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.
Meet the Leader of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy
Jeff Merkley could inherit Bernie Sanders’ progressive mantle in 2020. But for now, he’s spending his time plotting the resistance against the Trump presidency.
Merkley is probably best known for being the only colleague of Sanders to endorse the Vermont senator last year.
.. He has no campaign staff, and has raised no money. But he seems to be hoping that the credibility he has with progressive activists and the wild new world of lefty politics will change all that. So he’s starting early, even if the odds don’t look great right now.
.. He’s the right age and would be 72 by 2028, if another Democrat beats Donald Trump in 2020 and then has a lock on the nomination for 2024.
.. he’s not immune to the sense going around many Democrats these days that if Trump can win, maybe anyone can, and there’s certainly no harm in trying.
.. Whether there’s actually an appetite for pulling the party further to the left is a different question.
.. support for individual issues Merkley supports, from health care changes to free college to universal basic income, all at under 40 percent.
.. inside Washington, he is very much a player, having quietly brought together leading groups on the left for what’s become a regular series of pragmatic, action-focused meetings.
.. Every other Thursday, around the table in his conference room (or sometimes over the phone), top staffers from leading progressive groups MoveOn.org, Ultraviolet, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Daily Kos, Credo and Indivisible join him to plot strategy and share information. If there is a nerve center of the vast left-wing conspiracy, this is it.
.. Merkley circulates invitations among senators. Among the regulars: Warren, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Minnesota’s Al Franken. A rotating cast of others, including New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris, have been known to stop by. Sanders is always invited, but he never comes, instead sending a staffer and people from his Our Revolution group.
.. In recent months, a staffer from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has started joining.
.. The meetings began as strategy sessions for how to push a presumed President Hillary Clinton to the left on Cabinet picks and abruptly transformed into a lefty war council, bringing together battered progressives and minority senators looking to amplify a voice that’s much further from power than they’d been prepared for.
.. Some who know Merkley suspect he regrets not running for president last year—he could have been the progressive magnet pulling Clinton to the left, but without doing the damage that Sanders did to her that she blames in part for her loss.
.. In fact, he insists, Clinton ought to thank Sanders for running. “There was a tremendous amount of grass-roots energy
.. As for Trump, Merkley likes his position on trade, and that’s about it. He calls the president a “mystery,” because he ran as a populist but is governing more like a movement conservative.
.. “It was a surprise that he was able to campaign on one vision, and implement a completely different vision.
He attacked Hillary for being too close to Wall Street. Well, he wakes up every day seeing what he can do for Wall Street, how he can tear down consumer protections.”
.. living “his whole life stepping on others. He was raised to step on others.”
.. That language reinforced the argument that Kim Jong Un is making to his own population, which is that the U.S. wants to destroy North Korea, that they have to put all their resources into the military side, that they have to have nuclear weapons in order to deter America from bombing them,” Merkley says
.. official rollout of his Medicare for All plan.
Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms
Bannon was in Rome to learn from and provide support to the unusual coalition of populists and nationalists who together won half the vote in Italy’s recent elections and have formed a government. Bannon sees that sort of coalition — mixing left and right, old and young — as his goal for the United States. “Europe is about a year ahead of the United States. . . . You see populist-nationalist movements with reform [here]. . . . You could begin to see the elements of Bernie Sanders coupled with the Trump movement that really becomes a dominant political force in American politics.”
.. The Republican Party’s strategy, for now, appears to be to make the midterm elections a series of local contests focusing on the tax cut and the healthy economy. Bannon views this as fundamentally misguided. “You have to nationalize the election,” he said. Bannon understands that voters are moved from the gut more than through a wonky analysis of taxes. “This is going to be an emotional [election] — you’re either with [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi or you’re with Donald Trump.
.. Bannon is most focused on the issue of immigration because it hits both the heart and the head. “Immigration is about not just sovereignty, it’s about jobs.”
.. He believes that the Trump coalition can attract up to a third of Sanders supporters who see trade and immigration as having created unfair competition for jobs, particularly for working-class blacks and Hispanics.
.. “You’re not going to be able to take the Hispanic and black community from the STEM system in grammar school to our best engineering schools . . . to the great jobs in Silicon Valley, unless you start to limit these H-1B visas and this unfair competition . . . from East Asia and South Asia.”
.. The most likely result of limiting these visas is that talented immigrants will simply go elsewhere — Canada, Britain, Australia — and start successful companies there... The Democratic Party is too far to the left on many of these issues, embracing concepts such as sanctuary cities, which only reinforces its image as a party that is more concerned with race, identity and multiculturalism than the rule of law... I wrote last month that Trump would try to fight the midterm elections on immigration and added, “Do not be surprised if Trump also picks a few fights with black athletes.”
.. He predicted the next major battle would be over the proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The wall is not just totemic. The wall is absolutely central to his program. . . . As we come up on Sept. 30, if [Congress’s] appropriations bill does not include spending to fully build his wall . . . I believe he will shut down the government.”
.. Bannon doesn’t think the fighting and the rancor in the United States are going away any time soon. The “battle between nationalists and globalists is at the fundamental roots of what America is, what America will be,”
Democrats are about to have to pay up
Before the ink was dry on our new tax bill, outraged blue states were screaming about the cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes. Their governments were also frantically seekingways around it, and small wonder. For decades, high-tax states with a lot of wealthy residents enjoyed a hefty subsidy from the rest of America.
.. Over the past few decades, the United States has undergone “the Big Sort,” the clumping of the electorate into demographically, professionally and politically homogenous neighborhoods. Clinton voters have their Zip codes, and Trump voters theirs, and ever more rarely do the twain meet.
.. No, the money for American-style social democracy is all supposed to come from the rich. “I’ve been frustrated with liberals,” says Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center. “They really do just want to raise all the revenue from rich people, and they don’t understand that that really constrains what they can do in terms of financing the safety net.”
.. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will keep promising big new programs with laughably inadequate financing mechanisms.. Blue-state professionals have enjoyed a disproportionate share of the prosperity gains over the past few decades; if they want a bigger government, they’ll have to give up those gains to fund it.