"Even Republicans who have cast Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as their favorite new left-wing target would love to catch some of the lightning in a bottle that’s made the New York congresswoman a national phenomenon. At the recent South by Southwest conference, in Austin, the unabashedly progressive 29-year-old drew a larger crowd than any of the half-dozen 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in attendance, most of whom have been national figures far longer than AOC.
| | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Government and Courage at SXSW 2019 [Video]New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks with The Intercept's Senior Politics Editor Brihna Gray at SXSW 2019. |
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Her rise from political neophyte to power player began less than a year ago, with a stunning David-versus-Goliath unseating of a longtime incumbent in a June 2018 primary. Now the same group of young activists from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign who boosted Ocasio-Cortez are looking to replace other moderate and conservative Democrats across the country with leftist candidates. Their first target? U.S. representative Henry Cuellar, of Texas’s Twenty-eighth Congressional District.
| | Will There Be a Showdown Over Funding of the Border Wall?Carlos Sanchez speaks with a Texas congressman on the appropriations committee ahead of the looming budgetary sh... |
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“His votes and his rhetoric are not upholding Democratic values,” says Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the political action committee Justice Democrats, which launched its “Primary Cuellar” campaign in January. In arguing why the eight-term congressman must go, Rojas points to the frequency with which Cuellar votes with President Donald Trump—about 60 percent of the time, more than almost any other House Democrat—despite representing a district that favored Hillary Clinton over Trump by nearly 20 percent in the 2016 election.
The Justice Democrats say they believe, contrary to the results of recent elections, that the values of Texans aren’t significantly different from those of New Yorkers—and, furthermore, that those values are progressive. “In poll after poll, Americans everywhere want change in immigration, health care, climate change, and income inequality,” Rojas says.
Their effort is something of a proxy war for a larger conflict that has erupted within the Democratic party about the right way to mobilize voters and take the White House back from Trump in the 2020 election. Did Clinton lose the presidency because she failed to excite progressives by not tacking far enough to the left or because she didn’t hew close enough to the center to attract moderates? And is the answer to that question the same in all parts of the country?"
