DETROIT (CNN) Consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's travel schedule.
Over the past two weeks, the aggressive new voice of the progressive left has been criss-crossing the Midwest, making a stop in Kansas to campaign alongside Bernie Sanders as well as solo trips to Missouri and Michigan to flank insurgent candidates hoping to follow her. her course.
That Ocasio-Cortez is still hundreds of miles from the Bronx and Queens, where she stunned the political world in June by unseating the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, shows how important the next few weeks are to the movement that has come. to represent.
Beginning with contests in those three states on Aug. 7, and continuing for nearly five straight weeks after that, progressive underdogs will test their mettle against incumbent Democrats in elections from Hawaii to Delaware and Massachusetts.
Success in any of these races has the potential not only to shape the 2018 field, but to encourage a future crop of progressives — and signal a shift to the left within the Democratic Party. On the other hand, a shutout would quell — or at least put on hold — any indication that the party's moderates face an existential threat from their left.
Campaigning for Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed, who is competing against the odds and conventional wisdom to become the nation's first Muslim governor, Ocasio-Cortez explained the core electoral premise driving the movement.
“Our swing voter is not red-blue,” he said at a stop in Flint. “Our swing voter is the voter to the non-voter, the non-voter to the voter.”
In an interview later, he dismissed the existence of a persuasive center.
“I don't think swing voters decide based on how much a candidate has run more down the middle,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I know people who are gifted voters, and when I think about how they decide, they don't say, 'Oh, I'm voting for this person because they've become the most Republican in the entire race to get my vote.' .. Enlarging the electorate is the way.”
It's an argument progressive candidates and operatives have been trying to make to skeptical Democratic Party leaders in recent years.
Ocasio-Cortez, her team and allies are clear-eyed about the math and the narrative risks. Most of the candidates now riding the wave of national attention are considered long shots. But so was she.
Even then, losses don't always equal defeat, she argued, pointing to James Thompson in Kansas' 4th Congressional District to make her case. In 2016, Republican Mike Pompeo won the seat by 30 points. Thompson fell, as expected, in the 2017 special election, but the result was a shock to the system — he had come within 6 points of victory.
“He, as a progressive, single-handedly turned this seat from an impossible race into a flip-flop district,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “He lost that race last year, but does that mean his work was pointless? Absolutely not, because now we're in line in 2018 to potentially take the seat… I hope that even if a candidate doesn't win this cycle, they will have generated profits for 2020, for 2022.”
Against the odds
As recently as June, before Ocasio-Cortez struck her signature blow, the insurgency seemed destined to claim its successes further down the ballot, and mostly out of the national political conversation. But that changed when 10-year-old House Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley publicly offered his concession.
Ocasio-Cortez immediately began telegraphing her next steps and indicated that growing her own lone classes was a priority.
“I hope I'm not the only one. I hope I'm not the only flag bearer and that's a big part of this whole tour,” she said of the main season schedule. “I mean, I don't know if I'd call it a tour, but that's the point of supporting other progressive candidates because I shouldn't be the representative. No one person should be the representative of an entire movement because the movement is by definition collective. And so I'm just a perspective.”
Hours after her own victory, Ocasio-Cortez said Boston City Councilwoman Ayanna Pressley called on supporters to “vote her next.” House candidate Cory Bush of Missouri and Chardo Richardson of Florida — both of whom, along with Pressley, are challenging Democratic House incumbents — also chimed in.
There were more, headlined by the 33-year-old doctor from Michigan: El-Sayed.
On July 2, Ocasio-Cortez he tweeted that the state was “blessed to have @AbdulElSayed as a candidate for Governor and I am proud to support him.”
She could hardly be accused of chasing glory. El-Sayed was firmly in third place behind the front-runner, former Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer. He also followed self-funded millionaire Shri Thanedar, a political wildcard who was the first of the three to hit the airwaves.
“They said I wouldn't be welcome here,” Ocasio-Cortez said upon arriving in Grand Rapids on Saturday, a nod to the experts — some of them elected, like Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth — who suggested that the region may be off-limits in its left-wing politics.
An upset for a candidate like El-Sayed, with his detailed single-payer health care plan and open disdain for corporate campaign cash, won't end the debate, but it will push back critics of the movement while it would strengthen its leaders.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed insists to reporters and supporters that the bad poll numbers are just a product of bad polls. The momentum, he says, is his. History too. Sanders won here despite trailing heavily heading into the 2016 presidential primaries.
The Vermont senator, who endorsed El-Sayed last week, will rally with him on Sunday. But the buzz surrounding his events with Ocasio-Cortez required no spin. The Sanders coalition, especially with the New Yorker in town, seemed to be showing off again.
For true believers on the left, El-Sayed's case is special — a necessary fight for a movement committed to standing out from the party's moderates, even if it ends with thick lips all around.
“(Sanders) inspired people to believe in his message because they knew he wasn't bought by corporations, because he wanted to really solve the problems they were facing,” El-Sayed said in an interview somewhere between Grand Rapids and Flint. “He didn't propose half measures and he was able to inspire them, and we're doing exactly the same thing.”
He hit back at the memo hours later, telling supporters: “Every day I meet someone who says, 'I've never registered to vote, not once, and I literally registered to vote for you. don't let me down.” That says something about this electorate.”
The pioneer — and an afternoon at church
While El-Sayed is struggling to unseat Thanedar, who despite a lack of loyalists has tried to claim the progressive mantle, Whitmer appears poised to win the nomination — and turn the progressive tide on his heel.
Unlike her opponents, the former state lawmaker would not seek a short-term transition to single-payer health care. News that officers from the PAC run by the state's largest insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, promoted employees at a Whitmer fundraiser earlier this year led El-Sayed, who has pledged money from corporate PAC, to quip in a debate that “it's not bought by people like Blue Cross Blue Shield.”
“First of all, it's a fake attack,” Whitmer said early Saturday night, during a quick break from door-knocking in Detroit's Indian Village neighborhood. “And second, it's extremely sexist to say that a woman owes her father's former employer… A record-breaking 84 percent of the money we've raised in this campaign is from Michigan. Eighty-two percent is 100 $ or less.”
Her father, Richard Whitmer, was president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan from 1988 to 2006. Although his name never came up over the weekend, the connection colors every mention of the insurer.
Susan Demas, a Democratic strategist and former editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, attributes Whitmer's lead in the polls to the goodwill she built with liberals during her time in the Legislature, when she helped deliver votes for a deal to increase Medicaid. to 680,000 people and took a leading role in opposing the state GOP “right to work” law. Years before the #MeToo movement took shape, Whitmer made headlines when she spoke publicly about being sexually assaulted in college.
“One downside of Abdul really hitting on the Blue Cross argument is that he keeps tying it to (Whitmer's) father, and that really offends a lot of progressive women,” Demas said. “There's always a risk when you're running a heated argument, and I think while it probably won him some of those progressive Bernie Sanders voters, it didn't help him get votes with traditional Democratic women.”
In Ypsilanti on Sunday, inside the packed and packed Brown Chapel AME Church, that less traditional Democratic woman, Ocasio-Cortez, was greeted — again — with rapturous applause.
A call for volunteers, before El-Sayed spoke, had a sense of revitalization — stand up, count, take a moment and celebrate.
“The only way is to move forward,” she said, after being introduced by El-Sayed. “We have to decide whether to change for the worse or for the better. Because the status quo is no longer an option.”
