Upsets In New York and Maryland Primaries May Signal a Major Change for the Democrats

Yesterday’s primaries produced a couple of upsets that seem like them may mark the leading edge of a change in Democratic politics.

The stunner, of course, was in New York. Joe Crowley, a 10-term Democrat congressman and the product of the once formidable Queens Democrat machine, has his ass handed to him by a 28-year-old novice politician named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was a field organizer for Bernie Sanders who didn’t break 40% in the district. Crowley was chairman of the House Democrat caucus, he’d last faced a primary challenger 14 years ago and he outspent Ocasio-Cortez $3 million to $200,000.

Ocasion-Cortez didn’t sugarcoat her socialism as she coasted to a 58-42 win. She ran on “Medicare for all” (get ready to hear a lot more about this) and “Abolish ICE.” She even protested at a detention facility during the last couple of days of the primary.

In Maryland, establishment favorite Rushern Baker, the lip-locking Richard Madaleno

and assorted other denizens of the Star Wars cantian went down in defeat as Bernie Sanders-endorsed former NAACP president Ben Jealous took 40% of the total vote. Jealous, sort of a prophetic last name given his platform of free college and a $15/hour minimum wage, was an underdog to Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker. Baker, a fairly competent and telegenic African-American, had come up through the Democrat machine and has been looked at as a future governor for a few years. This race should have been his for the asking.

The plural of anecdote is not data but these two upsets have so much in common that they might portend a major change in the national Democrat party. In both cases the handpicked candidate of the current Democrat machine was upset by Bernie Sanders. In both cases, many of the union activists who should have been loyal machine soldiers bolted and worked to elect an insurgent. And in both cases the candidates ran on an unabashed platform of what can only be called making the US into Venezuela. It nearly guarantees that this will push the Democrat candidates farther to the left in order to win close races. In the next primaries we can expect to see a bumper crop of young Hugo Chavez’s challenging the Democrat status quo.

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