An Upset in the Making: Why Joe Crowley Never Saw Defeat Coming

He led his upstart rival, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by 36 percentage points.

It was the last poll Mr. Crowley’s campaign would conduct.

Despite his many reputed strengths — his financial might as one of the top fund-raisers in Congress, his supposed stranglehold on Queens politics as the party boss, his seeming deep roots in an area he had represented for decades — Mr. Crowley was unable to prevent his stunning and thorough defeat on Tuesday night.

.. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bested Mr. Crowley by 15 percentage points, delivering a victory expected to make her, at 28, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

.. in a redrawn and diversifying 14th Congressional District where the incumbent, despite two decades in Congress, had never run in a competitive primary.

.. She flipped the levers of power he was supposed to have — his status as a local party boss and his money — against him, using that as ammunition in an insurgent bid that cut down a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi and the No. 4 Democrat in the House.

.. It was demographics and generational change, insider versus outsider, traditional tactics versus modern-age digital organizing.

.. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a socialist

.. “It’s a wake-up for everybody,” said Michael Blake, a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee

.. charismatic younger challenger whose politics and profile — a woman with Puerto Rican roots — matched a diverse Queens and Bronx district, where 49 percent of residents are Hispanic and fewer than one in five are white.

.. “A lot of people of color were excited about a young woman of color,” Mr. Blake said. “People say demographics are destiny and you can’t ignore that reality when looking at the numbers there.”

.. A former organizer for Bernie Sanders

.. carrying Mr. Crowley’s home borough of Queens by a larger margin than she won the Bronx.

.. She drew support for her progressive platform that included abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Medicare for all and a federal jobs guarantee

.. “Her strongest support came from areas that were not predominantly Hispanic,”

.. He was remarkably little known back home, despite his many years in office, and his favorability rating was also low, according to people familiar with the findings.

.. Mr. Crowley’s family lives in the Washington area — a fact Ms. Ocasio-Cortez used as a cudgel.

.. By early June, the Crowley campaign was already on high alert. He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mailers and voter outreach, but Mr. Crowley remained mired in the low 50s in the head-to-head matchup

.. His bank account showed $1 million for the race’s final sprint. But Federal Election Commission records reveal that nearly two-thirds of those funds were earmarked for the general election. He couldn’t spend it on the primary.

.. Mr. Crowley’s blitz of activity and mail — one official involved in his campaign said some voters received more than a dozen pieces of literature — had rebounded to her benefit.

.. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez released a two-minute biographical video that went viral, the latest instance of this “girl from the Bronx,” as she called herself, catching fire on social media.

Her video, and a competing three-minute clip that Mr. Crowley released days before the election, told the story of the race.

.. She rode subway trains in hers. He drove a car in his.

.. pitched himself as an ally.

.. She pitched herself as a member of the community itself.

.. His video had fewer than 90,000 views on Twitter by Primary Day. Hers had more than 500,000.

.. “We had people running this like a 1998 City Council race and not a 2018 congressional primary,”

.. They saw heavier turnout in some more gentrified pockets of the district — Sanders-type strongholds. Her social media presence was swamping them.

.. warned the Queens County Democratic leaders, including Mr. Crowley himself, that the district was shifting beneath them, ideologically and racially.

 

 

Search for Hicks replacement turns into West Wing food fight

The top candidates emerging from inside the White House, multiple officials said, are director of strategic communications Mercedes Schlapp, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration who has become a Kelly ally in his battle against Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Tony Sayegh, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Treasury Department.

.. There is also a broad internal base of support for press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to take on the job, adding overall messaging strategy
.. The communications shop has long been one of the rockiest departments in the West Wing, with the top job there viewed now as a thankless task of overseeing messaging for a message-resistant, Twitter-happy president.
.. Trump likes to revive names from his original, campaign inner circle
.. Jason Miller, a veteran of the 2016 campaign, has been floated internally as a potential candidate for the job. Miller was first tapped for the communications director job during the transition in 2016, but was unable to take the job for personal reasons. He has managed to remain a favorite of the president, though, for his Trump-defending commentary on CNN.
.. the role Hicks played is not replaceable — she was one of Trump’s closest confidantes, serving as a resource for colleagues who relied on her help reading the president’s moods.

What To Do With “Shitty Media Men”?

The body of the email contained an anonymous Google spreadsheet labeled “SHITTY MEDIA MEN.” On the top, it said, “DISCLAIMER: This document is only a collection of misconduct allegations and rumors. Take everything with a grain of salt. If you see something about a man you’re friends with, don’t freak out. Men accused of physical sexual violence by multiple women are highlighted in red.” I saw some of the names and thought: fucking finally. Finally, the grossest men in media will be exposed.

.. But things do get complicated when you start lumping all of this behavior together in a big anonymous spreadsheet of unsubstantiated allegations against dozens of named men — who were not given the chance to respond — that, by Wednesday night, seemed to have spread far and wide. At various points on Wednesday, dozens of anonymous accounts were looking at the spreadsheet. This was by design; because of the way the document was structured it meant that anyone could look at it, download and share it

.. In the coming days, as aggregated lists of men are created, it’s important to distinguish who are dogs and who are sexual assaulters.”

.. the fact of the spreadsheet’s existence is itself a feature of this new social media age, of email hacks and document leaks, and a time when things that had just been whispered about are put into digital form, and shared, and take on a life of their own.

.. the consequences almost never outweigh the price that women pay for coming forward. Our motives are suspect, our reputations are maligned, our victimhood called into question.

.. the thing that stuck out to me, and sickened me, the most on the list was the men about whom it had been written “rumored sealed settlement.” Because most of those men are still working in media

.. The hypocrisy of performative allyship has been well documented. But what of the hypocrisy of media organizations themselves?

The accused work at some of the most well-known places in the industry, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Mother Jones, and BuzzFeed.

 

 

Guide to Allyship: Boots & Sandles: How to handle mistakes

If you decide to become an ally, but refuse to acknowledge that your words and actions are laced with oppression, you’re setting up yourself to fail. You will be complicit in the oppression of those you purport to help. You are not truly an ally.

 

.. Imagine your privilege is a heavy boot that keeps you from feeling when you’re stepping on someone’s feet or they’re stepping on yours, while oppressed people have only sandals. “Ouch! You’re stepping on my toes!” How do you react?

Because we can think more clearly about stepping on someone’s literal toes than we usually do when it comes to oppression, the problems with many common responses are obvious:

  • Centering yourself: “I can’t believe you think I’m a toe-stepper! I’m a good person!”
  • Denial that others’ experiences are different from your own: “I don’t mind when people step on my toes.”
  • Derailing: “Some people don’t even have toes, why aren’t we talking about them instead?”
  • Refusal to center the impacted: “All toes matter!”
  • Tone policing: “I’d move my foot if you’d ask me more nicely.”
  • Denial that the problem is fixable: “Toes getting stepped on is a fact of life. You’ll be better off when you accept that.”
  • Victim blaming: “You shouldn’t have been walking around people with boots!”
  • Withdrawing: “I thought you wanted my help, but I guess not. I’ll just go home.”