Will Progressives Topple Another Establishment Incumbent?
Jamaal Bowman's race closely resembles AOC's and tangibly threatens long standing Dem Eliot Engel's comfortable seat in Congress
Next Tuesday there will be a Democratic primary in New York’s 16th congressional district that could result in an upset that would shake things up for party leadership.
The incumbent, Eliot Engel, was actually re-elected in 2012 after being redistricted from the 17th district in the 2010 census redistricting cycle. He is certainly what we would call a career politician having served in Congress for 31 years and today he holds the title of House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman and is known as a prominent ‘pro-Israel’ voice in the party. He is no doubt a valued member of the conservative established leadership circle (despite, to his credit, being involved in a few progressive policy caucuses, including the caucus on Medicare for All).
The challenger is Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal from the northern Bronx who has embraced the pledge from Justice Democrats to take no corporate PAC money and has come out in support of the slate of proposals that have typically been championed by progressives in the last few years, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. He has also gained some attention for his proposal for a “reconstruction agenda” which is certainly pertinent to the national situation unfolding around Black Lives Matter and I think is a brilliant way to frame the universal programs that will go a long way to improving Black lives which Bernie always claimed was the best way to implement ‘reparations.’
In the last few weeks, as the campaign has entered the final stretch, it started garnering national attention as prominent Democrats and other institutions doled out their endorsements. As Jesse Mckinley of the NYT wrote in his piece “the race has become a focal point for the party’s directional battle.”
In one corner you have the insurgent progressives and advocates of ‘big structural change’, Bernie, AOC, and Liz Warren who have joined Jamaal, and in the other corner, you have the aging party leadership in Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and James Clyburn among others who no doubt want their long-time colleague Elliot to stay in the club. It was clear that the conservative party elite was feeling the heat when they pulled out the big guns bringing Hillary out of the shadows to endorse Engel just days after Bowman secured a surprising endorsement from the NYT editorial board. We also saw the same corporate PAC who ran negative ads against Bernie Sanders in the leadup to Iowa dish out $600,000, some of which came from prominent GOP donors, to push back against the primary challenger.
It certainly is interesting to see the lines drawn so clearly, I don’t know how anyone could argue that the party isn’t divided; the sides have been forming since 2016 and the activist base is pushing to claim more seats and increase their caucusing power in congress. It seems that the left and left-leaning inside players are willing to unite to oppose leadership when it comes to strategic primary challenges, and I do hope they can nix this seat from a congressman who is well past his sell-by date.
Some have compared this race to AOC’s race vs Joe Crowley back in 2018 and there are a few notable parallels. First and foremost they are running in neighboring districts, certainly containing different constituencies, but both districts include a portion of the Bronx and just about everyone has the context of living around, and oftentimes working in, NYC.
The other striking similarity is how detached their incumbent opponents were from the actual district in question. Crowley had also spent decades in congress and made it close to leadership, but by the time the election rolled around was completely unknown in the community he was supposed to be representing.
This situation in NY-16 is another revealing one. We find yet another case of a career politician who has played within the party and has become removed from the situation on-the-ground in their district; Bowman has repeatedly called out Congressman Engel for not understanding the plight of the people in the community because of how little he is present there.
When you spend that much time in the club, you might feel more comfortable spending more and more of your time near your buddies in Washington and as you rise in leadership your role becomes more to serve the party infrastructure rather than the people who voted you in. Mr.Engel also made a few missteps one of which made this absence pretty obvious when he was caught on a mic during a rally in the district saying that he wouldn’t care to be there if he didn’t have a primary challenge.
The politicians who are entrenched in the Democratic party and who were elected in solidly blue states/districts think that the D next to their name and their resumes with fancy titles making them seem like powerful party apparatchiks are enough to hold on to their seats. What the establishment is learning is that they cannot take any community for granted anymore.
In states like NY, you have communities that are becoming more and more diverse, and since the rise of Bernie Sanders, you have a swath of young voters and activists around the country who are ready to participate in their local congressional races now that they understand how important those seats are to achieving actual transformational change in America. Candidates like Engel can no longer expect that we will just show up for them because the lawn sign with their name that we saw in our town had the word ‘democrat’ on the bottom; we are going to be looking at whether you have your hand on the pulse of the working class of the country which is demanding not only progressive legislation but people who are willing to fight for it.
Obviously the thing AOC and Bowman have most in common is the progressive policy platform they embrace and the official backing from Justice Democrats and consequently their grass-roots model for organizing and fundraising. Jamaal, of course, has no name recognition or previous clout in the party, so the efforts that got him to a late polling lead in the past few weeks happened with the help of local people who were passionate about the change he could represent.
His campaign’s phone banking team made “more than 600,000 calls, in a district where 180,000 people voted in the 2018 election, and only 30,000 in that year’s primary.” They also made sure to firstly offer help to their constituents during these troubling times as volunteers used the calls to “direct homebound seniors to mutual-aid groups that could deliver food, or undocumented residents to organizations that could help people who lost a job and were ineligible for a stimulus check.”
Talk about showing that you care about the people you want to serve.
Bowman also seems to have the star-power and charisma that provides a very stark contrast to Engel who hasn’t really had to run a competitive race in decades, a very similar dynamic to the one that helped AOC rise so quickly. Despite being older than her, he has been adept with social media and has spent time getting to know his constituents and building online momentum (which is doubly important during COVID which makes traditional in-person organizing nearly impossible). And now that the race has garnered so much national attention, his campaign “raised $750,000 in the first 15 days of June -- nearly matching his total going back to the beginning of the campaign.”
Perhaps the most interesting difference between NY-16 and NY-14 is the juxtaposition that exists in Bowman’s district between the affluent suburban constituents of southern Westchester County, and the much poorer constituents of the northern Bronx. This is a microcosm of the larger class divide in the Democratic electorate that we are going to need to bridge productively to garner a coalition big enough to wield national power, so it will be intriguing to see if Bowman can excel with both sets of voters and show there is more broad support for a new kind of politics.
It seems like he has a real shot and as I said before, I’m hoping he produces the upset because I am confident he will inevitably caucus with people like AOC and it would represent another shot across the bow that should send a real chill down the spine of Democratic leadership.
Despite this hope, I do want to insert a word of caution about the fight that Bowman will end up bringing to congress. In the past few years, we have seen even AOC buckle to the social pressure in the party, famously changing from an activist who applauded protesters in Nancy Pelosi’s office at the beginning of her term, to an insider who proudly called the speaker the “mama bear” of the party.
Jamaal seems to be showing signs that he is ready to play nice too; in a recent interview with Anand Giridharadas, he was asked about the Democratic Party and Joe Biden and his answers seemed a bit tepid and calculated.
Anand first asks whether Jamaal thinks the democratic party “as it stands, is a corrupt party?”
He responds with a long-winded answer that we would expect from a politician who’s thinking about their political capital: “corrupt, I don’t know if I would use that word … it’s a party that I think in some ways has lost its way.”
The fact of the matter is that I would expect a true fighter to answer that question with a simple “yes, that is why I am running to root out the corporate interests in our government.” To his credit, he even goes on to cite money in politics as the issue and how we need to deal with Citizens united. But that reality is corrupt, there is no other word to describe it. Private money in our elections has amounted to bribery and the Democratic party, as an institution, has sold out to those private interests. If he isn’t willing to call out corruption in the party before he wins his seat, I doubt he will do so as an insider (it’s also worth noting that he has a wife and kids which makes it much more difficult to come out publically and forcefully against party leadership when you know full well you could be smeared incessantly and your family could come under fire).
With regards to Biden, he was asked whether he thinks that Biden has done enough to atone for his role in mass incarceration and his past comments on race. This one he also tip-toed around saying that the former VP is “a work in progress.” This move is less surprising considering the high stakes of the election the danger of Donald Trump winning a second term, but I’m mystified by the fact that he can’t just say “No, but he has a chance to if he wins the presidency.” After all, Biden just a few weeks ago was still defending his role crafting the Crime Bill and we are now in the midst of a Black Lives Matter uprising which directly opposes the injustice that it perpetuated. There’s no need to dance around Biden’s record, you can tell the truth about his stance and still support him in defeating Trump.
You can tell that he doesn’t want to alienate “traditional democrats” so he is being careful with his rhetoric, and to be fair, this is politics, so he may have good reason to be measured with diction. There are plenty of authoritarian and partisan minded voters out there who really will “vote blue no matter who” and take cues from the aging party leadership that they have grown to trust. You can even see it in this race directly as one NY-16 voter who was interviewed for the Times piece I cited earlier said that they were supporting Engel because they wanted to “preserve the institutional integrity of the Democratic Party at a time when it’s under tremendous pressure.”
I would say that if you are an insurgent progressive like AOC, your thesis is exactly the opposite: the institutional integrity of the party has decayed so much that we need to rebuild it from scratch, but you will have to convince those voters who still glorify the “blue team.” I hope that he will bring tenacity and fire to oppose those corrupt and conservative institutional forces that will inevitably try to co-opt him and not give in to this notion that we need “unity” between the progressive and corporatist wings of the party. As I’ve written before, most of the time that “unity” is a ploy to take away your political leverage.
All told, this is an exciting race and to Jamaal: I wish you the best on Tuesday. I proudly donated and can’t wait to see your face in congress, but if you win I will be keeping a very close eye on you and will not hesitate to hold your feet to the fire.