Ocasio-Cortez the Incumbent Killer, and Other Stories

Since some people want a primary thread, here you go. The biggest story:

There was much more to the shocking defeat of Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) at the hands of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The incumbent was, for starters, simply a terrible demographic match for the district as it’s currently drawn.

He’s a white man in a mostly female party representing a district that’s less than 20 percent non-Hispanic white (and some of those are Republicans) and half Latinx. He’s also in the weird situation of being the county party boss of Queens even though a healthy slice of his district is in the Bronx.

Looking back, it’s also striking that Crowley never actually won a competitive congressional election. He was slotted into a safe seat back in 1998 by his predecessor, who only officially retired too late to have an open primary competition for the seat, thus allowing Crowley to be crowned without really running. Crowley is well liked by his colleagues in the House, but he’s not particularly charismatic. And in retrospect, his decision to skip a couple of debates looks borderline catastrophic.

Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, is a young, dynamic public speaker in a city whose machine-oriented politics tends to toss up drab nonentities as its politicians. She had uncommon social media savvy, and cut a fantastic video while waging a campaign that did a brilliant job of both channeling long-simmering national progressive disgruntlement with the idea of Crowley’s eventual accession to the speakership and emphasizing her greater rootedness in the district as currently conceived.

The obvious comparison is to Dave Brat’s defeat of Eric Cantor in the 2014 cycle, but Ocasio-Cortez’s win is in many ways a bigger shock. Ideology-driven defeats of Democratic incumbents are historically much rarer than on the Republican side, so claiming any victories at all would be a big win for the left, and Crowley’s seat is a very big prize indeed.

This is how you do it — safe seat, dynamic politician, if you don’t have ex ante support from the establishment who cares.

And glad for this preemptive snark:

Romney didn’t run in the 2016 cycle, but did briefly audition as a spokesperson for the #NeverTrump movement — slamming nativism and protectionism as inauthentic to the conservative movement. He pegged Trump himself as a fraud, though of course when it came time for the general election Romney couldn’t bring himself to endorse actually voting for the one candidate who could stop the fraud from becoming president.

Tuesday night, he wrapped up the GOP nomination to run for Senate in Utah (where I guess he moved at some point?) which makes his elevation to Congress all-but-certain. Romney fans like McKay Coppins say that possession of such a safe seat will make Romney “free —perhaps for the first time in his political career — to be unabashedly who he is, without any serious threat of electoral blowback.” Coppins continued, “That could lead him to hold the president accountable in ways that other Capitol Hill Republicans have shied away from.”

In truth, the best hope for these fantasies would have been for Romney to bow out of running at the last minute, leaving people free to dream of what Sen. Romney might have been. As an actual elected official, Romney will inevitably end up being unabashedly who he is — one of the most shameless opportunists in the history of American public life, who invariably ends up disappointing people who expect him to stick to anything for long.

The are few certainties in public life, but Mitt Romney being a Trump lickspittle in practice when he joins the Senate is one of them.