Some congressional seats are safer than Fort Knox, and it just happened to be Joe Crowley’s luck that he had one of these, in the outer New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. But in 2018, he faced something seemingly inconceivable: a primary challenger.
WASHINGTON — Some congressional seats are safer than Fort Knox, and it just happened to be Joe Crowley’s luck that he had one of these, in the outer New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. A native of Queens, Crowley first won election in New York’s 7th District in 1998, a tribune of lunch-pail Democrats who were central to New York’s legend about itself. Fourteen years later, the district was redrawn to include a slice of the Bronx and rechristened the 14th District.
It would be the closest Crowley would ever get to wielding power under Trump. About a year and a half later, he faced something seemingly inconceivable: a primary challenger. Even more inconceivable was the challenger, a 28-year-old bartender from the Bronx. By the time it was all over, Crowley would be seen largely — if not entirely fairly — as a footnote in the ascent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Gil Amelio to her Steve Jobs.
Sherman and Palmer describe Crowley as the almost too-perfect embodiment of everything Ocasio-Cortez was running against. They write it “was an open secret that Crowley lived with his family in suburban Virginia, not in Queens.” A leader of that borough’s Democratic Party, he practiced the backslapping politics that were increasingly the stuff of a bygone New York, where political clubs on dusty outer-borough stretches held in ordinate sway.
Sherman and Palmer report that even as the Acela-bound press corps largely ignored Ocasio-Cortez, Crowley’s own polling showed what they euphemistically call “troubling results.” One poll, in early 2018, showed that “his name ID was low despite being in office for nearly 20 years.” A second poll showed Crowley with an illusory 36-point lead, illusory because it surveyed only “super-prime voters,” older outer-borough whites loyal to the Democratic machine.
Yes, well, and Hillary Clinton was supposed to win Wisconsin. In her only debate with Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez treated Crowley more or less the way Trump had treated his Republican challengers three years before. “If a person loves their community they would choose to raise their family here,” she said of Crowley’s choice to live on the Potomac River, not the East River. “They would choose to send their kids to our schools, they would choose to drink our water and breathe our air.
At some point during the night, Crowley also took a call from Pelosi, whom Sherman and Palmer describe as “distraught.” They do not say what she was distraught about. Pelosi’s representatives would not confirm that the call took place. But since resuming the House Speaker’s gavel, Pelosi has struggled to contain the emboldened progressive wing of the Democratic Party, an insurgency of which Ocasio-Cortez is the undisputed leader.
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