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      Ocasio-Cortez Turns a New York Brawl into a National Democratic Proxy Battle

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      Sean Patrick Maloney is a Democratic Party stalwart who declares himself a “practical, mainstream guy.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a political outsider-turned-left-wing star with a powerful social media megaphone.Perhaps no two House Democrats better represent the dueling factions of a party at war with itself — over matters of ideology and institutions, how to amass power and, most of all, how to beat Republicans. Mr. Maloney, who represents a Hudson Valley-area district, is the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tasked with protecting incumbents and making him a pillar of the establishment. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the Bronx and Queens, has made it her mission to push that establishment to the left, one endorsement of a liberal challenger at a time.The two forces collided this week when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez handed her endorsement to Mr. Maloney’s primary opponent, Alessandra Biaggi, a left-leaning state senator with a political pedigree. It is often frowned upon for incumbents of the same party to back primary challengers, and it is especially unusual within a state’s delegation. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who toppled a Democratic incumbent herself in 2018, has never been one to abide by such rules, and her muscle and fund-raising savvy could be a major factor in the race.The move turned a contest already filled with powerful New Yorkers and divided loyalties into a messy national Democratic proxy battle. There are clear tensions on issues that have divided the moderate and left wings of the party, including public safety, Medicare for All and fund-raising tactics. Driving those disputes are more existential questions, like how to pursue political survival in a climate that appears increasingly catastrophic for the party in power.Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York at the Capitol in 2021. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images“It’s a fight between two Democrats: one is younger and dynamic and wants to make changes quickly,” said former Governor David Paterson, for whom Mr. Maloney once worked and who has remained neutral in the race. By contrast, he said, Mr. Maloney “is now emerging in the leadership of the House, and is thinking more about the entire party and how things will go in November this year.”The fight will play out in New York’s 17th District, which under new boundaries includes parts of wealthy Westchester County, outside New York City, and conservative Hudson Valley hamlets. The district was recently redrawn as part of a redistricting fight that left some Democrats seething at Mr. Maloney. It also left the 17th District more competitive — raising the stakes for a primary fight that may turn on which candidate voters think can hold the seat. Mike Lawler, a state assemblyman, is expected to be the Republican front-runner in the primary on Aug. 23.“We have an incredible opportunity to be able to win against Republicans in November by being bold on our positions for working people,” Ms. Biaggi said in an interview.But that may not happen with an Ocasio-Cortez endorsement, warned Suzanne Berger, the chairwoman of the Westchester County Democratic Committee, who is backing Mr. Maloney.“They misjudged the voters of New York-17 if they think that is helpful to winning in November, which is the main point,” she said. “Republicans will use that endorsement as a weapon in November.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez declined an interview request. Her spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, said that the district would be competitive regardless and that “with Roe and gun safety on voters’ minds, Senator Biaggi’s record makes her uniquely positioned to drive out enthusiastic voters in the midterms.”Ms. Biaggi and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez have been political allies since they both rose to prominence by defeating Democratic incumbents in 2018. Ms. Biaggi, 36, is the granddaughter of Mario Biaggi, who was a 10-term congressman from New York. Hillary Clinton, whose Chappaqua home is now in the district, helped lead Ms. Biaggi’s wedding ceremony. Mr. Maloney, 55, has his own Clinton connections. He worked in former President Bill Clinton’s White House as a staff secretary, and he recently marched with Mrs. Clinton in a Memorial Day parade in Chappaqua, according to a photo he posted on Twitter. Spokesmen for the Clintons had no comment on their plans to endorse in the race.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hugging Alessandra Biaggi in the Bronx on Election Day in 2020.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMr. Maloney, who calls himself a “pragmatic progressive who gets things done,” is regarded as the favorite in the race, though local party officials say both candidates have work to do in introducing themselves across a newly configured district. Ms. Biaggi, for her part, argued that Mr. Maloney had been too timid on issues like health care — she supports Medicare for All and said that “ideally private insurance would not be part of that.” She casts Mr. Maloney as too close to corporate interests.And, at a moment of overlapping national crises and frequent stalemate on Capitol Hill, where Democrats hold narrow majorities, she suggested that voters were in the mood for candidates who would “fight like hell for them.”When Mr. Maloney first arrived in Congress after flipping a Republican seat in 2012, he was unquestionably more of a centrist. But his allies now dismiss the idea that the congressman — New York’s first openly gay member of Congress who has long fought for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and supported climate proposals backed by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — is a moderate.In an interview, he said he believed “in mainstream policies that can get done right now, on things like protecting our kids from gun violence, protecting reproductive freedom and climate change.” (The Senate has stymied most of those priorities.)He noted several times that he had “nothing but respect” or “tremendous respect” for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, despite her endorsement of Ms. Biaggi.“I’m an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, and we have spoken about that — I speak to her all the time,” he said.But as of Thursday, he confirmed, they had not spoken since she raised the prospect last month that he should step aside as D.C.C.C. chairman, amid a battle over redistricting that threatened to tear the delegation apart. According to people in and around the delegation, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, there have not been efforts to mediate between the two representatives.Ms. Hitt, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s spokeswoman, said that they were “collegial despite their differences.”After the state’s high court struck down a congressional map drawn by Democrats and a new map was announced, Mr. Maloney declared that he would be running not in the redrawn version of his current 18th Congressional District but in the slightly safer 17th District. He lives there — and Ms. Biaggi does not, although she is planning to move to it — but the area is largely represented by Representative Mondaire Jones.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi of New York speaking outside Rikers Island prison last year in support of legislation aimed at reducing the prison population.Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesThe leader of the campaign committee entertaining a challenge to a fellow incumbent drew explosive backlash, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, citing a conflict of interest, suggested that Mr. Maloney should step down as chairman should he pursue such a challenge. Ultimately, Mr. Jones decided to run in a different district and a primary was averted, but some members still privately bristle at the episode.Asked about his message to disgruntled colleagues, Mr. Maloney acknowledged that he “could have done things better,” even as he stressed that the district he selected was only marginally safer for Democrats than the alternative.“I also thought there was a way for it to work out and avoid a primary between members and that’s just what we did,” he said.He also promised that, as chairman of the committee, his “heart” and his “focus” would be on protecting the Democratic majority even as he navigated his own race.At the same time, Mr. Maloney noted that he ended a policy that blacklisted consultants or political groups that backed candidates who ran against incumbents. The policy had been a point of contention between left-leaning members and the D.C.C.C.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has backed several challengers this year — one lost and one narrowly trails in a race that is headed to a recount — much to the annoyance of some Democrats.“New York’s post-redistricting fiasco is a clear demonstration of why a sitting member of Congress should not lead the political arm of the Democratic Party,” said Representative Kathleen Rice of New York. But she also seemed to criticize Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, complaining about “certain members with their own long history of challenging incumbents” who are stirring the pot.“When the stakes are this high, Democrats should be coming together to keep the majority, rather than promoting Dem-on-Dem violence,” she said.Asked about criticism that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is overly eager to take on her colleagues, Ms. Hitt said that the congresswoman believed that no one was entitled to re-election “by default.”Some nationally prominent House Democrats have rallied around Mr. Maloney, who is close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The list includes the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who said in an interview Thursday that she was supporting him.Some of the criticism Mr. Maloney is getting, she noted, comes with the job.“You’re never going to make everybody happy, and you’re judged on victory,” she said.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, called Mr. Maloney “a hard-working and well-respected member of Congress who has won multiple hotly contested elections,” and expressed confidence that voters “will once again send him back to Washington.”Asked if that was an endorsement, he said only that the comment spoke for itself. But it reflected an unmistakable sign of encouragement from party leadership.The primary is scheduled for August. But for all the drama around the contest, some Democrats in the delegation and beyond are already consumed by bigger problems amid an ever-worsening political climate.“When you’re facing the possibility of a tornado,” said former Representative Steve Israel, a former D.C.C.C. chairman, “the angry breezes don’t really matter.” More

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      How Much Damage Have Marjorie Taylor Greene and the ‘Bullies’ Done to the G.O.P.?

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      Curious to know how the two more extreme wings of the Democrats and Republicans in the House differ, I asked a high-ranking Republican staff member with decades of government experience — who requested anonymity in order to speak openly — for his take:They are different in that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad” seem to me to be more “idealist.” They actually do want to legislate/accomplish the very far-left social ideas they propose. They are willing to cause Pelosi headaches, but they have shown they are not going to go so far as to jeopardize the government (operations) and safety net that so many families depend on from a working government.On the other hand, the staff member continued,I hate to use a loaded word here but I can’t think of another one, the “MAGA Caucus” members operate more like bullies — legislative bullies. If they have the opportunity, they will gladly hold bills/government funding hostage for the sake of populism and social media. They would take pride in “shooting the hostage” as that would be very popular with their tribal base and their social media.Both blocs have thrived in an era of social media and small-dollar funding, skilled in winning publicity, often shaping public perceptions of partisan competition on Capitol Hill. In this respect, the Squad and the MAGA caucus have come to epitomize partisan hostility, the refusal of the parties to cooperate, and, more broadly, the intense political polarization that afflicts America today.The Squad and the MAGA caucus are best known for their most visible members, Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.Both factions have caused major headaches for their respective party leaders.Centrist Democrats contend — citing poll data from USA Today Ipsos, Pew Research, a FiveThirtyEight polling summary and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Survey — that support from members of the Squad and their allies for defunding the police has undermined the re-election chances of moderate House Democrats running in purple districts.The participation of members of the MAGA caucus in events linked to white supremacists have increased the vulnerability of the Republican Party to charges of racism, alienating moderate suburban voters.But these are hardly equivalent in the first place, and there are other, major dissimilarities.John Lawrence, who retired in 2013 as chief of staff for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, took a position to my Republican informant’s in his email contrasting the two blocs:The MAGA people seem far more focused on personal celebrity and staking out extremist stances whereas the Squad, while pushing the policy envelope to some extent, remain reliable party members.The difference, Lawrence argued,comes from a fundamental distinction between the parties at this point in history: Democrats approach government as an agent of making public policy across a wide swath of subjects whereas Republicans — and the MAGA people are the extreme example of this — not only have a very hostile view of government but embrace inaction (and therefore obstruction), especially at the national level.Here are some examples that illuminate the differences to which the political veterans I spoke to were referring.In a widely publicized struggle that continued for over two months in the fall of 2021, the Squad, along with the House Progressive Caucus, held the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a centerpiece of the Biden agenda, hostage in order to force House Democrats to pass a separate but more controversial measure, the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill (for spending on education, the environment, health care and in other areas).The tactic worked — in part. On Nov. 15, the House and Senate both voted to enact, and send to President Biden, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — with the support of a majority of the Progressive Caucus. Four days later, the House approved the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill by a slim vote (220-213). Although House Democratic leaders kept their promise to pass the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill, it remains stalled in the Senate as negotiations between the administration and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who at times allies himself with the Republican Party, have failed to bear fruit.Compare that lengthy struggle, to which the Squad lent its strength, to the more frivolous votes cast by members of the Republican MAGA caucus — not a formal organization in the manner of the Progressive Caucus but a loose collection of representatives on the hard right.On May 18, the House voted 414-9 to pass the Access to Baby Formula Act, which would authorize the Department of Agriculture “to waive certain requirements so that vulnerable families can continue purchasing safe infant formula with their WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).”Who cast the nine votes against the infant formula bill? The core of the MAGA caucus: House Republican Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas.Or take the House vote last year to fast-track visas for Afghans who provided crucial assistance to the U.S. military, which went 407-16. “Those Afghans knew the risk that their service posed to them and their families, and yet they signed up to help because they believed that we would have their back,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, told the House. “They have earned a path to safety.”Who cast the 16 no votes? Five of the nine who voted against the baby formula bill — Biggs, Boebert, Gosar, Greene and Roy, plus Mo Brooks, Scott DesJarlais, Jeff Duncan, Bob Good, Kevin Hern, Jody Hice, Barry Moore, Scott Perry, Bill Posey and Matt Rosendale.Philip Bump, a Washington Post reporter, has covered what he calls the “Nay caucus,” writing “The emerging far-right ‘no’ caucus in the House” on March 19, 2021; “What’s the unifying force behind the House’s far-right ‘nay’ caucus?” on June 16, 2021; and “The House Republican ‘no’ caucus is at it again” on April 6, 2022.In his most recent article, Bump wrote:Perhaps the best description of this group is that it constitutes a highly pro-Trump, deeply conservative and often individualistic subset of a very pro-Trump, very conservative and very individualistic Republican caucus. It is a group that includes a number of legislators who go out of their way to draw attention to themselves; one way to do so is to oppose overwhelmingly popular measures.Bump ranked members of this caucus on the basis of voting no on a roll-callin which no more than a tenth of the House cast a vote in opposition. The top ten were Massie, who cast 99 such votes, Roy 93, Biggs 85, Greene 79, Ralph Norman 73, Good 57, Rosendale 56, Boebert 56, Matt Gaetz 51 and Perry 49.Members of the MAGA caucus have been sharply critical of the Squad, to put it mildly. In November 2021, Gosar posted an animated video in which, as CNN put it, he is “portrayed as a cartoon anime-type hero and is seen attacking a giant with Ocasio-Cortez’s face with a sword from behind. The giant can then be seen crumbling to the ground.”Gosar issued a statement defending the video, which shows the cartoon image of himself flying by jetpack to slay the giant Ocasio-Cortez: “The cartoon depicts the symbolic nature of a battle between lawful and unlawful policies and in no way intended to be a targeted attack against Representative Cortez,” it says, before adding, “It is a symbolic cartoon. It is not real life. Congressman Gosar cannot fly.”Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, outlined in an email the differences between the Squad and the MAGA caucus:There are a lot of ways that lawmakers can be extreme. They can be extremist in their policy preferences, extremist in their preferred tactics, and extremist in their political messaging. When it comes to policy, it isn’t exactly clear what folks like Greene and Gosar want — they aren’t exactly policy wonks. Members of the Squad have done more to communicate their policy priorities — e.g., on issues like policing and climate change — and there, what they want is generally more liberal than what some (perhaps many) in the party are likely to support.In terms of political messaging, Rubin argued, “it is undeniable that Greene and Gosar have done more to deviate from normal politics — likening vaccination requirements to Nazi rule or running violent ad campaigns — than anything ever said by any member of the Squad.”I asked Rubin which group has done more damage to its own party:If/when the Democrats lose big in the midterms, I think it likely that the Squad will face a lot of criticism for pushing progressive policies that are not sufficiently popular with voters (police reform) over those that have greater public support (expanding Medicare, for example).But, Rubin contended, Biden will also bear responsibility if Democrats suffer badly in November:In this day and age, it is unreasonable to expect that you can be an FDR-figure without the kind of sizable and stable majorities in Congress he benefited from. The upshot of being an experienced politicians is that you should anticipate this and plan accordingly.Conversely, Rubin continued:There is little evidence that Republicans like Gosar and Greene are doing any short-term damage to the Republican Party — long-term damage is less clear. And one way we can tell is that Republican leaders (and voters) wasted no time getting rid of the one member whose conduct wasn’t burnishing the party’s brand: Madison Cawthorne. The fact that this hasn’t happened to Greene or Gosar or other MAGAish members suggests they aren’t perceived to be enough of a problem.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argued in an email that extremists can in fact play a constructive role in legislative proceedings:While not defending the excesses and demagoguery that some of the members you list have engaged in, a couple examples come to mind:Massie has strenuously objected to the continued use of proxy voting in Congress two+ years into the pandemic as undermining the traditions and character of the institution. For those of us who have long worried about the huge share of members who are only in Washington from Tuesday to Thursday, are such perspectives out of bounds?Was there any value in Massie’s insistence on holding public debate before Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, a stance that drew harsh denunciation from President Trump himself?Lee acknowledged:Members who incite violence against other members or the institution cannot be countenanced. But I would encourage a tolerant attitude toward legitimately elected representatives, even those who hold views far outside the mainstream. It’s always worth considering what their constituents see in them and what, if anything, they contribute to debate. Such members do make Congress a more fully representative body.Michael B. Levy, who served as chief of staff to former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, pointed out, “There are many similarities in that both groups live and die by their primaries because their districts are one-party districts and neither has to worry much about the median voter in their states.”Beyond that, Levy continued, there are significant differences: “The Squad’s agenda is a basic international social democratic left agenda which joins an expanding social welfare state to an expanding realm of cultural liberalism and identity politics.”The Squad, Levy wrote, “while willing to attack members of their own party and support candidates in primaries running against incumbents in their own party, continues to exhibit loyalty to basic democratic norms in the system at large.”In contrast, Levy argued, “The MAGA caucus has a less coherent ideology, even if it has a very distinct angry populist tone.” That may be temporary, Levy suggested,as more and more intellectuals try to create a type of coherent “integralist” ideology joining protectionism, cultural and religious traditionalism, and an isolationist but nationalist foreign policy. Arguably theirs is also a variant of identity politics, but that is less clearly articulated. As best I can tell, they do not have a coherent approach to economic policy or the welfare state.Two scholars who have been highly critical of developments in the Republican Party, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, co-authors of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” were both far more critical of the MAGA caucus than of the Squad.Mann was adamant in his email:The MAGA Caucus is antidemocratic, authoritarian, and completely divorced from reality and truth. The Squad embraces left views well within the democratic spectrum. What’s striking about the MAGA Caucus is that they are closer to the Republican mainstream these days, given the reticence of Republican officeholders to challenge Trump. We worry about the future of American democracy because the entire Republican Party has gone AWOL. The crazy extremists have taken over one of our two major parties.The MAGA group, Ornstein wrote by email, is composed ofthe true believers, who think Trump won, that there is rampant voter fraud, the country needs a caudillo, we have to crack down on trans people, critical race theory is an evil sweeping the country and more. The Squad is certainly on the left end of the party, but they do not have authoritarian tendencies and views.Ocasio-Cortez, Ornstein wrote, “is smart, capable, and has handled her five minutes of questioning in committees like a master.”William Galston, a senior fellow at Brooking and a co-author with Elaine Kamarck, also of Brookings, of “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy,” wrote by email:How does one measure “extreme”? By two metrics — detachment from reality and threats to the democratic process — the nod goes to the MAGA crowd over the Squad, whose extremism is only in the realm of policy. I could argue that the Squad’s policy stances — defund the police, abolish ICE, institute a Green New Deal — have done more damage to the Democratic Party than the MAGA crowd has to the Republicans. President Biden has been forced to back away from these policies, while Republicans sail along unscathed. By refusing to criticize — let alone break from — the ultra-MAGA representatives, Donald Trump has set the tone for his party. A majority of rank-and-file Democrats disagree with the Squad’s position. There’s no evidence that the Republican grassroots is troubled by the extremism in their own ranks.I asked Galston what the implications were of Marjorie Taylor Greene winning renomination on May 24 with 69.5 percent of the primary vote.He replied:Trumpists hold a strong majority within the Republican Party, and in many districts the battle is to be seen as the Trumpiest Republican candidate. This is especially true in deep-red districts where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. A similar dynamic is at work in deep-blue districts, where the most left-leaning candidate often has the advantage. Candidates like these rarely succeed in swing districts, where shifts among moderate and independent voters determine general election winners. In both parties, there has been a swing away from candidates who care about the governance process, and toward candidates whose skills are oratorical rather than legislative. I could hypothesize that in an era of hyperpolarization in which gridlock is the default option, the preference for talkers over doers may be oddly rational.They may be talkers rather than doers, but if, as currently expected, Republicans win control of the House on Nov. 8, 2022, the MAGA faction will be positioned to wield real power.Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, explained in an email that there has beenchange in lawmaking that amplifies the extremes of majority parties. In previous generations, extreme progressives or conservatives were more easily excluded from rooms where policy and procedural decisions were made. Either committee leaders would craft deals away from their party caucuses or leaders had an easier time finding moderates in the other party to craft solutions that the extreme wings of their caucus might oppose.In contrast, Huder wrote:Today’s partisan-cohort legislative style inherently incorporates more extreme voices. Decisions are made within the caucus or negotiated with various caucus factions through leadership offices. Put simply, the influence of extreme wings of each party are more intimately woven into legislative negotiations. And as a result, intense partisan warfare is more common.In this environment, Huder continued, “undeniably, their influence on congressional decision making has grown. They don’t get what they want all the time, but many congressional fights and tactics can be explained by the influence of the more extreme wings of each party.”Recent history suggests that the MAGA caucus and the overlapping but larger Freedom Caucus have Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican minority leader who is favored to become speaker of the House if his party takes control, firmly in their grip. The Freedom Caucus played a key role in forcing Speaker John Boehner out of office in 2015 and a central role in pushing Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, to retire three years later.“The Freedom Caucus has become the political home of right-wing troublemakers who often embarrass and even defy the party leadership,” Ed Kilgore wrote in the Intelligencer section of New York magazine. “A group of experienced ideological extortionists answering to gangster leadership of Trump is going to be hard to handle for the poor schmoes trying to keep the G.O.P. from falling into a moral and political abyss.”If McCarthy takes the speaker’s gavel next year, he will be in the unenviable position of constantly addressing the demands of a body of legislators who at any moment could turn on him and cut him off at the knees.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      California Sends Democrats and the Nation a Message on Crime

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      LOS ANGELES — Voters in California delivered a stark warning to the Democratic Party on Tuesday about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022, as a Republican-turned-Democrat campaigning as a crime-fighter vaulted into a runoff in the mayoral primary in Los Angeles and a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco was recalled in a landslide.The two results made vivid the depths of voter frustration over rising crime and rampant homelessness in even the most progressive corners of the country — and are the latest signs of a restless Democratic electorate that was promised a return to normalcy under President Biden and yet remains unsatisfied with the nation’s state of affairs.“People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood,” said Garry South, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist. “It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”The West Coast contests were being monitored closely by strategists and leaders in both parties around the country, as Democrats seek to hold together a fractious and diverse political coalition that can be divided both by race and ideology over criminal justice.In Los Angeles, Rick Caruso, a billionaire luxury mall developer, spent nearly $41 million telling voters how he would restore order in the city, vowing to add 1,500 officers to the police department and promoting the endorsement of William J. Bratton, the former police chief famous for his broken-windows policy. The race now heads to a November runoff. Mr. Caruso will face Representative Karen Bass, the Democratic former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Mr. Caruso had about 42 percent of the vote and Ms. Bass had around 37 percent early Wednesday morning.In San Francisco, about 60 percent of voters recalled Chesa Boudin, a former public defender who became district attorney in 2019 in a huge win for the progressive left. He promised then that “the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of the 1990s and early 2000s are on their way out.” Instead, he is.Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco district attorney, making final campaign appearances on Tuesday.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThe elections on Tuesday showed the extent to which the political winds have shifted even in Democratic cities in the two years since George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. The initial rally cry on the left then — “defund the police” — has since become so politically toxic that it is now more often used by Republicans as an epithet than by Democrats as an earnest policy proposal. And the crusading energy to overhaul policing in the face of rising crime has waned.For Democrats, the issue of crime and disorder threatens to drive a wedge between some of the party’s core constituencies, as some voters demand action on racial and systemic disparities while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods.“People walking the streets, in many cases, feel themselves in danger, and that’s got to be dealt with,” said Willie Brown, a Democrat who is the former mayor of San Francisco.But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats do not want to talk about “what cops do” for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending “A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is,” he said dismissively of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the influential progressive.In a sign of how crime can divide the party in unusual ways, public and internal polling showed how the crime-and-homelessness campaign of Mr. Caruso, who is white, helped him make inroads with a large swath of Black men, even as he ran against Ms. Bass, who is Black. In one May survey, Mr. Caruso was performing more than 30 percentage points better among Black men than women.Mr. Caruso found traction in the heavily Democratic city despite being a longtime Republican who then became an independent and only joined the Democratic Party just before running for office. He ran a campaign promising to “clean up” the city and hailed Tuesday’s results as “a great awakening.”Jefrey Pollock, a pollster for Mr. Caruso, said the results should be a take-heed moment for the party.“If the Democratic primary electorate is showing a shift toward the middle on police and crime issues, then it is an even larger concern when thinking about the November general elections,” said Mr. Pollock, who also works for at-risk Democratic congressional candidates in other states.Turnout was low on Tuesday across California. And there is always a risk of over-interpreting local races where distinctly local dynamics are often at play. Mr. Caruso’s vast financial advantage — he outspent Ms. Bass by more than 10-to-1 — is not replicable in most races, and he still faces a fierce fight in the fall.Steve Soboroff, a Los Angeles police commissioner who himself ran for mayor in 2001 and endorsed Ms. Bass this year, was unimpressed by Mr. Caruso’s “basic guttural knee-jerk messages” on crime and his final showing, given his vast spending.“Caruso hit a glass ceiling made of Waterford crystal,” he said.In her own election night speech, Ms. Bass referenced the tilted financial playing field. “All of us stood strong against an onslaught,” she said.Election workers wait for voters at the Avalon Carver Community Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Pollock noted that vulnerable congressional Democrats are already hearing about crime back home and racing to show how they differ with the “progressive trends on handling crime.” In Washington, House Democrats boosted funding and grants for local and state law enforcement by more than $500 million in this year’s appropriations package, delivering Democratic lawmakers a talking point to rebuff “defund” attacks from Republicans.And at the White House, Mr. Biden has made a point of outright rejecting the most severe rhetoric embraced by the activist left.“The answer is not to defund the police,” Mr. Biden said in February when he visited New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams, who won in 2021 primarily on a crime-fighting message, has been held up as an example of how to approach the issue.Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, met privately with Mr. Adams this spring in part to strategize on approaches to public safety. “He was empathetic to the plight and the issue that we’re all facing,” Frank Carone, Mr. Adams’s chief of staff, said of Mr. Klain.The extent to which crime is actually up depends on the category being measured and the particular jurisdiction. But strategists in both parties said that whatever the data shows, there is a widespread sense that daily life in big-city America is no longer as safe as it once was.“There are voters in the suburbs and exurbs all across this country — they’re seeing what’s happening in cities,” said Dan Conston, who heads the leading super PAC for House Republicans. “They’re both aghast and concerned for their communities.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Endorses Nina Turner for Ohio House Seat

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      Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the nation’s most prominent left-wing officials, endorsed Nina Turner’s congressional bid in the final hours of a divisive Ohio contest that has increasingly attracted national Democratic attention. Ms. Turner, a former state senator who was a co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is challenging Representative Shontel Brown from the left in Tuesday’s primary election, a rematch after Ms. Brown won a bitterly fought special election last year in what was widely seen as a victory for the institutional Democratic Party.“Nina is exactly the kind of progressive leader we need more of in Congress,” read a fund-raising email from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s team that was released widely Monday evening, on the eve of the primary, and was first reported by The New York Times. “She will be a powerful voice for policies that will make a meaningful difference in the lives of working people across this country — like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, and a Green New Deal.”For her part, Ms. Brown has been endorsed by President Biden and has campaigned in recent days with high-ranking party officials including Representatives James E. Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries.“Shontel Brown is about results, not insults,” Mr. Jeffries said in a video. “She is about bringing people together, not tearing folks apart.”Ms. Brown was also endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s political arm, a dynamic that prompted left-wing backlash in some corners and debate about the group’s endorsement process on Capitol Hill, Punchbowl News reported Monday morning.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Ms. Brown are both members of the caucus. Mr. Sanders, another member of the caucus, has also backed Ms. Turner. Both he and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez supported her in her previous primary.Until recently, the latest battle for the Cleveland-area congressional district largely flew under the national radar in comparison to last summer’s high-energy, high-profile and highly polarizing contest, and it is not clear how many voters have tuned into what may be a low-turnout race.“Together we will change what is possible in our political system,” Ms. Turner wrote on Twitter in promoting Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement. “Thank you, sister.” More

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      in Elections

      What Rashida Tlaib Represents

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last May, following protests in East Jerusalem over planned evictions of Palestinians, Hamas started firing rockets toward Tel Aviv, and Israeli airstrikes pounded residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after, a group of nine Democratic lawmakers, all longstanding Israel supporters, took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to reaffirm the country’s right to defend itself. “We have a duty as Americans to stand by the side of Israel in the face of attacks from terrorists,” Elaine Luria, a representative from Virginia, said, “who again, have the same goal in mind: to kill Jews.”Later that evening, about a dozen other Democrats spoke as well — to question the justice of funneling almost $4 billion a year to a country that was in the midst of bombing civilians. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive?” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, said. “Do we believe that? And, if so, we have a responsibility to that as well.”The speeches were a rare occasion when Palestinian rights have been addressed at such length on the House floor. They were introduced by Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. But the driving message of the session came from Rashida Tlaib, the 45-year-old second-term congresswoman from Detroit, who, according to several people familiar with the discussions, played a significant role in making the speeches happen. “How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter?” Tlaib said in her own remarks, fighting back tears.Tlaib is the only Palestinian American now serving in the House of Representatives, and the first with family currently living in the West Bank, whose three million inhabitants’ lives are intimately shaped by American support for Israel. As the May fighting intensified, colleagues approached Tlaib to ask if her family was safe. “It’s a voice that hasn’t been heard before,” Betty McCollum, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, told me.Tlaib has been criticized, sometimes viciously, by Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats for calling Israel an “apartheid regime,” and for her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to end military occupation by exerting economic pressure on Israel. She has been called anti-Semitic for her criticism of Israeli policies, and has become a favored quarry of Fox News. Tony Paris, a close friend and former colleague of Tlaib’s, told me that in conversations with some of his relatives, conservative Democrats, he has “tiptoed around the Rashida thing.”But Tlaib’s arrival on the national stage has also coincided with an opening, albeit a small one, within the Democratic Party to challenge the United States’ Israel policy. The Palestinian cause has become a significant part of the politics of the American left at the same time that the left has gained a legible footing on the national stage. Tlaib, a democratic socialist who is if anything more outspoken on domestic issues than she is on the Palestinian cause, has found herself at the center of this turn. She appeared in a traditional Palestinian dress made by her mother during her swearing in, sometimes wears a kaffiyeh (symbolically tied to the Palestinian resistance) on the House floor and speaks often about her grandmother in the West Bank. Rebecca Abou-Chedid, a lawyer and longtime Arab American activist, told me that the simple fact of Tlaib’s presence on the Hill means that “we are now actual people to them.”Yet Tlaib is wary of adopting the role of the only Palestinian voice in the room. “I feel like no one wants to see me as anyone but Palestinian,” she told me. “I’m a mother, I’m a woman, I have gone through a lot being the daughter of two immigrants in the United States. I’m also the big sister of 13 younger siblings. I’m also a neighbor in a predominantly Black city.”Tlaib’s pitch is that the roads to a fairer Israel policy and to fix the problems that plague her district — poverty, water access, pollution — are not so different. She didn’t run for Congress with a strategic plan to shift the Israeli-Palestinian debate, or even a coherent vision to do so. Sometimes she even seemed to equivocate. “We need to be not choosing a side,” she told The Washington Post during her 2018 campaign. But over her three years in Washington, Tlaib’s argument has sharpened: If the United States cares about democratic values, then upholding Palestinian rights is inherently American.I first met Tlaib last summer at a cafe in the Midtown neighborhood of Detroit, a gentrifying area of dive bars and boutiques. Two days of thunderstorms had left 850,000 people without power, and several restaurants were still closed. Tlaib was in a white summer dress and sneakers (“My mother hates when I wear them”); a congressional pin hung around her neck. I had ambitiously ordered a cinnamon roll, and as we sat down, Tlaib, who had gotten a coffee, eyed it and brought me a fork and napkins. “I’m such a mom,” she said. Shortly after they arrived in Washington, Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota, gave bracelets to fellow members of “the Squad”: the young, left-leaning congress members of color that at the time included Tlaib, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, all of whom were elected in 2018. Omar had Tlaib’s inscribed “Mama Bear.”Tlaib grew up caring for her seven brothers and six sisters, balancing diapers with homework. Her father, Harbi Elabed, was born in East Jerusalem, and her mother, Fatima, grew up in Beit Ur al-Fouqa, a village in the West Bank. They arrived in Detroit shortly before Tlaib was born, in 1976, as the city was reeling from years of deindustrialization and redlining and the deadly unrest of 1967. Capital had fled in search of cheap labor, as had white residents, leaving the city majority Black.Michigan’s 13th District, which Tlaib represents, cuts through most of working-class Detroit before veering abruptly west into slices of three other cities: Dearborn Heights, Romulus and Wayne. It is the second-poorest district in the country. Tlaib, who grew up relying on food assistance, came to Congress at a time when more than half its members were millionaires. She recalls voicing her frustrations about finding an affordable place in Washington to a freshman colleague, who nonchalantly mentioned that he’d bought an apartment nearby. “That’s like $800,000, isn’t it?” she said in amazement.Tlaib’s father, who died in 2017, was an assembly-line worker at the Ford Motor Company and a United Auto Workers member. They had a difficult relationship, but she credits him with introducing her to politics. When she turned 18, instead of wishing her a happy birthday, he told her to register to vote. “I think it’s because maybe he knew it’s a privilege, because he didn’t have that opportunity anywhere else,” she told me.After law school, she worked at a nonprofit serving the Arab American community, then moved to the Statehouse as a staff member. In 2008, she won an eight-way primary race to become a state representative — a surprise to her father, who was skeptical Americans would elect an Arab after 9/11. (Soon after the attacks, like many Muslims, Tlaib’s parents were interrogated for hours by F.B.I. agents about their travel and whom they knew among potential suspects on the agency’s radar, according to Tlaib.) In office, she developed a reputation for taking matters into her own hands. When plumes of black dust appeared over the Detroit River, in 2013, she and a few environmental activists drove to the river’s edge, marched past a “No Trespassing” sign and crossed old train tracks to the source: an industrial site where petroleum coke was piled in 40-foot-high black dunes. Tlaib scooped the substance into Ziploc bags and sent it off to a lab. A storage company was stockpiling the petcoke — prolonged exposure to which at high concentrations can cause lung disease — without a city permit. For weeks, Tlaib held up a bag of the residue in interviews, and the company was later ordered to remove the piles. A building in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, which Tlaib represents — the second poorest in the country.Dave JordanoIn 2017, John Conyers, Detroit’s longtime congressman, resigned following a sexual-harassment scandal, opening up a House seat in the city for the first time in 52 years. Many residents believed the seat should go to another Black person, and the mayor and the Wayne County executive endorsed Tlaib’s primary rival, Brenda Jones, the City Council president at the time, who is Black. But Tlaib won the primary against Jones the following August, and with it, the near guarantee of winning the general election.When she and the Somalia-born Omar were elected that November, they became the first Muslim women in the House. “I guess I was naïve,” Tlaib told me, “in not understanding how bipartisan Islamophobia is in Congress.” It was the subtle things, she said: colleagues shocked to know that most American Muslims are Black, or stereotypes of Muslim women being submissive. One colleague approached Omar and touched her hijab. Besides ignorance, Tlaib said, “I think there’s a tremendous amount of fear.”Her election also made her the third Palestinian American in the House after Justin Amash, a Republican representative from Michigan, and John E. Sununu, a Republican representative from New Hampshire. Amash at times bucked his party, which he left before exiting Congress in 2021, on Israel. In 2014, he voted against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, which has been significantly financed by the United States since it was established in 2011. Amash, a libertarian, explained his opposition on the grounds of government spending. Tlaib’s views, by contrast, are deeply and openly personal. She grew up hearing stories of family members being forced out of their homes. At age 12, she visited the West Bank and saw for herself the walls and checkpoints.Still, foreign policy had hardly come up in her years as state representative. Shortly after her bid for Congress, Steve Tobocman, a former state representative for whom she worked early in her career, sat down with her. The two had discussed the conflict in the past, but now Tobocman, who was working on her campaign, wanted to further understand her views.Tlaib, he recalls, offered few specifics for a policy agenda, but told him about playing with children of Israeli settlers when she visited her grandmother, and recognizing the humanity of people on both sides. Ultimately, she told him, her position on the conflict would be driven by values of equality, peace and justice. She reminded Tobocman of Barbara Lee, the California Democratic congresswoman who cast the sole vote against the authorization of force in Afghanistan in 2001, quoting in her floor speech a clergy member’s warning to “not become the evil we deplore.”“I said, ‘You aspire to be like Barbara Lee,’” Tobocman told me. “And she said, ‘Absolutely.’”In the fall of 1973, shortly before Tlaib’s parents arrived in Michigan, almost 3,000 Arab American U.A.W. members marched to the U.A.W. Dearborn office and demanded that the local union liquidate about $300,000 in bonds it had purchased from the State of Israel with money collected from union dues. At another protest, workers waved signs that read: “Jewish People Yes, Zionism No.” The U.A.W. later liquidated some Israeli bonds.Only recently had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fully entered American politics. In 1967, after a six-day war with its Arab neighbors, Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; swaths of Palestinian land were now under Israeli control, and so were one million additional Palestinians. To American leaders, Israel proved itself a capable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in Egypt and Syria. By 1976, Israel had become the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid.Around the same time, James Zogby, who is now president of the Arab American Institute, helped found the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, part of a nascent Palestinian rights movement that had a few allies in the Capitol. But its efforts were dwarfed by those of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded over a decade earlier, which helped form pro-Israel political action committees that fund-raised for both parties. Israel also successfully framed the Middle East conflict for American audiences as a battle between the West and Soviet-sponsored terrorism. In 1988, Zogby, who advised Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign that year, was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention. He tried to persuade the party’s leadership to include language about the “legitimate rights of Palestinian people” in the party platform, but failed. “Palestinian became the prefix for the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism,’” Zogby told me. “You couldn’t say one without the other.”Since then, the question of U.S. aid to Israel, in the words of Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has remained “sacrosanct.” Barack Obama committed the United States to an additional $33 billion in military aid, even as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, brazenly waded into American politics on the side of the Republican Party and presided over Israeli politics’ lurch to the right. Israel legitimized settlement expansion despite international condemnation and, in 2018, passed a controversial “nation-state” law that in part affirms that only Jewish people have the “right to national self-determination.”But beneath the unbroken surface of U.S. policy, the consensus has begun to slip. According to Gallup polling, Americans’ views of the conflict have changed significantly since 2013, with sympathy for the Israelis falling slightly and sympathy for the Palestinians more than doubling. The shift has overwhelmingly been on account of Democrats; while Republican opinion has changed little, Democrats have gone from sympathizing more with Israel by a margin of 30 points in 2002 to being more or less evenly split today.The beginning of this shift roughly coincides with the resumption of the active conflict in 2014, when Israel launched a major military operation in the Gaza Strip after the kidnapping and murder of several Israeli teenagers by the Hamas militant organization. Social media was flooded with testimonials and videos of Israeli airstrikes, which killed nearly 1,500 Palestinian civilians (six Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas rockets).The American Jewish community, which is broadly Democratic, has meanwhile begun to fracture in its support for Israel. According to a recent poll from the Jewish Electorate Institute, 43 percent of Jewish voters under 40 say that Israeli treatment of Palestinians is comparable to racism in the United States, versus 27 percent of those over 64. And pro-Palestinian activists have more successfully integrated their cause with the last decades’ currents of American activism, most notably marching alongside Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, while halfway around the world, Palestinians tweeted tactical advice (“Don’t keep much distance from the Police, if you’re close to them they can’t tear gas”).Although most Democratic lawmakers continue to side with Israel when the conflict finds its way into Congress, a handful have begun to reflect the shifting sympathies of the party’s base. In 2017, McCollum introduced the first piece of legislation to directly support Palestinian rights, a bill that would have restricted U.S. aid from being used to detain Palestinian children in military prisons. The bill never came up for a vote, but it garnered 30 co-sponsors. “It’s a bit of new space that might be cracking open,” says Brad Parker, a senior policy adviser for Defense for Children International — Palestine. He added, “We’re trying to force it open.”In interviews, Tlaib speaks about the occupied Palestinian territories in the context of Detroit, pointing to issues of water access in both, comparing their patterns of segregation and poverty. “I don’t separate them,” Tlaib told me. Both places have “what I call ‘othering’ politics,” she said, “or feeling like government or systems are making us feel ‘less than.”’In 2013, Detroit entered the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. It came under emergency management, which granted a governor-appointed trustee, a bankruptcy lawyer from the Jones Day law firm, authority to overhaul spending on city services. At the time, the city’s unemployment rate hovered around 15 percent, and more than a third of the population was living under the poverty line. Widespread power outages followed; people opened their faucets to find them dry. Today, a quarter of the city’s population is unemployed. In office, Tlaib has been more focused on the affairs of her district than of the Middle East, including persuading the House to pass a national moratorium on utility shut-offs when the pandemic started, as well as pushing legislation to replace lead water pipes. But from her first days in office, it was Tlaib’s positions on Israel that attracted both attention and criticism.In January 2019, on the day that Tlaib and Omar were sworn in, Senate Republicans added language to a bipartisan bill reauthorizing aid to Israel that affirmed state and local governments’ right to sever ties with companies that boycotted or divested from the country. This was a nod to the more than two dozen state legislatures that already had laws responding to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Tlaib is a member, endorsed B.D.S. in 2017, and both Tlaib and Omar had voiced support for the movement. In response to the Republicans’ bill, a version of which was previously introduced in 2017, Tlaib tweeted that the sponsors “forgot what country they represent,” which critics charged was perpetuating an anti-Semitic trope accusing Jews of dual loyalty.Tlaib’s timing couldn’t have been worse: The Democrats had recently taken control of the House, and Republicans had already zeroed in on the Squad’s left-wing politics. “I don’t see much hope for changing where Tlaib and Omar are, but there is a battle in the Democratic Party,” Norm Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota who now presides over the Republican Jewish Coalition, said at the time. House Democrats “will have to make choices about whether they’ll quiet those voices or whether they’ll remain quiet.”Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, admonished Democratic leadership for not “taking action” against the anti-Israel stance of Tlaib and Omar, to which Omar tweeted in reply, “It’s all about the Benjamins” — $100 bills. The ensuing maelstrom defined Tlaib’s career for the next several months. Tlaib came to the defense of Omar (who apologized the next day) even as Democratic leaders issued a statement to condemn Omar for anti-Semitic remarks. The party was already sharply divided on B.D.S.; Speaker Nancy Pelosi described it as a “dangerous” ideology “masquerading as policy.” By that summer, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution to oppose boycott efforts targeting Israel; Pressley broke with her Squadmates and voted in favor. The anti-Semitism charge, Lara Friedman told me, was a “sharp knife” that Republicans could throw “and watch Democrats attack each other.”According to Tlaib’s friends and staff, she hadn’t expected the level of vitriol flung at her and her colleagues. Yet, at times, even her critics seemed unsure of how to respond to Tlaib’s unique position as a Palestinian American member of Congress. Shortly after her election in 2018, Tlaib announced plans to lead a congressional delegation to the Palestinian territories, a tour that would focus on poverty and water access. The trip would coincide with the annual AIPAC-sponsored congressional visit to Israel led by Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. After public encouragement from Donald Trump, Netanyahu announced on Twitter that Tlaib and Omar, who planned to join the trip, were barred from entering because of their support for B.D.S. The move drew criticism from Hoyer, and even AIPAC and several Republicans. Tlaib asked permission to at least visit her grandmother in the West Bank, who was 90 years old at the time, promising to not promote boycotts while there. Israel acceded to the terms, but in a sudden about-face, Tlaib decided not to go. In a statement, Tlaib said that visiting under “oppressive conditions meant to humiliate me would break my grandmother’s heart.”One aide to a Squad member, who asked for anonymity to speak freely, told me that wanting to show solidarity with Tlaib gave their boss more courage to speak on the issue. McCollum told me she receives less pushback from colleagues now than she did for her earlier efforts to recognize basic rights of Palestinians. “If I can speak out about what’s happening at home,” she said, “why can’t I point out when another democracy is not behaving in a way that I think lives up to human rights norms?”Even President Biden, who during the May 2021 conflict reiterated Israel’s right to defend itself, made a point of speaking to Tlaib about the situation when he met her on an airport tarmac during a trip to Michigan. According to Tlaib, Biden brought up the conflict first, asking how her family was doing in the West Bank. Over the course of the eight-minute conversation that followed, the president listened as Tlaib spoke about the dire situation in the West Bank. “Everything you’re doing is enabling it more,” she later said she told him. Tlaib speaking with President Biden on the airport tarmac in Detroit about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last May.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTlaib arrived in Washington with one genuinely vanguard position on the conflict. During the 1990s the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, along with the United States, agreed that the best solution to the conflict was the establishment of two states: a sovereign Palestine and a sovereign Israel coexisting side by side. Though the borders have never been agreed upon, the two-state outcome remains a “core U.S. policy objective,” according to the State Department. But since then, settlements have grown steadily, while military occupation of the Palestinian territories continues. Today, nearly 700,000 Jewish settlers occupy land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has not only cut off some residents’ access to water and electricity but also left Palestinians with less — and more fragmented — territory for a Palestinian state in any hypothetical future negotiation. This has led Middle East experts like Zaha Hassan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Steven Cook from the Council on Foreign Relations and commentators like Peter Beinart to publicly give up on a two-state solution as a fair or realistic outcome and turn toward what was once considered a radical prospect in the debate: a single democratic state with equal rights for Arabs and Jews.Tlaib didn’t seem to have a firm view on the best road to peace before her election. During her 2018 campaign, the liberal pro-Israel group J Street endorsed her candidacy based on a meeting and a policy paper that her team submitted, which argued that a two-state outcome, while increasingly difficult to achieve, was the best aim. Soon after, in an interview with the left-wing magazine In These Times, she reversed herself, questioning the two-state solution. After seeking clarification from Tlaib about her position, J Street pulled its endorsement. By the time Tlaib reached Washington, she was the only member of Congress to publicly back a single, fully democratic state.This position has put Tlaib out of step with most of her Democratic colleagues. Hoyer, with whom she has grown close and who calls her “my Palestinian daughter,” told me she has not swayed him on his views on Israel. Even her progressive colleagues like Omar support a two-state solution.To other congressional Democrats, talk of a secular one-state outcome, which by definition rejects the idea of Jewish nationalism, is tantamount to calling for the eradication of a Jewish state. “The whole idea of a one state solution denies either party the right to self-determination,” Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism and is a staunch Israel supporter, told me. If you advocate getting rid of a Jewish state, he said, “that’s when you end up on the path to anti-Semitism.”Deutch clashed directly with Tlaib on the House floor in September, when Hoyer forced a vote on a bill that would provide Israel with an additional $1 billion for its Iron Dome program. Tlaib has long seen U.S. aid as a crucial source of leverage in the fight for Palestinian rights. She argued against the resolution, declaring Israel to be an “apartheid regime.” (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, have all taken the position that Israel has committed the crime of “apartheid,” but Human Rights Watch has stopped short of calling it an “apartheid regime.”) Chuck Fleischmann, the Tennessee Republican representative who was floor manager during the debate, urged Democrats to condemn Tlaib’s words. Deutch spoke up, saying the House would always stand by Israel and suggesting that Tlaib’s position was anti-Semitic.Afterward, Tlaib told me, her colleagues “whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ The whispering needs to stop,” she said, “and they need to speak up and say, ‘That was wrong.’” Hoyer told me he didn’t consider Tlaib’s remarks anti-Semitic, but thought they were “harsher than they needed to be.”Some Palestinian rights advocates, including McCollum, didn’t join Tlaib’s nay. Only nine lawmakers voted against the measure. Ocasio-Cortez, who the previous May introduced legislation to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, was about to join them, but ultimately changed her vote to present, crying as she did so. She didn’t give a clear reason for the switch but later said there were pressures of “vitriol, disingenuous framing, deeply racist accusations” and “lack of substantive discussion.” Tlaib spoke with her privately after, but wouldn’t reveal details. She had conversations with several others too. “People were really sincere about the guard rails they felt were present,” Tlaib told me. “They kept saying ‘guard rails.’”The pro-Palestinian cohort in Congress remains only informally organized. The House has nearly 400 caucuses, including one for rum and another for candy, but none focused on Palestinian rights. Staff members of about a dozen current House and Senate members meet informally to discuss the latest efforts to advance Palestinian rights and their long-term objectives, according to several participants in the discussions. But no one has yet filed the paperwork to start a formal caucus. “They’re kind of looking at me, and I’m like, ‘I’m not doing it by myself!’” Tlaib told me. “You all cared before I came here.”Tlaib at a pro-Palestinian rally in Dearborn, Mich., last spring.Antranik Tavitian/Detroit Free Press, via ZUMA
      In the years since Tlaib’s election, several Democratic battles involving the left have included fights over Palestinian rights — a difference that maps onto wider fights over the future of the Democratic Party. Cori Bush, the Missouri Black Lives Matter activist elected in 2020 to Congress, and Pressley now often link the Palestinian cause to issues of police brutality and segregation at home. Jamaal Bowman, who beat the longtime (and pro-Israel) incumbent Eliot Engel for a New York congressional seat in 2020, recently came under criticism from some in the D.S.A., which endorsed him, for his vote to support Iron Dome funding and for visiting Israel on a J Street-sponsored trip. In North Carolina, Nida Allam, the Durham County commissioner who is running for Congress on a platform of environmental justice, has called for conditioning military aid to Israel on Palestinian rights; she was recently endorsed by Tlaib.In 2020, meanwhile, Zogby, who had been attending the D.N.C. for nearly four decades, finally succeeded in inserting changes to the party’s platform. Party leaders wouldn’t accept the word “occupation,” but for the first time, allowed the phrase “we oppose settlement expansion.”Sensing a shift, however small, a new pro-Israel organization called the Democratic Majority for Israel was formed in 2019 to campaign for Democratic candidates who would uphold current U.S. Israel policy. “We thought it was important,” Mark Mellman, its founding president, told me, “before things get out of hand, if you will, to be a force in the Democratic Party and maintain support for Israel.”D.M.F.I.’s political action committee has targeted primary races that often involve candidates backed by Justice Democrats, an influential left-wing PAC that recruited Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman. Last summer, D.M.F.I. PAC injected more than $2 million into the Democratic primary of a congressional special election in Ohio, and aired ads against Nina Turner, who supports placing conditions on military aid. (Turner lost.) Notably, the ads focused less on Turner’s position on Israel and more on her disagreements with party leadership. “In the super PAC business, one is about winning elections,” Mellman told me.According to D.M.F.I., 28 out of its 29 candidates won their primaries in the last cycle. Among them was Ritchie Torres, a congressman representing the South Bronx, the poorest district in the country. Some Israel advocates see Torres as the model for bringing disaffected Democrats back into the fold: a self-described progressive who maintains support for Israel. For the first time since its founding, AIPAC is starting two political action committees. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC lobbyist, said the group will “probably accelerate its ad campaign against” Omar and Tlaib, as well as “a few others on its enemies list.”The politics of Tlaib’s own position on the Palestinian question, however, may be improving for other reasons. Detroit’s population has fallen again, and congressional lines were recently redrawn into another jigsaw piece of a district, costing Michigan a seat. In January, Tlaib announced she would run for the new District 12, which includes only two-thirds of her old constituents, but now also includes Dearborn, a city with a large concentrated Arab American population. Tlaib’s challenger, Shanelle Jackson, has already tried to wield her identity against her, telling Jewish Insider: “She obviously is carrying the water of Palestine in all that she does.”In 2019, days after telling the Squad to “go back” to their countries, Donald Trump called Tlaib a “crazed lunatic.” Denzel McCampbell, Tlaib’s communication director, told me that whenever there is an uptick in hateful calls and threats at the office, he knows that Fox News must have mentioned her. A Republican political tracker — an operative who regularly films the activities of a politician — follows her around regularly, a practice usually reserved for campaign season.In her Washington office, Tlaib keeps a sample of the petroleum coke she collected in Detroit in a glass cabinet. A framed photo of Tlaib’s grandmother, whom she hasn’t seen in more than 10 years, looks over her desk. “You know how some people take naps?” she told me. “I quit in my head for 20 minutes, and pretend I’m not the Congressmember for the 13,” she said, referring to her district. “Not because of them, but because of this place.”Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at the magazine. She is working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. Jarod Lew is an artist and a photographer based in Detroit. His works explore community, identity and displacement and have been exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Design Museum of London and the Philharmonie de Paris. More

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      The Young Progressive Lawyer at the Center of a Marquee Texas Runoff

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      Jessica Cisneros had the backing of national progressive leaders, a cramped campaign headquarters and the help of her father. She’s now taking on Representative Henry Cuellar in a runoff in May.LAREDO, Texas — Just a few years ago, Jessica Cisneros was an intern in Henry Cuellar’s congressional office. Now, the representative’s former intern has forced the nine-term incumbent into a runoff, providing progressives with an opening to oust a powerful moderate Democrat and upend South Texas politics.The runoff election on May 24 — the same day Ms. Cisneros turns 29 — will be a rematch more than two years in the making. In 2020, she came within 2,700 votes of beating Mr. Cuellar in the Democratic primary. Her father and volunteers drove through the district after she lost, picking up her campaign signs. They held onto many of those signs knowing there might be a sequel. So some of her signs from 2020 are out on the streets again in Laredo in 2022, with the old election date painted over.“We knew from the very beginning this was going to be a very tough election,” Ms. Cisneros said Wednesday morning, speaking to a crush of reporters who squeezed into her one-room campaign headquarters, a Laredo storefront tucked between a snack stand and Mexican bakery. “We deserve a lot more than what we’re being offered. And I’m really glad that over half of the voters agree that it’s time for new leadership.”Volunteers at the Cisneros campaign headquarters in Laredo.Jason Garza for The New York TimesMs. Cisneros’s success in forcing Mr. Cuellar into a runoff was one of the most striking results of Tuesday’s primary election in Texas, the first of the 2022 midterm season. In Texas primaries, any candidate who finishes below 50 percent faces the No. 2 vote-getter in a runoff. As of Wednesday evening, Mr. Cuellar had won 48.4 percent of the vote, Ms. Cisneros had 46.9 percent and another liberal candidate, Tannya Benavides, had 4.7 percent.Though she has frequently been compared to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — the two campaigned together in San Antonio last month — Ms. Cisneros is no firebrand. While she pushes for many of the same progressive policies as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, including the Green New Deal and a $15 federal minimum wage, Ms. Cisneros has campaigned heavily on what she describes as more bread-and-butter issues in this border district — jobs and health care.The results from Tuesday showed the ideological and geographic split among South Texas Democrats.The congressional district stretches from the edge of San Antonio to Laredo and to rural counties along the southern border. Ms. Cisneros performed best in the northern reaches of the district that are farthest from the border, beating Mr. Cuellar in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio. But she lost to him in Webb County, which includes Laredo, and in the more rural areas closer to the border, including Zapata and Starr Counties. The newly redrawn district lines included more of liberal San Antonio and appeared to help Cisneros.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsPrimaries Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the midterm election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.The politics of South Texas do not fit easily into national norms. Senator Bernie Sanders won several parts of the district in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. But at the same time, Donald J. Trump dramatically improved his performance with voters in the larger South Texas region in the 2020 general election. That shift has alarmed many Democrats, who warn that Latino voters along the border are increasingly skewing to the right.Ms. Cisneros has dismissed those views, arguing that the area is seen as conservative largely because Mr. Cuellar helps perpetuate the idea. Mr. Cuellar, in turn, has criticized Ms. Cisneros’ endorsements from political leaders outside Texas, including Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.“South Texas is its own district,” Ms. Cisneros said in an interview in 2019 with The Laredo Morning Times. “We are placed in a very unique spot in terms of politics and also geographically, being right here on the border. But fundamentally I think the big issues are being able to address things like poverty — the rampant poverty that we have here on the border — health care access and the jobs issue.”Jessica Cisneros campaigning with her father, Jose Luis Cisneros.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesLike Mr. Cuellar, Ms. Cisneros is the child of immigrants from Mexico.Her parents moved to the United States before she was born, after their older daughter needed serious medical care. Her father worked in agriculture and later opened a small trucking company. After growing up in Laredo and graduating as the valedictorian from Early College High School, Ms. Cisneros moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas and went on to law school there, focusing on immigration law.During the campaign, Ms. Cisneros has frequently referred to her work as an immigration lawyer, citing her efforts helping asylum seekers who were stuck at the border under the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy.She has frequently relied on immigration to contrast herself with Mr. Cuellar, who has been an outspoken critic of President Biden on the issue. Mr. Cuellar has said the president has been too lax on border security and has not done enough to listen to the views of Border Patrol agents. Ms. Cisneros has said she supports overhauling decades-old laws that make up the immigration and deportation system.But for all the divisive issues that have helped define her campaign nationally, many voters who supported her were simply focused on a change in leadership, particularly as Mr. Cuellar faces an F.B.I. investigation.On Tuesday night, Ms. Cisneros and her supporters gathered outdoors behind a Laredo strip mall, cheering each time the vote tally showed her edging out Mr. Cuellar. That lead had eroded by the time she took the stage just after 11 p.m., but the mood hardly dampened. It was unclear at that hour whether she had earned enough votes to force a runoff.Standing in front of her parents, sister and niece, Ms. Cisneros assured the crowd, in both English and Spanish, that she was confident she would win. “Tonight, tomorrow or in May,” she said. More

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      Democrats Struggle to Energize Their Base as Frustrations Mount

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      Even as President Biden achieves some significant victories, Democrats are warning that many of their most loyal supporters see inaction and broken campaign promises.Democrats across the party are raising alarms about sinking support among some of their most loyal voters, warning the White House and congressional leadership that they are falling short on campaign promises and leaving their base unsatisfied and unmotivated ahead of next year’s midterm elections.President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and moving a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House. But some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.Already, Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have taken a sharp fall among some of his core constituencies, showing double-digit declines among Black, Latino, female and young voters. Those drops have led to increased tension between the White House and progressives at a time of heightened political anxiety, after Democrats were caught off-guard by the intensity of the backlash against them in elections earlier this month. Mr. Biden’s plummeting national approval ratings have also raised concerns about whether he would — or should — run for re-election in 2024.Not all of the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Biden; a large percentage of frustration is with the Democratic Party itself.“It’s frustrating to see the Democrats spend all of this time fighting against themselves and to give a perception to the country, which the Republicans are seizing on, that the Democrats can’t govern,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who leads the A.M.E. churches across Georgia. “And some of us are tired of them getting pushed around, because when they get pushed around, African Americans get shoved.”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading House progressive, warned that the party is at risk of “breaking trust” with vital constituencies, including young people and people of color.“There’s all this focus on ‘Democrats deliver, Democrats deliver,’ but are they delivering on the things that people are asking for the most right now?” she said in an interview. “In communities like mine, the issues that people are loudest and feel most passionately about are the ones that the party is speaking to the least.”Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats acknowledge that a significant part of the challenge facing their party is structural: With slim congressional majorities, the party cannot pass anything unless the entire caucus agrees. That empowers moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to block some of the biggest promises to their supporters, including a broad voting rights bill.A more aggressive approach may not lead to eventual passage of an immigration or voting rights law, but it would signal to Democrats that Mr. Biden is fighting for them, said Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mr. Shakir and others worry that the focus on the two significant pieces of legislation — infrastructure and the spending bill — won’t be enough to energize supporters skeptical of the federal government’s ability to improve their lives.“I’m a supporter of Biden, a supporter of the agenda, and I’m frustrated and upset with him to allow this to go in the direction it has,” said Mr. Shakir, who managed Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020. “It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden in this debate.”He added: “It’s made the president look weak.”The divide over how much attention to devote to staunch Democratic constituencies versus moderate swing voters taps into a political debate that’s long roiled the party: Is it more important to energize the base or to persuade swing voters? And can Democrats do both things at once?White House advisers argue that winning swing voters, particularly the suburban independents who play an outsize role in battleground districts, is what will keep Democrats in power — or at least curb the scale of their midterm losses. They see the drop among core groups of Democrats as reflective of a challenging political moment — rising inflation, the continued pandemic, uncertainty about schools — rather than unhappiness with the administration’s priorities.“It’s November of 2021, not September of 2022,” John Anzalone, Mr. Biden’s pollster, said. “If we pass Build Back Better, we have a great message going into the midterms, when the bell rings on Labor Day, about what we’ve done for people.”Even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation that passed the House earlier this month offers proposals transforming child care, elder care, prescription drugs and financial aid for college, as well as making the largest investment ever to slow climate change. But some of the most popular policies will not be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections, nor will the impact of many of the infrastructure projects.Already, Democrats face a challenging education effort with voters. According to a survey conducted by Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm, only about a third of white battleground voters think that either infrastructure or the broader spending bill will help them personally. Among white Democratic battleground voters, support for the bills is only 72 percent.Representative James E. Clyburn, the high-ranking House Democrat from South Carolina and a close ally of Mr. Biden, said the way the bills were negotiated and reported in the media had voters in his district asking him about money that was cut from initiatives rather than the sweeping benefits.“People stopped me on the streets saying we cut money from our H.B.C.U.s,” Mr. Clyburn said, pointing out that more funding for historically Black colleges and universities will be added in the coming years of the administration. “So while everybody keeps blaming the Democrats, Democrats, Democrats, it’s the Senate rules that are archaic, and stop us from passing these bills.”Mr. Clyburn and other lawmakers say they struggle to explain the vacillations of congressional wrangling to their voters, who expected that by electing Democrats to the majority they would be able to pass their agenda.“Nobody thought about the filibuster and the realities,” said Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee. “People don’t understand the Byrd rule and the parliamentarian and the things we have to put up with. It does lower their enthusiasm.”Atlanta voters cast their ballots last November. Mr. Biden won more than 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia, but inaction on voting rights has weakened their support.Jessica Mcgowan/Getty ImagesAs they’ve begun to do with the infrastructure bill, the White House plans an aggressive approach to sell the social policy legislation once it passes, dispatching Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top officials for events across the country.“There is a real window of opportunity to show the cooperation and competence people expect from us,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey and a leader of a moderate wing of lawmakers in congressional negotiations. “It’s up to us to communicate what we just accomplished for families and for the country.”Yet many activists say the White House is to blame for failing to aggressively push for the central promises made to their supporters during the campaign. They said they wanted Mr. Biden to leverage both his bully pulpit and executive powers to tackle student loans, criminal justice, immigration reform and other issues.“We’re talking about democracy in such a crisis and here we are with very few legislative days left and the lack of urgency is deafening,” said Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, a minister and civil rights advocate who has helped lead the response from faith leaders on voting rights. “For the president to say he can only do one thing at a time is simply not true.”Lorella Praeli, the president of Community Change Action, a group advocating immigration reform, offered a terse warning to the administration about keeping Latino support: “There are no participation trophies.”Some of the most popular policies in the social safety net bill that passed the House won’t be felt by voters until long after the midterm elections.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesAlready, the national environment looks difficult for Democrats, who may lose seats in redistricting and face the historical trend of a president’s party losing seats during his first term in office.Tomás Robles, the co-chair of Lucha, a Latino civil rights group based in Phoenix that is widely credited with helping Democrats win the state in 2020, said people were “disillusioned and unmotivated” by what they had seen in the first 10 months of Democratic governance.“When you’re not passing bold progressive policies, you have to be able to show something,” Mr. Robles said. “President Biden gets the most blame because he’s the most visible, but it’s the party as a whole that has failed its voters.”In Georgia, inaction on voting rights has fueled a steepening decline of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden among Black voters. The New Georgia Project, a progressive civil rights group, conducted a study last month of Black voters in Georgia, and found that 66 percent approved of the job Mr. Biden was doing, and 51 percent thought that his administration was working to address the concerns of the Black community. In 2020, Mr. Biden won more than 90 percent of Black voters in Georgia.Representative Cori Bush, a progressive whose district includes large parts of St. Louis, said the social safety net and climate provisions included in the bill that passed the House could not be pared down any further. And, she added, the White House has to follow through on other provisions if Democrats want to excite Black voters — perhaps the party’s most loyal constituency — ahead of the midterm elections.“Do I believe Black community members will be happy to see these investments? Absolutely. Will they feel like this has changed their lives in some ways? Yes,” Ms. Bush said. “But will this be enough to excite? When you’re excited, that means that you feel like something else is coming. You have hope that more is happening. So what’s next?” More

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      A.O.C. on Why Democrats’ ‘Talking Points Are Not Enough’

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      The House progressive spoke about “demoralizing” congressional negotiations, how she was told to stay away from Virginia’s elections, and what it means to excite the Democratic base.Last year, after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the Democratic presidential nomination, a group of progressive lawmakers rallied around him to project party unity at a critical time.More than a year later, as the president seeks to pass a robust spending package of social policies that represent the bulk of his domestic agenda, many of the same leaders are looking for a return on their political investment.In an interview with The New York Times, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the country’s most prominent progressives, questioned whether Democratic leaders and the White House understood the scope of the demands coming from the party’s base. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Why do you feel this social policy bill has to pass as soon as possible, at the biggest scale possible?I think the stakes are really, really high.The entire reason that the Progressive Caucus gave their votes [for the infrastructure bill] was based on direct promises from the president, as well as direct promises from more conservative Democratic holdouts. And from House leadership as well. So if those promises don’t follow through, it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to get votes on anything moving forward, because the trust that was already so delicate will have been broken.Do you think these extended negotiations and the stuff that was cut will have an electoral effect? Obviously the Senate will have its say, but if the spending bill largely looks like what the House passed this week, will Democrats say it fulfills the promise of Election Day?I think that if we pass the Build Back Better Act as the House passed it, that we have a shot to go back to our communities and say we delivered. But that’s not to say that this process has not been demoralizing for a lot of folks, because there were enormous promises made. Not just at the beginning, and not just during the election, but that continued to be made.And this is where I have sounded the alarm, because what really dampens turnout is when Democrats make promises that they don’t keep.With the bipartisan infrastructure plan, there’s all of these headlines going around. And I understand the political importance of making a victory lap. But I think that the worst and most vulnerable position we could be in is to over-promise and under-deliver.So let’s not go around and say, “We’re going to replace every lead pipe in this country,” because according to the bipartisan infrastructure plan, that is not going to happen. That has not been funded. And if the Build Back Better Act gets cut even further, then that’s definitely not going to happen. You and other progressives backed Biden during the general election. Do you feel that this White House has continued to be open to the left? And that created trust, because trust requires vulnerability from all parties.There was some good faith with the American Rescue Plan [Democrats’ $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, signed in March]. But after that, which was quite early, it’s been a bit of a slog.I actually don’t direct this critique directly at the White House. I think, in general, the party doesn’t quite fully grasp what is happening in deep-blue communities.What is it that you say they’re missing?The talking points are not enough.Yes, is child care great? Absolutely. Universal pre-K, this is something I’m deeply, deeply supportive of. But we also have too much of a top-down strategy when it comes to our base. We’re always giving them the medicine and telling them what they need to accept, as opposed to really monitoring where the energy is, and being responsive to it. And allowing that to shape our strategy.And even with the infrastructure plan, this kind of investment is deeply needed in underserved communities like the Bronx. However, if we as a party are asking every single person in this party to take a victory lap, and do a news conference in front of a bridge or pothole, and we aren’t funding and actually fixing that pothole, I’m very concerned about how people are going to interpret that a year from now.But doesn’t the White House agree — didn’t it propose a more robust package? The obvious response here is that the administration faces the reality of a 50-50 Senate.There is an enormous amount of executive action that they’re sitting on that I think is underutilized. On student loans. We’ve got executive action on the table with respect to climate. There are certainly things that we can do with immigration.So why are we taking this as a legislative compromise, when the opportunity is so much greater, or when Biden could do this stuff with a stroke of a pen, and is just reminding us that he’s choosing not to?We always try to tell people why they need to settle for less, instead of being able to harness the energy of our grass roots and take political risks in service of them, the same way that we take political risks in service of swing voters. We can do both. The Infrastructure Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 5The bill receives final approval. More