A great night for progressives

Crowley and Grimm go down: Top takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries

It was a great night for progressives, and also for Donald Trump.

By STEVEN SHEPARD

Rep. Joe Crowley’s stunning loss has left House Democratic leadership scrambling for answers — and has left-wing, Bernie Sanders-aligned activists feeling emboldened.

Fewer than 30,000 votes were cast in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th District, but the race has already rocked the political world from Queens to Capitol Hill. Crowley, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, was defeated Tuesday by a 28-year-old, first-time candidate and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The future of the House Democratic conference is suddenly jumbled, and potential 2020 candidates are already linking themselves with giant-slayer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her liberal platform.

That contest may have been the marquee race of the night but there were several other races with national implications. President Donald Trump risked significant political capital to take sides in two internecine primary fights, and Utah answered whether a former major-party presidential nominee could have a third act in politics — in a new state.

Here are POLITICO’s top takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries:

1. Liberals roared back.

The insurgent left has lost most of the battles it picked thus far in 2018. But not on Tuesday.

Ocasio-Cortez shocked Crowley with an upset that will reverberate far beyond the five boroughs. MoveOn.org called the result “a shot across the bow of the Democratic establishment in Washington.” Democracy for America said it “sends a clear message to a Democratic Party that still needs to hear it.”

But it wasn’t the only victory for liberals in competitive primaries on Tuesday.

Former NAACP President Ben Jealous won the Democratic nomination for Maryland governor, campaigning over the final weekend with Sen. Bernie Sanders, even as Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker had most of the state party in his corner.

Elsewhere in New York, a Syracuse University professor, Dana Balter, beat a more moderate opponent backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Juanita Perez Williams in a battleground House district. Rep. Jared Polis won the Democratic nomination for governor in Colorado, and Joe Neguse, a preferred candidate among liberals, won the nomination to replace Polis in the House.

While Crowley was the only incumbent to fall, two of his New York City colleagues — Reps. Yvette Clarke and Carolyn Maloney — were held under 60 percent against 30-something candidates who said the progressive moment inspired their under-the-radar campaigns.

Overall, Tuesday night was a reversal from the list of close-but-no-cigar congressional defeats for liberals earlier during the primary season. They failed to oust Rep. Dan Lipinski, who opposes abortion rights, in Illinois. Laura Moser, who became a cause célèbre on the left after the DCCC tried to torpedo her candidacy in a Houston-area district, fizzled in a runoff last month.

Those defeats are in the rear-view mirror because liberals took down a seemingly invincible incumbent — and a member of Democratic House leadership — on Tuesday night.

2. It was a great night for President Trump.

Trump’s 11th-hour trip to South Carolina for Gov. Henry McMaster represented an unusual risk: the expenditure of political capital by a president in a primary race unlikely to impact the partisan balance of power.

It paid off. McMaster — only two weeks removed from a weak, 42-percent showing in a five-candidate primary — jumped more than 10 percentage points in Tuesday’s runoff to earn a decisive victory over businessman John Warren.

Trump also cashed in on his other big bet: Rep. Dan Donovan easily defeated his once-disgraced predecessor, former Rep. Michael Grimm, in a nationally watched New York GOP primary. Trump didn’t campaign with Donovan in the Staten Island-based district, but he told his followers on Twitter that nominating Grimm — who resigned after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud — would imperil the seat in the general election, and Donovan would be a safer bet.

The president acknowledged both men Tuesday night — on Twitter, of course. He also tweeted congratulations to one of his former punching bags: Mitt Romney, who cruised to the GOP nomination for Senate in Utah on Tuesday.

Trump’s political instincts might have been askew, however, when he suggested Crowley might have been renominated if he’d only been “nicer” and “more respectful” to him.

3. The end of the urban, white ethnic party boss.

Crowley isn’t only a 10-term member of Congress and the fourth-ranking House Democrat — he’s the now-humbled boss of the once-powerful Queens Democratic machine.

His defeat signals the demise of the white-ethnic party boss, once a familiar character in the big cities on which the national Democratic Party is increasingly reliant.

When he leaves Congress at the end of this year, Crowley will be joined by Democratic Rep. Robert Brady, the retiring Philadelphia power broker who opted against seeking reelection amid a redrawn congressional map and the small matter of a criminal investigation into his 2012 campaign for paying off a primary challenger to drop out of the race. (Maybe Crowley should have tried that.)

Crowley and Brady — proudly shanty (not lace-curtain) Irish pols representing majority-minority communities — are throwbacks to Richard Daley in Chicago and Carmine DeSapio in Manhattan. But Crowley’s defeat goes beyond just the diminished role of the ward bosses: It also signals upheaval for the old guard in diverse Democratic-dominated cities.

That’s one reason why Massachusetts Rep. Mike Capuano might be nervous. He was elected to Congress the same year as Crowley, 1998. The half-Irish, half-Italian Capuano represents a majority-minority, Boston-based district and faces an African-American primary challenger more than 20 years his junior in September, Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley.

Ocasio-Cortez is already drawing the parallels: Not long after declaring victory in her own race, she tweeted her support for Pressley.

4. Where do House Democratic leaders go from here?

Crowley was an answer to a question that Democrats on Capitol Hill have been asking themselves — under their breath — for the past year: Who will lead our caucus in the next Congress?

Barring a massive wave election that sweeps in 40 or 50 new Democrats, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s days leading the conference could be over: Democrats might move on if they didn’t take back the House, or they might win a narrow majority achieved on the backs of new members who had said they intend to vote for a new leader when they got to Washington.

There are two members ahead of Crowley on House Democrats’ totem pole: Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Assistant Minority Leader James Clyburn. But neither Hoyer, 79, or Clyburn, who will be 78 next month, screams “fresh face.”

Crowley, 56 years old, seemed like a logical choice to lead the party in a post-Pelosi world. But he’ll no longer be an option when the post-election jockeying begins. The first names to emerge for a potential promotion on Tuesday night were Reps. Linda Sánchez (Calif.), Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Cheri Bustos (Ill.) and Ben Ray Luján (N.M.).

Sánchez has roiled leadership by already suggesting it was time for new blood at the top of the conference, while Luján’s fortunes could be tied to his current job: DCCC chairman, charged with winning back the House this fall.

Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn have each emerged from their primaries unscathed, so there’s no danger of them befalling the same fate as Crowley. And, if anything, their hold on the Democratic conference is stronger as a result of Crowley’s defeat. But Tuesday’s results mean there’s less clarity about when or if Democrats might make a change in leadership, and who those new leaders might be.

5. The 2020 Democratic landscape gets some early definition.

After then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s 2014 defeat in a Republican primary in Virginia, some predicted a tidal wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that would reshape the Republican party.

In the end, only two other House GOP incumbents lost: Ralph Hall (Texas), who was 90 years old when he was narrowly defeated in a GOP primary runoff, and Kerry Bentivolio (Mich.), the eccentric reindeer rancher whose brother told reporters that he was “mentally imbalanced.”

While Republican primary voters didn’t sweep out incumbent members by the score, they did sweep in Donald Trump during the next presidential primary, rejecting a dozen other candidates with sterling political resumes in favor of a first-time candidate who appealed to their emotions.

It’s against this backdrop that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory on Tuesday could be the most significant moment in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination thus far. Crowley, a white man who began his congressional career in the late 90s as a centrist, New Democrat (though he was more reliably liberal in recent years), lost to a 28-year-old Latina — a first-time candidate who describes herself as a “Democratic socialist” and favors single-payer health care.

Sanders, rejected in the primaries in New York two years ago, was quick to embrace her on Tuesday night, suggesting her campaign focused on some of the same themes his did in 2016. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro was also quick out of the gate to congratulate her.

6. It was a mixed night for Democrats in their efforts to take back the House.

Crowley’s defeat doesn’t affect the party’s basic 2018 arithmetic: Gain 23 seats, and Democrats regain control of the House next year.

On that measure, Democrats had a mixed night. They got one prized candidate through a potentially tricky primary. In Colorado, Jason Crow, a veteran, won the nomination to face GOP Rep. Mike Coffman in a perennial battleground district outside Denver. Crow overcame some liberal consternation after the muckraking website The Intercept published a recording made by Crow’s primary challenger, former Obama administration official Levi Tillemann, in which Hoyer urged Tillemann to end his campaign and defer to Crow.

One DCCC-backed candidate stumbled: Perez Williams, designated as a top challenger by the party committee, was blown out by Balter in a New York district where Democrats hope to unseat incumbent GOP Rep. John Katko.

Another veteran with the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” stamp of approval, Max Rose, won the Democratic primary Tuesday to face Donovan in New York. But while Democrats expressed confidence before the vote that the seat was in play whether or not Grimm won the primary, most in the party would have preferred to face an ex-con in the fall.