Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office.
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
“No one looked at me and said, ‘Girl, it’s you,’ ” said Lauren Underwood as she shuffled a pile of envelopes on the otherwise bare desk in her new congressional office. At thirty-two, she had become the youngest person, first female, and first person of color to win her seat in the suburbs of Chicago, and the youngest black woman ever in the House.
No one but Underwood even seemed to understand that she could pull it off. Like scores of women who turned anger and frustration into a decision to run for Congress in 2018, she was appalled by President Donald Trump; also like many other women in 2018, she was a first-time candidate in a Republican district, leveraging the alchemy of Trump fatigue (particularly among suburban women), a growing fear among voters that health insurance protections were under attack by Republicans, and an appealing comfort in her own skin.
From Lauren Underwood in Illinois to Sharice Davids, the first openly LGBTQ person to win a congressional race in Kansas and one of the first two Native American women ever to serve in the House, to Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had both defeated powerful Democratic incumbents on the East Coast, the formula was much the same: break it. These women remained their authentic political selves throughout their campaign, and, thanks to this cohort, Pelosi regained the gavel.
In many cases, female voters in Republican-majority districts were at odds with their husbands, a conflict sometimes manifested by dueling yard signs for congressional candidates. Other times, voters’ efforts were more stealth—some women in central Michigan, for example, would tell their husbands they were going to book club when they were actually attending a volunteer session for Democratic candidate Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer who went on to beat a Republican there. Underwood, Slotkin, and others in districts with more Republican than Democratic voters had an especially arduous mission: they needed simultaneously to energize a Democratic base to get through a primary and ensure turnout in the general election, while also appealing to Republican women. Once on Capitol Hill, they would need to continue this balancing act.
For all women who choose to run for office, there can be additional obstacles, sometimes through betting against themselves. They may feel discouraged from running, even though statistically they win about as often as men (unless they are Republican women in primaries). According to a 2013 study by professors Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox, men are 15 percent more likely to be recruited to run for office than women. And women rarely come up with the idea on their own; someone usually has to recruit them. Sometimes, their hesitation stems from hating to ask people for money, which is a central feature of modern campaigns. Just as often, however, they consider themselves unqualified.
This concern is one that women already in office seek to tamp down. Former senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), who, like many female senators, spent a fair amount of her time trying to convince women to run for office, told me she repeatedly heard them worry about their qualifications, something that seems rarely to distress men. “I used to tell them, ‘Have you seen the North Dakota legislature?’ ” she joked. Even among those queried in “feeder” professions, such as the law, only 57 percent of women said they thought they were qualified or very qualified to run for office, Lawless and Fox found, compared to 73 percent of the male respondents.
For the women who prevailed in 2018, self-determination was part of their secret sauce. Of the roughly twenty women I followed closely, the vast majority had made their own decision to run, motivated in large part either by the Trump presidency or the Republican congressional agenda. They sounded a lot like people who chose to go into public service after 9/11, believing they were called to duty as part of a larger national emergency response.
“This is exactly what I signed up for,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) told me. A former US Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor now representing a swath of northern New Jersey, Sherrill sometimes cites Trump’s attacks on Senator John McCain, even after McCain’s death, and on the Khan family, whose twenty-seven-year-old son, a US Army captain, died in a car bombing in 2004 in Iraq, as among her motivations to run. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who has said that being in New York City on 9/11 is what compelled her to pursue a job at the CIA, wanted to continue the mission in Congress.
The candidates also worked to make themselves unusually accessible to those they were trying to woo, especially folks who had been ignored by Democrats in past years. Slotkin began her campaign in Michigan, which became one of the most expensive in House history, with a listening tour dubbed Snowboots on the Ground, in which she painstakingly knocked on door after door throughout the district, a technique many women embraced. Women of color like Lauren Underwood, Ilhan Omar, Sharice Davids, Jahana Hayes, and Ayanna Pressley, all of whom won majority-white districts, knew they needed to make deep one-on-one connections in order to be accepted by people who did not look like them.
Most importantly, candidates believed that if they were relatable, consistent in their message no matter the neighborhood they campaigned in, and cheerfully themselves, voters would get on board. Black, Muslim, young, and gay candidates did not try to subdue those identities. They casually embraced them, with the expectation that constituents would find themselves in general agreement with their policy positions. Angie Craig, who in 2016 narrowly lost her first House race in the suburbs of Minneapolis, let herself talk about her wife and their kids the second time around in an easy, matter-of-fact way. “I will just bring it up naturally. Like when talking about education costs, I say, ‘My wife and I have four sons, and college isn’t for all of them.’ I saw you can be a lesbian, and it made no difference at all in the campaign here.” She also ditched the business suit that so many women feel they need to don on campaigns, trading it in to match the more casual look of her district. Honesty, charm, and self-confidence all went a long way.
Lauren Underwood and I first met in her new congressional office in the Longworth House Office Building, which she had decorated with color photos of her district and a few books, including How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings. A trained nurse with a congenital heart condition who had worked in the Obama administration on health-care policy, she felt singularly motivated to run when Republicans began to pursue legislation that would remove protections for patients with preexisting medical problems.
At the Women’s March in 2017, she learned that Democrats had set their sights on the four-term incumbent, Rep. Randy Hultgren, who held a seat that had historically been almost exclusively Republican. It was once the redoubt of former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was hugely popular before he was exposed as a child molester after his retirement from politics. While solidly Republican, the district, like other suburban strongholds, was flashing warning signs in the era of Trump. Then–Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had won it by 10 percentage points in 2012. Trump won it by only 4, and didn’t cross the 50 percent threshold. “I thought, ‘Great, I will support whoever runs,’ ” Underwood told me. Then she got to thinking: “whoever” in her district could be her.
Underwood grew up in Naperville, Illinois. Her father was a corporate controller. Her mom was a buyer in manufacturing. The Underwoods were one of the few black families in a district where blacks make up less than 5 percent of the population. “I never had a black teacher,” she said, and she had almost no black coaches. A product of a close family and a community where she always felt embraced, she believed she understood precisely what the district—a mix of rural swaths of pastures and grain stores and Chicago suburbs full of half-empty strip malls—needed. “I went to lunch with my friend Sarah Feldmann at this barbecue place and said, ‘I am thinking of running for Congress.’ So Sarah pulls out a notebook and starts writing. She was totally down to help. I was underestimated by everyone, but we knew the Fourteenth was winnable.”
She was not exactly welcomed by the party, given that six other Democrats were ready to go—and then she won the primary with more than 57 percent of the vote; her closest competitor took a mere 13 percent. Even so, she entered the general election as an underdog.
Underwood insisted on making her own decisions. She wanted to manage her own money, for instance, and chose a post office box to receive donations, carrying around the tiny key herself, rather than funneling funds through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and she often avoided costly consultants. “This was the most data-uninformed thing I have ever done,” she shared with me over a late-night meeting in her office during the government shutdown, when she and her skeleton staff were stuffing their own envelopes. “I didn’t have the staff they advised. I did not allocate money for that. I did my own thing.”
After her decisive primary victory, Underwood knew that health care was going to be the central policy issue in the general election. She also knew she could outwork Hultgren. “I found that there was so much value in just showing up,” she said. “We would go and stand in people’s living rooms. People would host us for house parties. They were not even supporters. They just wanted to hear. We would be in cul-de-sacs, standing in soybean fields, where no Democrat had been in years.” The conventional wisdom of the consultant class, she was told, was that candidates like her ought to focus on traditionally Democratic areas and ignore the rest. “But we went everywhere,” she said. “We invested in all corners of the district, and as a result we won every county.”
Her message was relentless but did not focus on Trump: Republicans, she said, over and over and over, were trying to take away coverage of preexisting conditions. “The president was not so unpopular,” she said, and she sensed that an anti-Trump message would not “be a bridge opportunity to connect with people across the district.”
As the race tightened, former vice president Joe Biden stumped for Underwood, and former president Barack Obama endorsed her at a Democratic rally in Chicago. Her defeat of Hultgren by 14,871 votes was among the most surprising of the night: 5 percentage points was not simply an upset for that district; it was a rout. In her victory speech, Underwood, dressed in a conservative navy grosgrain suit and her “power pumps,” said cheerfully: “I aim to be the very best congresswoman this area has ever seen. And honestly it won’t be that difficult, because I’ll be the first congresswoman to represent this district!” She exited the stage at the Kane County Fairgrounds to the Alicia Keys song “Girl on Fire.” (Pelosi would use the same song, months later, as her walk-off song for a speech to rally Democrats in New Jersey shortly after announcing the impeachment investigation.)
Underwood’s roommate in Washington would be a friend she made along the trail, another promising millennial freshman, Katie Hill, who had turned her idealism—and practical skills—as an advocate for the homeless into a winning campaign. Her district, California’s Twenty-Fifth, includes the dusty, working-class cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, stretches of high-desert brown hills and tired strip malls, and hospitals lacking sufficient mental-health care, but also includes priced-out Angelenos, the wealthy largely Republican subdivisions of Santa Clarita, and rural areas populated by Latino workers. It is heavy with police officers and veterans, and home to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.
Hill understood intuitively that Republicans in her district were distinct from those whose voices were loudest in Washington—disproportionately southern, socially conservative, suspicious of government. Those in her district support gun rights but also gun safety, low taxes but the preservation of government-supported health care, defense spending but climate-change consciousness, too. Like Underwood, Hill’s first task was to vanquish better-known primary contenders. At the California Democratic convention, she moved successfully to block her main challenger, a onetime corporate lawyer named Bryan Caforio, from getting the endorsement of the state party, in large part by pushing a poll that showed her the most likely Democrat to unseat the incumbent, Rep. Steve Knight (R-CA), a US Army veteran and former LAPD cop. Walking out after this incremental victory, Hill reflected on her final challenge to Caforio: “We’re gonna fucking crush him.” (She ended up winning by 2 percentage points, but who’s counting?)
Next target, the seemingly entrenched Knight. Word quickly spread around the bluer enclaves of Southern California: a talented, politically amalgamated, dog-loving, goat-owning, rock-climbing, real-talking millennial woman had just won a Democratic primary battle in a Republican district at the north end of Los Angeles County. She quickly raked in big bucks from celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel, whose infant son’s heart condition drew him to the health-care issue, as well as wealthy LA women who were eager to see this young woman rise.
In a Vice documentary—ever-Vice-ly titled “Who the Hell Is Katie Hill?”—Hill’s campaign office resembles the basement apartment of a college kid, with piles of paper and a half dozen wine bottles stashed at the top of an open closet. She watches coverage on a large-screen television propped up by empty printer boxes. The documentary captures a typical race for a first-time candidate: all dialing for dollars and stops for all of twelve votes at a pizza party. At one point, Hill’s mother is forced to schedule breakfast with her through a campaign staff worker. The ability to raise money, the holy grail of House campaigns in which the fundraising never stops, is best depicted in a scene from her campaign manager/finance director’s house/campaign headquarters as Hill and her staff call potential donor after potential donor as a fundraising deadline approaches. “We are all doing like booty calls,” she laments, adding that her sister “is texting all her ex-hookups.” Looking at a clock as the deadline looms, Hill says, “You have twenty-eight minutes! That’s probably longer than most of the times you slept with them!” Her staff erupts in a reminder of the running video camera: “Katie!”
More money poured in, and Hill spent it almost precisely disproportionately to how she was advised. While most consultants pushed her toward television ads, she spent more on digital ones. “I invested a lot more in field than you normally do,” she told me, convinced that her path to victory would be paved through young people and others who don’t watch television but do share stuff they see on social media. Some financial supporters were turned off by the approach and held back money. “The normal DC crowd looks at your expenditures, and there is skepticism,” she said. “They wanted to see higher numbers of cash on hand to spend on TV in the end. But I spent as we raised on digital because I was an unknown person, and I believed we needed to spend. People say to win you need to get low-propensity Democratic voters or you have to convince independents and moderate Republicans to vote for you. We thought we could do both. Also, I raised all my money at the end of the quarter. I feel like we conditioned our donors to have a sense of urgency.”
The success of these efforts was largely invisible to the traditional race watchers. Katie Hill, like many female contenders that year, was often dismissed by reporters for spending time at small events with new and, often, younger voters and volunteers who energized the campaigns, or she was written off as no match for her male Republican opponent. “On a recent Friday afternoon, she was in Lancaster at a sparsely attended meeting of a high school political club, some of whose members were not old enough to cast a ballot,” sniffed one reporter writing up her race. “Hill, for her part, is full of optimism,” he went on to say. “ ‘We’re seeing the energy everywhere,’ she said. Outside the Lancaster high school event, however, it was hard to ignore the desert silence, the empty parking lot, and the line of Knight campaign posters hanging defiantly on a fence across the street.” (Note to future campaign reporters: Yard signs. Are. Not. Votes.)
The reporter failed to see that the zeitgeist was shifting, and that the polls—as they did during the 2016 presidential campaign—often failed to capture the shift. On Halloween, dressed in a zombie costume with full makeup, Hill stood with some staff in a Chili’s in Stevenson Ranch as they all stared at a New York Times poll on someone’s phone. The news was bad: she looked 4 points down, spelling an almost-certain defeat. Then a waitress came over and told Hill that her little sister loved her. “I said, ‘See, we are going to win by ten.’ My staff said, ‘Katie, we are down by four points. That’s within the margin of error. There is nothing that says we are going to win by ten.’ But I said all along the turnout is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before. I felt completely sure that there was enthusiasm and that people who never felt like someone got them and gave them a voice were gonna show up.”
When all was said and done, Hill annihilated Knight by more than twenty-one thousand votes. Or close to 10 points.
For young nonwhite progressives looking to get into public office, the most natural path is to challenge a more senior member in the primaries—also known as “primarying” them. Most of the time, this strategy fails. Incumbency is a powerful thing, and the Democratic machine that helps House candidates loathes insurgents; DCCC officials firmly believe that members of its party should target only Republicans. In fact, they sometimes actively seek to quash primary challengers by basically blacklisting them from consultants and other firms that work with candidates.
But there are others in the party, many of whom work on campaigns, who believe the only way to increase the number of women in the House is by picking off men in safe seats. This was the theory of the case for Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts’s Seventh District. The Pressley model represents one of many central conflicts roiling House Democrats: Do they protect their own, or do they let all comers, which almost inevitably means more women, bring the fight? The child of a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison, Pressley had attended Boston University in the 1990s but dropped out to help support her mother, a community activist. She eventually landed jobs with both Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II and Senator John Kerry, and in 2009 she became the first woman of color to win a Boston City Council seat.
In 2018, there was not a lot of political light between Pressley and the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Michael Capuano, a popular progressive who had held the seat for almost two decades. Her task was to convince core suburban voters that it was simply time to mix things up in their increasingly diverse, economically mixed area, where, like in many liberal enclaves, they had become deeply frustrated with what they perceived as Washington Democrats’ reluctance to steamroll Trump. Her slogan: “Change can’t wait.”
Voters in the district, which includes most of the city of Boston but also struggling areas like Pressley’s hometown of Dorchester, with large Haitian, Latino, Chinese, and African communities, felt voiceless, and so she made heavy use of both shoe leather and social media, hammering home the notion of racial and economic justice. “We had two hundred fifty incarcerated black men organize families on the outside to get to the polls,” Pressley said during an interview with me in DC. “I had been engaging them not for the purpose of their vote but the purpose of their voice.” Like Katie Hill, she bypassed television ads, save for a few that ran on Telemundo and Univision, featuring community activists.
Unlike other challengers that year, Pressley was not an unknown, having served on the city council for years. Her self-assurance—she walks through a room and seems to dare someone to talk to her—height, booming oratory, and compelling life story seemed to be appealing to a wide range of voters. “I am an outsider insider,” she explained to me. “I am not new. I spent sixteen years as an aide here, but I think of myself as an outsider because of what I carry in these spaces. What is the point of being a black woman who has the experiences I have and not bringing that to the table?” (In the 2019 off-year elections, seven of the Boston council’s thirteen seats were won by Asian Americans, blacks, or Latinos, a path Pressley helped pave.)
Shortly after the election, I was chatting with a couple near the cheese plate after a Friday night service in a synagogue in Brookline, an upper-middle-class area of Boston and the birthplace of President John F. Kennedy. The couple had supported Capuano for years but had voted for Pressley, whose message “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power” had beguiled them. “We just thought she was so exciting,” the wife said.
Pressley’s transparency and outreach paid off across class, age, and racial lines, which distinguishes her achievement from that of Ocasio-Cortez, to whom she is often compared but whose victory was delivered largely by young, white new voters in her district. “I was at a bar fairly late at night in downtown Boston with a girlfriend,” Amy Pritchard, a consultant to Pressley’s campaign, told me. “There was a group of firemen, a mixed group of young and old, and somehow her name came up. Two of the guys were big Trump guys, old-school, like every Boston movie you have ever seen. This one guy said, ‘Fuckin’ Ayanna is the most fuckin’ ballsy woman I have known.’ I realized in that moment that if older white guys were going to be for her in a city that is this racially charged, that was something I don’t know would be captured in a poll.”
Pressley took home 58.6 percent of the vote, crushing Capuano, who barely carried his hometown of Somerville. “It’s not just good enough to see the Democrats back in power, but it matters who those Democrats are,” Pressley said in her primary victory speech in an uncharacteristically soft voice, likely made so by aggressive last-minute campaigning. “Change can’t wait.”
When she arrived in Washington, DC, her first speech on the House floor would be to denounce Donald Trump—“the occupant of the White House” as she has insisted on calling him—over the ongoing government shutdown. “You devalue the life of the immigrant, the worker, and the survivor. I see right through you, and so do the American people,” she said, and was mildly rebuked by the Speaker pro tempore, who admonished her in the typically fussy prose of Robert’s Rules of Order, originally published in 1876 but still in use in Congress, to “refrain from engaging in personalities toward the president,” a violation of the House’s prohibition for casting personal aspersions.
Who cared? Not Pressley.
That day, hardly anyone was in the press gallery that overlooks the floor, and I watched from my own almost-empty row, but in the era of shared video, this didn’t matter. The speech was viewed thousands of times. Essence magazine wrote it up.
This was the life of these brand-new freshmen, a group that in any other Congress would have been largely ignored by everyone outside their hometown papers and trade reporters following how the new members were voting in reference to the specific bills they were interested in. But the new freshmen barely seemed to realize their own anomaly.
The story of Rep. Jahana Hayes is also unusual. She was not one of the women watching her Republican congressman on TV that year, getting angry and gathering her friends around a table to figure out how to raise money and spark an insurgent campaign. She was asked to run for an open seat in Connecticut’s Fifth Congressional District, and she said no. Senator Chris Murphy, a liberal gun-control activist, had held the seat, followed by another Democrat, Rep. Elizabeth Esty, who declined to run for reelection in 2018 after reports surfaced that she had protected a former chief of staff for months after discovering allegations that he had harassed and threatened a female coworker. While parts of the district are known for country clubs and second homes to rich New Yorkers, other areas have long suffered from gun violence and educational and other inequities that have left generations of residents living in the shadows of the state’s elite colleges and universities and its bucolic waterfront towns. Murphy wanted to see the seat reflect the diversity of the district, which includes affluent towns like Kent as well as Wolcott, a blue-collar outpost where Hayes lives and where Trump had won big, and Waterbury, the embattled city where Hayes grew up—the largest city in the district.
For several years, Murphy had been following Hayes’s career with interest. A onetime high school dropout, she had been named the National Teacher of the Year in 2016, and video of her enthusiastic clapping at the award ceremony with then-president Barack Obama had become its own meme. “You just need to settle down,” the president joked as Hayes jumped up and down with joy. Murphy, seeing Hayes for the first time in person at the White House, watched with amusement but also awe. “I represented Waterbury for decades, and I had heard about this teacher,” he told me. “I had a group of students who would come do big community-service projects. I remembered the stories I had heard about her. But I was just blown away by how powerful she was in person and onstage.”
Hayes, who was raised by a drug-addicted mother who often found herself homeless, had given birth at seventeen and dropped out of school before pulling herself back, going to college, and earning a master’s and two other advanced degrees. Murphy called her up and pushed her to run. Hayes was against the idea. She liked her job and was busy with the youngest of her four children. Raising money sounded awful, and she had no idea how to do it.
Murphy and his staff kept leaning on her, even though Mary Glassman, a long-time local politician who had twice run unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor, seemed to be embraced by the fairly solid Democratic district. Murphy was ready to have someone mount a challenge against a politician with ties to the state’s Democratic apparatus. “I found it maddening in Connecticut how few young African Americans and Latinos are able to break into the political process even at the local and state level,” he said. “I don’t think you can talk about the importance of diversity in elected office if you are not willing to do something about it. It was time for our party to think about diversity at the highest levels.”
It was the job Hayes was reluctant to leave that ultimately convinced her to run what would become a truncated campaign. Her particular brand of teaching relied on encouraging students to get involved in projects for Habitat for Humanity, Relay for Life, the American Cancer Society, and local community groups. And beyond encouraging a service orientation generally, Hayes had formed a club to get kids from compromised economic circumstances to do projects that would help them see that they too had the power to change other people’s lives. For spring break one year, she took seventeen students from Waterbury to rebuild Habitat houses in California, which had been devastated by fires. Hammer in hand, Hayes had an epiphany: How could she tell kids, none of whom had parents who owned their own homes, to step up in spite of their circumstances if she would not step up herself? “When I saw these kids, I was like, “You don’t get to do nothing,” she later said in a speech. “So literally with a press release to my local newspaper, I declared that I was running for Congress.”
She started her campaign just twelve days before Connecticut’s Democratic convention. She had no experience. She had no money. She had no political favors to call in and no party ties, other than Murphy, a key ally who would find himself more than matched by the unblinking supporters of her opponent, including many far-left groups whose leaders struggled to explain why they were backing a previously failed middle-aged white candidate over an African American insurgent.
At the convention, Hayes won enough votes to qualify for the primary, but she did not get her party’s endorsement. “I think for everybody it was so deflating,” Murphy recalled. “She had it in her hands, and then it was taken away from her. Most of me expected she was going to hang it up and live to fight another day.” Undaunted, Hayes pressed on. “The next day she called me to tell me she was going to go forward with the primary,” Murphy said. “I will always remember this. She said, ‘I don’t know that I can do this, but what I do know is that I will never know if I don’t try.’ ”
It was then that Hayes scored an underfunded and infrastructure-poor contemporary candidate’s perfect kill: the viral campaign video. In it, Hayes embraced her own story, detailing her teen pregnancy and life with her grandmother while her mother battled addiction. “People are strong, but they aren’t supposed to run for Congress,” she said. “If Congress starts to look like us, no one can stop us.”
Suddenly, new voters in Connecticut’s Fifth District were fired up. Here came Students for Jahana. (She had a youthful campaign, she admitted, because it was all she could afford, and then was taken in by their enthusiasm.) Diverse crowds showed up to hear her speak. “Jahana just connected with people,” Laura Maloney, Senator Chris Murphy’s then–deputy communications director, told me, after having observed much of the campaign. “They liked her story. They wanted to listen to her. She screamed authenticity.” Almost instantly, the video, produced for less than $20,000, yielded $300,000 in donations.
Hayes’s efforts in her hometown turned out voters, too. “But the bigger story was new voters,” Murphy said. “I went to my polling place at seven p.m. that night in Cheshire, where I live. Cheshire is ninety percent white and high-income. A worker I have seen for years was standing outside my polling place. He told me, ‘Chris, I have been standing outside this polling place every election for twenty years, and I don’t recognize anyone coming here today. These are not normal primary voters. Something is going on.’ ”
In a stunning turn of events, Hayes prevailed. She then took her strategy to her general-election fight with Manny Santos, a former mayor of Meriden and a veteran.
In 2016, Stacey Abrams, then the minority leader of the Georgia General Assembly, told me that Democrats needed to stop trying to convert Republicans and start mining their own party for voters who were simply not making it to the polls. “This is a party that is comprised of what is being referred to as the new American majority,” she said. “Those are progressive whites, people of color, and millennials. We have to focus our politics on turning out those voters.”
This is just what Hayes did, repeatedly making the point that Congress needs to look more like the population that it’s representing and focusing on such progressive measures as making college affordable, Medicare for all, and creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Like other women who ran that year, Hayes brushed off advice from Murphy and other Democrats. “I had people tell me, ‘You have to quit your job,’ ” she said, noting that this was not going to be possible. She and her husband, a police officer, could not afford it, and she was not going to abandon her pupils. “So I worked during the day and did calls at night,” she said. “It was the most foreign thing for people.”
The habit has followed her into Congress, where she refuses to leave her committee hearings to go make calls to donors. “We have to force people to think differently,” she told me. (“Call time” is the scourge of any member of the House, and the need for it begins literally the day after one is sworn in. The shortness of House terms—two years versus six in the Senate—and the endless troughs of cash that now flow through US politics make begging for more money a second full-time job for members. One particularly endangered incumbent, I was told, had not been to a committee hearing in months because he had spent his entire time at the DCCC, calling donors to help him get reelected.)
While the Connecticut district Hayes was seeking to win leaned Democratic, there were no guarantees. Some working-class areas had gone for Trump, and her opponent had pressed his support for the president. Joe Biden, campaigning in the state, gave Hayes a plug. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who is on the short list of potential House Speakers post-Pelosi, joined her at a rally. National press chronicled Hayes’s journey. Her opponent—who clung to Trump throughout the campaign—was outmatched. Hayes became the first African American woman from her state to win a seat.
But before Pressley and Hayes and a slew of other new victors, there was AOC, the OG of insurgent vanquishers. On a typically temperate night in Los Angeles in late June of 2018, I was standing in a green room at UCLA, arranging my colleague New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman’s hair. She was staring at her iPhone as she munched indifferently on a carrot from the catered vegetable tray. We were doing last-minute prep for a panel I had arranged with three other Times colleagues, Adam Nagourney, Nate Cohn, and Alex Burns, to talk about the upcoming midterm elections. It was around 10 p.m. back on the East Coast, and shocking news had just come across the transom. A young unknown bartender from the Bronx had just obliterated ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in New York.
Trouble on the horizon for Crowley had been on few people’s radar but his own, and he had tried to downplay it during his campaign to keep from tainting his future shot at a higher leadership spot among House Democrats. His challenger had failed to capture widespread media attention during her campaign, the result of her poor polling and intense competition for stories about challengers that year, and the Times would later be criticized for ignoring her.
So, to refresh, a then-twenty-eight-year-old self-identified democratic socialist had picked off one of the most powerful and senior Democrats in Congress, just as the party was poised to retake the House. My colleagues and I all cheerfully agreed we had some hot news to discuss on our panel.
By the next night, when we took our show to San Francisco, every Democrat in the United States knew the upsetter’s name: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, soon to be simply AOC.
Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign an unknown idealist. Like Jahana Hayes, like Katie Hill, her breakout moment came via video, this one showing AOC riding the New York subway, her signature red lipstick a shock of chromaticity against the dreary backdrop of aging subway cars and the foreboding edifices of an unaffordable city streaming by. In lieu of the cheery “Let’s work together, everybody” dispatches that used to be the stuff of campaign videos, Ocasio-Cortez instead offered a blunt narrative of her experience as a working-class minority, who, like the rest of her age cohort, grew up in an era of economic insecurity, encroaching late-stage capitalism, and a seemingly endless war. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” she says in the ad. “I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny.” At one point, she struggles with her postcommute high heel, a sly nod to both working commuter ladies and her own undeniably stylish appearance. “Going into politics wasn’t in the plan,” she goes on, adding, “Who has New York been changing for?” Her final shot: “It’s time we acknowledge that not all Democrats are the same.” She had written the script herself, her staff said, and had picked some of the locations to shoot.
The video, which has now been viewed more than five million times, would be typical of the rest of Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign and her first months in Congress, when social media would be her primary mode of talking to voters, reporters, colleagues, Republican hecklers, and her growing base of fans across the country who liked both her bold progressive policy ideas about climate change and the economy, and her straightforward delivery of that message, often offered with a side of pop culture. Like President Trump, AOC is unafraid to be unfiltered and even at times factually imprecise, minus the crass personal insults and typos. While previous female candidates tended to don power suits and trot out their health-care PowerPoints at political club meetings, she opted for posts on Twitter and Instagram, showing her shyness about campaign door knocking, her mascara application, and her drink mixing while throwing in casual but cogent chatter about prescription drugs costs and demands for a higher minimum wage.
“People look at her going to work in that video and they see themselves,” Rep. Peter Welch, a progressive Democrat from Vermont, told me. “If I were to make a video that says, ‘This is me, relate to me,’ it wouldn’t work and I wouldn’t be comfortable with it.” (He is bald, septuagenarian, and white.) “But she says things clearly,” he went on. “She says there is a fiction up in government that we can’t do hard things.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s biography was unusual for someone challenging a senior incumbent in Congress. Born into a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, she moved to nearby Yorktown in 1992 for access to its better schools. Known then as Sandy, she was studious and, by her own description, nerdy, though of the teenage rom-com variety, a pulchritudinous geek who came in second in the microbiology category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, with a research project on the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of the nematode C. elegans. After high school, she attended Boston University, majoring in economics and international relations. She also ran the university’s Alianza Latina, a club focused on issues like student debt and economic inequality. Although after her election to Congress, AOC’s Instagram discovery tour of the dank passageways of the Hill and the funny swag bag that all new members get were massive hits that seemed to come out of nowhere, the terrain was not actually so unfamiliar to her. During college, she had interned for Senator Ted Kennedy, working on his immigration portfolio.
Her father’s death from lung cancer in 2008, during the depths of the national recession, was, she has often noted, a transformative event in her life, deeply paining her and sending her family into economic insecurity (he owned a small company and had not left his financial house in order), from which it would never fully emerge. After graduation, she returned to New York and started a small publishing venture through a local startup network, Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator, which charged some $195 per month for shared work space and business advice. “What Brook Avenue Press seeks to do is help develop and identify stories and literature in urban areas,” the then-twenty-two-year-old said of her startup, which produced positive children’s books set in the Bronx. “Rather than think of it as somewhere to run from, the Bronx is somewhere to invest,” she told the New York Daily News the following year.
The entrepreneurial stage of her life—during which she advocated for tax breaks for small businesses—is not one that Ocasio-Cortez often touts, preferring to focus on her work as a community organizer, but it did win her honors from the National Hispanic Institute, which named her its “social entrepreneur in residence.”
From there, her work life became intensely millennial and modern, and increasingly progressive, as she moved among a flurry of community-organizing jobs for nonprofit groups, while also helping her mother clean houses and taking on bartending gigs to support her and her brother and to fend off foreclosure of their Bronx home. She alternated between an Obamacare health plan, with a huge deductible, and no insurance at all, and was saddled with $25,000 of student loan debt.
Shortly after Trump’s victory in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez took two steps that would help define her political career. She and some friends piled into a car to drive to North Dakota, where she spent several weeks with indigenous activists fighting the construction of an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. “I felt so galvanized spiritually and morally by that experience,” she told me. “I felt ready to dedicate my whole self to work on social change.” She also labored as a field organizer for Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign, and became steeped in the language of Medicare for All, free college, a $15-per-hour minimum wage, and breaking up big banks. This platform would prove instrumental in her own congressional campaign two years later, in which she advocated for specific policy positions, unlike her opponent, the Democratic incumbent, who ran largely on his anti-Trump credibility.
Three staff members from the Sanders campaign—Saikat Chakrabarti, a Harvard grad who had worked on Wall Street and in tech startups; Corbin Trent, a food truck operator from Tennessee; and Alexandra Rojas, a community-college student from California at the time—started a political action committee called Brand New Congress in April 2016. “The original idea was to recruit four hundred people to run for Congress, all running together in a giant national campaign and with a single plan for economic rejuvenation and justice,” Chakrabarti told me. “We were looking for people who really led, whether that was in the workplace or in their community, and who had had chances to sell out but didn’t do it.”
The notion was to try to harness the Bernie energy and recruit congressional candidates from both parties who could reflect the views of the working class. “When you saw Sanders run, there was this moment where we could radically shift what the dynamics of the conversation could look like,” Rojas told me. “My generation will be less well off than my parents. I am seeing radical changes in our climate. I am seeing my rent skyrocketing. My experience is a lived one. I did not get to go to college and get a fancy Wall Street job, but there is an intuitive understanding that America can be so much more. We believe our country can rise to the occasion.”
BNC solicits recommendations from the public. “We’re looking for leaders who put people and policies before party loyalty—every time,” its website says. Ocasio-Cortez’s younger brother, Gabriel, sent in her name. “He let me know when he did it,” AOC confirmed. “But I didn’t think much about it. I thought, ‘I am a waitress.’ ”
The PAC received about eleven thousand nominations and dispatched a team of volunteers to research different districts in search of local community leaders: maybe a county teacher of the year who had bucked the system, or a water-plant worker who had blown the whistle on contamination. Team members would then call them up and ask if they would run. Of the fifteen candidates they recruited this way, AOC—the only one who would win—was of instant and special interest, said Rojas. “She was this superclear, incredibly talented communicator on issues we really cared about.”
Ocasio-Cortez was suddenly a candidate for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District, which includes the eastern part of the Bronx and portions of north-central Queens. “We are in a movement moment,” Rojas said, “which is why people like AOC, who look like us and are one of us, can succeed.”
While BNC’s political theory was meant to apply specifically to working-class, largely nonwhite candidates and voters, it would prove to have broader appeal—among young voters across the demographic spectrum who were feeling priced out of life, and voters with more privilege who themselves were on the rising edge of gentrification in formerly poor and working-class hubs. Similarly, the younger candidates were more inclined than the moderates who preceded them even ten years earlier to embrace some more progressive positions as a treatment plan for generational inequality.
Katie Hill put it pretty simply. “You have a younger generation that has come into power. That is why you are seeing this stuff,” she told me over a glass of wine in a Capitol Hill happy-hour chardonnay mill one summer night. “Overwhelmingly, most of us don’t have political backgrounds. We were mobilized because we realized things are fucked-up.”
Eventually, the three founders of Brand New Congress went off to form Justice Democrats, with no more pretense at bipartisanship. Instead, steeped in Sanders-heavy policy platforms, the new PAC focused on getting progressive Democrats to take on incumbents across the country and, ultimately, to transform the party into something that would be, in some sense, the political analog of the modern Republican Party, which had been transformed by the Tea Party movement that began during the Obama administration and was fully realized by Donald Trump—more partisan, more confrontational, and uninterested in compromise, preferring instead to lean into the policy positions of its base.
In AOC, the group found its perfect candidate. Ocasio-Cortez quit her bartending gig at Flats Fix in February 2018 to run. “It was a leap of faith,” she said as she gazed at a television behind us in a hallway where daytime talking heads were debating the rights of sex workers in her city. “I felt ready for this. It felt like, ‘Why not?’ ”
Her campaign was certainly scrappy and shoestring: she refused corporate money and shunned groups like EMILY’s List, which, one of its staff members told me, “she wrote off as an old-white-lady organization.” But it was not without an institutional framework. Justice Democrats provided a policy vision and unusually talented and well-connected volunteers and staff members who had cut their teeth on a federal campaign. Chakrabarti moved back to New York to become Ocasio-Cortez’s co–campaign manager, working with her on media training and brushing up her policy positions. (He went on to become her chief of staff, until his resignation in August 2019.)
Corbin Trent said Chakrabarti called him in February of 2018 and begged him for help. “He said they saw something special there, but I would have to come to New York,” Trent told me. He abandoned his food-truck business and left his wife and two little kids back in Tennessee to run communications, and moved in with Chakrabarti in the West Village, where he slept on the couch. (“If you’re going to sleep on a couch,” he said, “the West Village is the place to do it.”) Trent was responsible for securing a lot of the press hits and endorsements that built up AOC’s momentum, including an endorsement from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a liberal congressman who had already put his name behind her opponent, and later, a glowing profile in Vogue and with the Intercept. Meanwhile, Alexandra Rojas harnessed her considerable organizing know-how from her Sanders days to run the campaign’s phone banking and its all-important text-messaging effort.
A group of fundraising volunteers from across the country eventually descended on Queens and the Bronx like stealth army ants, focused on victory, all while Congressman Crowley repeatedly insisted to senior Democrats and campaign officials that there was nothing to see. He even skipped a planned debate, sending a well-meaning but feckless surrogate in his stead, misjudging Ocasio-Cortez’s threat to his incumbency despite the impressive number of signatures she received to get on the ballot.
While her campaign materials were put together on a small budget, they were polished and chic, and she drew from the city’s creative community for a digitally native campaign. One of her earliest supporters was Jake DeGroot, a lighting designer and activist who signed on to her campaign as digital-organizing director. AOC’s poster, inspired by the Cesar Chavez–era United Farm Workers of the 1960s, framed Ocasio-Cortez as a tough but glamorous working-class underdog. Only on the last day of the race did Democratic establishment officials in Washington begin to sound alarms. Too late: the massive turnout operation that materialized on primary day was for the challenger, not for Crowley.
“We had volunteers in every single polling location in the district,” Rojas recalled. “There were people from Iowa, people from Australia and California, who flew in to help us get out the vote. At three p.m., I was like, ‘There are so many people here!’ ”
Trent had been less sanguine. Again, as in so many races that depended on voters who often don’t come out for primaries, polls had undercounted who was going to show up. An internal poll taken by the AOC campaign a little over a month before primary day showed Ocasio-Cortez down 35 percentage points. “We had no idea whatsoever that we were going to win, and anyone who says they did is totally full of shit,” Trent said, because for Justice Democrats, losing was a way of life. “We had spent the last two years of our fucking lives facing loss after loss after loss.”
His wife and children had joined him in a pool hall to watch returns. But as he waited for inevitable defeat, the numbers came pouring in, all of them good. Ocasio-Cortez had not just won, but won decisively. “For like twenty minutes, it was the most amazing feeling I have ever had,” Trent said. “It’s a great moment for a field operator, because their work is done. But I was the comms guy, so my job had just begun.” The press was so unprepared for AOC’s victory, he said, that reporters did live shots from Mitt Romney’s headquarters in Utah, where he had just won his Senate primary.
The calls never stopped. “This is everything we had hoped for,” Rojas told me. “But I don’t think anyone could have expected the earthquake we saw with her race.” Her victory that June night sealed Ocasio-Cortez’s seat in Congress; a Republican challenger had zero shot in a heavily Democratic district in New York City. For her defeated opponent’s part, although he had just been more or less nationally humiliated, Crowley seemed to take the loss with cheer. After thanking his supporters at his (non)reelection party, he picked up a guitar and announced, “This is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” and launched into a not-all-that-bad rendition of “Born to Run.”
But in July, there began a short interregnum of unpleasantness. Revealing both her future Twitter trigger finger against opponents and her underrated political instincts, Ocasio-Cortez accused her defeated opponent of trying to stay in the race by refusing to remove his name from the Working Families Party line on the ballot for the general election. “.@repjoecrowley stated on live TV that he would absolutely support my candidacy,” she tweeted. “Instead, he’s stood me up for all 3 scheduled concession calls. Now, he’s mounting a 3rd party challenge against me and the Democratic Party.”
Crowley attributed the lack of call to her staff failing to follow up (believable to anyone who has tried to reach them) and said he had no intention of challenging her. But no matter what had led up to it, her tweet was a shrewd way for Ocasio-Cortez to gin up her base of small donors. And the conflict, a notably elbows-out move for a victor in a noncompetitive race, eventually melted like so much soft serve on a hot summer Bronx sidewalk as Crowley advanced to the work of cannabis lobbying back in the swamp he had just been expelled from.
Ocasio-Cortez’s outsized presence in the 116th Congress would soon force the party to confront its future writ large. Would the party focus on pulling in independent and disenchanted Republican voters with incremental policy propositions and traditional campaign mores? Or would it jettison that plan by focusing on younger and more liberal voters, and the vast array of other Americans who had previously been turned off by politics, with policy notions rooted in more socialist terrain? Could congressional Democrats pick and choose between these menus without the progressive left threatening them with primary fights or the conservative wing dragging down their ambitions? Speaker Pelosi repeatedly attempted to tamp down the narrative of this tension, but that would soon prove impossible.
During orientation week, as the incoming freshmen milled about the Capitol, I saw Ocasio-Cortez slipping by a group of reporters to canter up a flight of stairs. “Congresswoman-elect? Congresswoman-elect!” I called to her while speeding to catch up. She did not turn around. I was surprised and a tad confused.
I soon realized she had no idea I was talking to her, likely because no one had yet called her by that title.
When I finally caught up to her on the stairs, she turned around—perhaps wary of my stalker-like presence—and she finally stopped and smiled politely. Her eyes widened as I asked her what her favorite moment had been so far. “I was in a room with John Lewis and Maxine Waters today,” she said, slightly out of breath. “It dawned on me then. They’re real. They are human, and I am in the same room with them. It adds a dimensionality I could have never imagined.” Then she turned on her high heel and was gone.