Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary in one of the most fortified Democratic death stars in the United States because she won gentrifying neighborhoods in Queens, suggesting her messaging and her policies might be the true explanation, not her ethnicity or her gender, and that those policies might be successful in far broader stretches of the United States than many here seem to believe, according to a precinct-by-precinct analysis from Steven Romalewski, director of the Mapping Service at the City University of New York’s Center for Urban Research.
Since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ stunning victory, campaigning vocally in favor of Medicare for All, a Jobs Guarantee and Abolishing ICE, pundits here and in the MSM have been contorting six ways from Super Tuesday to portray her success as something colloquial, something that happened despite her staunch democratic socialist campaign, not because of it. Their arguments all contained the same elements: her district includes the Bronx, she is a Hispanic female who defeated a white man, and her policies would not play in whiter neighborhoods. I could link to several diaries and comments from influential Kossacks to that effect and reserve the right to do so depending whether people accept that this argument was commonplace here. But the talking points were coming right from the top brass of the party, particularly Nancy Pelosi:
REPORTER: “Leader Pelosi, to that end, the Democratic Party is increasingly younger, more female, more diverse, more progressive. Should the Democratic House leadership look that way?”
PELOSI: “Well I’m female, I’m progressive, I’m — and the rest. So what’s your problem? (Laughter) Two out of three ain’t bad.”
REPORTER: “[indecipherable]”
PELOSI: “No, they did. They made a choice in one district. So let’s not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that. Within the caucus or outside the caucus, we are — again, we have an array of genders, generations, geography, and there is opinion in our caucus, and we’re proud of that. The fact that in a very progressive district in New York, it went more progressive than — Joe Crowley is a progressive, but more she’s left than Joe Crowley, is about that district. It is not to be viewed as something that stands for anything else.
Well it turns out that the demographics of her win were a lot less particular to that one district than Speaker Pelosi and many here would like us to believe. From the Intercept:
“My colleagues in the media are shoehorning Crowley’s defeat into the narrative that Bernie Sanders-like insurgents are toppling a Democratic establishment,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank explained in a dispatch typical of the genre. “It isn’t so, because the argument that there is a Democratic establishment resisting the progressive tide is a straw man. Crowley lost because of the changing demographics in his district, which had been redrawn considerably after 2010 and is now only 18 percent white.”
In fact, Crowley — Irish-American and from Queens — was presumed to do better there than Ocasio-Cortez — Puerto Rican and from the Bronx — who was expected to carry her home borough. But Romalewski mapped out the votes across the district, and what he found was the exact opposite of the pundits’ conclusion: Crowley, known until last week as the “king of Queens,” was crushed almost everywhere, but he did better in the Bronx.
“You can also see that most of her votes, the strongest vote support, came from areas like Astoria in Queens and Sunnyside in Queens and parts of Jackson Heights that, number one, were not predominantly Hispanic, so they’re a more mixed population, and are areas where — this is kind of a term of art — are in the process of being gentrified, where newer people are moving in,” said Romalewski.
The analysis flips on its head the post-hoc rationalization that pundits have been using to explain a result they never saw coming. Indeed, her ideas — like establishing a single-payer health care system, tuition-free college, a foreign policy that puts human rights first, or abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — along with her dogged campaigning, were the engine which motivated that army and powered the upset.
In conclusion, Bernie Sanders’ policies could win in 2020, and have much wider purchase than a single district. He was not a one-off phenomenon, but rather tapped into a growing force of unrest and class-consciousness in America, folks fed up with the unprecedented rightward shift in this country that is caused by the unprecedented economic inequality in this country, and cannot be reversed without reversing said inequality. The end. Flame away.