Whenever American democracy looks rigged, an underdog comes along to remind you that it can be unrigged. Not since Republican Dave Brat beat incumbent Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary in 2014 has there been an upset quite like that pulled off last night, when 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat 56-year-old incumbent Joseph Crowley, the No. 4 Democrat in the House, in a New York primary. As The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel notes, the Web site for Flats Fix, a Flatiron-area taco and tequila bar, still carries a picture of Ocasio-Cortez shaking a drink behind the bar, because that is where she was working a year ago. Today, she’s almost certain to become the youngest member of Congress.
A primary ouster of a House incumbent is rare (it happened in only 31 out of thousands of primaries between 1994 and 2012), but it can chill the blood of incumbents everywhere, especially if policy is at the heart of the matter. Crowley had already moved reasonably far to the left by pre-Trump and pre-Bernie standards, but Ocasio-Cortez outdid him and ran on a platform of Medicare for all, federally guaranteed jobs, and the abolition of ICE. (How the last of these three could work with the first two is unclear—given that the world contains billions of people who would gladly move here for such benefits—but rhetoric will probably cede to a little realism.) Many of Crowley’s peers will consider themselves warned.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump had a pretty good night, too. His favored candidates won their primaries, and even those who were defeated seem to have gone down praising Trump all the way. If the G.O.P. has taken over Trump, Trump has also taken over the G.O.P., and its change over two short years, becoming the party of tariffs and North Korean peace, has been nothing short of remarkable. Democrats have no choice but to change in response, and the rise of Ocasio-Cortez is one indication of that. We’re seeing a left populism that is prepared to go up against a Trumpist right populism. If such are the rumblings of 2018, where on Earth does this leave us in 2020, on which many politically minded Americans are already focused?
The Republican side, at present, seems settled. Barring something huge, it’ll be increasingly Trumpist. But the nature of the party that will challenge it, the Democratic one, is still wide open, and defining it will involve a good deal more agony. Political analysis still tends to classify parties and candidates on a left/right axis, but that has become less and less useful since 2015, when populism entered into the picture and laid down some axes of its own. Donald Trump moved his party to the left on trade, and to the right on immigration, and all over the place on other issues—and Democrats have moved every which way in response. Candidates like Ocasio-Cortez have staked out a spot quite far to the social and economic left, while candidates like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat in a red state, have stayed put or moved to the right. Independent voters might be more attracted to a democratic socialist than to a centrist. We just don’t know.
With everything in flux, Democrats have very tough choices to make in their national campaigns. Should they push as far to the left on economics as many Republicans seem determined to push to the right? Should they take a Joe Manchin approach of granting Trump ground on the issue of immigration? Or an Ocasio-Cortez approach of calling for the abolition of ICE, and, with it, implicitly, border enforcement? Should they follow academic trends in their rhetoric on race and sex and get super-intersectional, or dial it way back the other way? Should they privilege economics or social issues? Should they rely on a hyper-energized base or persuadable independents? Should they abide by common courtesies in daily life, or should they take the advice of Maxine Waters and single out Trump White House employees for harassment? Each contender is likely to have a different combination of answers to these questions, but the party has to settle on one.
Over the weekend, Politico’s David Siders suggested that 2020 could take the form of Trump vs. Warren, as in Donald Trump versus Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, both of whom recently attended party conventions in Nevada and used their time on state to lay into one another, with Trump trotting out his well-worn “Pocahontas” insult (a reference to Warren having claimed American Indian ancestry) and Warren vowing to “hose out the Washington cesspool that Donald Trump has created.” But such a lineup would depend heavily on energy rather than voter conversion. Her steady attacks on Trump enchant much of the Democratic base, but there’s little evidence that it broadens her appeal. The same applies to several other names being floated, such as California’s Kamala Harris and New Jersey’s Cory Booker.
The oddest effect of the victory of Ocasio-Cortez—which may in fairness be a fluke, for all we know—is that it made most other Democrats look old. This isn’t because she’s 28, although that doesn’t hurt, or because she’s Latina, although that doesn’t hurt either. It’s because she offered a clarity of purpose and end goals that have eluded so many of the major names on the left. Even Warren, who was among the few who seemed to understand and explain the implications of the crash of 2008—when the government passed on hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to our grandchildren in order to sustain the lifestyle of Wall Street, which had already cleaned out the common man—has struggled to offer much in the way of vision. She has developed a reputation for grandstanding more than gravitas.
Ocasio-Cortez said something simple: working people like my neighbors and me deserve a square deal—a tuition-free college education if we’re ready to learn, a job at a living wage if we’re willing to work, and a hospital bed paid for by Medicare if we’re sick. Government should guarantee all of these. And it worked. What she seems to have learned from the old-yet-somehow-not-so-old Donald Trump is that vision works. Did Trump really believe we’d fix all our roads and airports, build a big wall, reverse our trade deficit, eliminate government waste, restore safety to our streets, and get so tired of winning that we’d beg to win less? No need to answer that. But he knew that thinking big would inspire his followers, and Ocasio-Cortez knows the same thing. It’s the sort of approach that drove Hillary Clinton crazy about Bernie Sanders, about whom she complained in her latest book that he “didn’t seem to mind if his math didn’t add up or if his plans had no prayer of passing Congress.” But perhaps he didn’t mind because it didn’t matter. You campaign on the vision, not the compromise.
This suggests, oddly enough, that Sanders, older than just about any other major player on the presidential scene, continues to look like one of Trump’s most plausible challengers. Even in a wildly polarized country, he continues to enjoy favorability ratings that regularly top 50 percent. He speaks willingly to political adversaries and, while fiercely critical of Trump, stops short of demonizing him or his supporters. He says what he must to defer to interest groups and identity politics, but his pitch remains similar to what it has always been, much of which has been adopted by Ocasio-Cortez: economic security for all Americans. It could be a winning one.
As it did in 2016, though, it seems immigration will continue to bedevil Democrats more than any other problem. Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez will retreat on her call for the abolition of ICE, or explain it away as a demand for bureaucratic reorganization rather than elimination of its enforcement functions. But the party keeps moving left on the issue, and Sanders is now weathering criticisms for refusing to join the eliminate-ICE faction himself. Even with a policy as noxious as the separation of mother and child at the border, Democrats risk overplaying their hand at the national level. A recent CBS News poll found while only 4 percent of Americans favor separation, 48 percent support deporting families together, and 11 percent support arresting the parents and allowing them to keep their children in the same detention facility. Only 21 percent support the heretofore prevailing policy of releasing them into the country to report back later. (The rest have no opinion.) Sanders seems to perceive the disconnect, but he remains caught between his base and the realities of American opinion. This will be the headache for any eventual nominee, just as it will be a gift to Trump.
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