 10 to 1. “I started this race out of a paper bag. I had flyers and clipboards and it really was just nonstop knocking on doors and talking to the community,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez is an almost made-for-TV foil to the Queens-born billionaire in the Oval Office.
The daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Bronx-born father, Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a working-class community where she commuted between the borough and Yorktown, 30 miles north, for school. She later earned a degree in economics and international relations from Boston University, during which time she worked for the late Senator Ted Kennedy, according to her campaign website.
After college she returned home to the Bronx and found work as an educational director. But she was forced to take on another job when the recession hit. Ocasio-Cortez worked “18 hour shifts” as a waitress and bartender to help her mother, a house cleaner, fight foreclosure after her father, a small business owner, died of cancer.
As she explained on MSNBC this morning, this life story has informed her politics. “My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure … I started bartending and waitressing. I understand the pain of working-class Americans because I have experienced the pain.”
In 2016, she organized for Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, in New York during the Democratic presidential primary, which he lost. She linked arms with progressive activists at Standing Rock to protest the construction of a natural gas pipeline that crossed Native American land. Trump has revived the project that Barack Obama had blocked. After Trump won the election, she felt compelled to do more.
In May of 2017, at the urging of progressive activists, she launched what was by all accounts a long shot bid to challenge congressman Joe Crowley of New York. Crowley, who is twice her age, was widely rumored to be next in line to lead House Democrats.
For 20 years Crowley, head of the Queens county Democratic party and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, ran the deep-blue borough where more than 130 languages are spoken. He was synonymous with the party machine young progressive Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez were ready to expel.
“We’ve got people – they’ve got money,” she said in a campaign ad, adding: “It’s time we acknowledge that not all Democrats are the same.”
Ocasio-Cortez ran a grassroots campaign, blanketing the borough with canvassers who pounded the pavement and courted young, black and Latino voters who make up the constituency.
She argued that Crowley was out of touch with the working-class people of his district and was beholden to Wall Street and corporate interests.
Last week, Crowley sent a Latina surrogate to debate Ocasio-Cortez, citing a scheduling conflict. Ocasio-Cortez ridiculed the decision, accusing him in a sharply-worded tweet of sending someone with a “slight resemblance to me”.
“The way the Queens Democratic party machine has worked, they operate on a politics of exclusion,” Ocasio-Cortez told WNYC after she launched her campaign.
The Democratic socialist ran on issues that remain largely outside of the Democratic mainstream.
Ocasio-Cortez called for the abolition of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (Ice), an agency that has increasingly become a target of left leaning activists over its treatment of immigrants in its care. She also called for a single-payer healthcare plan that would guarantee healthcare for all Americans, a proposal known as Medicare for All and championed by Sanders. She also called for tuition-free college and a universal-jobs guarantee, under which the federal government would provide a job for every American.
Last weekend before Tuesday’s election, Ocasio-Cortez left her New York district for west Texas to participate in a protest against family separations.
At a billiards bar in the Bronx on Tuesday night, a visibly shocked Ocasio-Cortez clasped her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide as she stared at the television. The results flashed across the screen to show that the 28-year-old progressive had slayed one of the Democratic party’s most powerful giants.
“How are you feeling?” a broadcast reporter asked, pointing her microphone at Ocasio-Cortez. “Can you put this into words?
“Nope,” she said. “I cannot put this into words.”
Earlier today on MSNBC she had found the words to articulate her vision and offered the Democratic establishment a clear challenge. “What is the vision that will earn the support of working-class Americans – what we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision and getting into twitter fights with the president is not where we’re going to find progress.”
At his election-night party at a restaurant in Jackson Heights, Crowley thrummed a guitar.
“This is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said as the band struck up Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.
