The Search for the Next AOC
The moment was immortalized in a one-minute clip on CNN: 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived at her campaign’s Election Night watch party, caught a glimpse of the results on a nearby TV screen, and clasped her hand over her Stila-painted lips. “Oh my God.”
Ocasio-Cortez had just learned she’d defeated incumbent Representative Joe Crowley of New York—the “Queens Machine” and possible future Speaker of the House—in a 2018 primary election. In the span of a few hours, a bartender at a taco restaurant had become a household name—and the spokesperson for the progressive movement.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s astonishing upset was also a crucial triumph for Justice Democrats, a fledgling progressive organization that, along with the group Brand New Congress, had recruited Ocasio-Cortez and helped shepherd her campaign to victory. Justice Democrats was founded in 2017 by veterans of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign with the goal of supporting candidates up and down the ballot who follow a set of progressive principles, including refusing corporate PAC money and supporting Medicare for All. While Justice Democrats had endorsed 79 candidates in the 2018 cycle, only 26 of them were successful, including other now well-known progressive members of Congress, such as Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. But no victory registered like Ocasio-Cortez’s upset, turning her into a three-letter political phenom:
