As of Wednesday morning, things don’t look good for older, more centrist Democrats in New York state. In a showdown that’s reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s huge 2018 upset, former middle school principal Jamaal Bowman seems poised to unseat Eliot Engel, a 16-term white incumbent representing the majority-minority 16th District, right next to AOC’s.
Bowman had the backing of many progressive leaders and organizations, including the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the Working Families Party, and Justice Democrats, the organization that helped AOC win her seat. Last year, when Justice Democrats announced their endorsement, an unnamed Democratic official told a reporter, “No one is afraid of those nerds. They don’t have the ability to primary anyone.”
But one of the biggest gets for Bowman was the endorsement from AOC herself, which apparently infuriated Engel. In a video on Twitter, he denounced AOC for making an endorsement, saying, “This is not a dictatorship, this is a democracy.” He explained his opposition to political endorsements: “We shouldn’t have one person, from high, even though she’s a colleague of mine, think that she can anoint whoever’s elected.”
Not long after that, Engel landed a high-profile endorsement from Hillary Clinton, her first of the election cycle. Oddly, Engel made no public denunciations of Clinton’s endorsement, and he also racked up public backing from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
Like many veterans in the Democratic Party, Engel has a record littered with questionable votes and positions. He was one of a handful of Democrats in the House who voted for the invasion of Iraq, and as the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he opposed then president Obama’s 2015 nuclear treaty with Iran. He also told NPR that he opposed any effort to hold Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman accountable for the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, characterizing the killing as a “disagreement” between Salman and the U.S. As The Intercept reports, this was Engel’s first competitive primary since 2000.
Bowman’s edge grew as protests against police brutality started to spread across the country. Engel, who represents a mostly Black and Hispanic district, voted for the 1994 crime bill, officially known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was directly responsible for swelling the U.S. prison population to the largest in the world, primarily by targeting Black people for petty crimes. And it didn’t help his case when he was caught on a hot mic at a Black Lives Matter event early in June saying, “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care.”
Absentee votes are still being counted, but in a testament to level of grassroots organizing behind him, Bowman has maintained a 20-point lead over Engel. In something of a victory speech delivered on Tuesday night, Bowman again laid out his commitment to social justice: “Poverty is not a result of children and families that don’t work hard; our children and families work as hard as anyone else. Poverty is by political design. And it’s rooted in a system that has been fractured and corrupt and rotten from its core from the inception of America.”
The Bowman-Engel race drew a lot of media comparisons to Ocasio-Cortez’s race. A major distinction, though, is that after AOC unexpectedly ousted her opponent, the high-ranking House Democrat Joe Crowley, other incumbents were more on guard and prepared for progressive challengers.
Ocasio-Cortez also faced off against primary opponents on Tuesday, including Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former Republican with substantial campaign donations from Wall Street executives. AOC handily won with more than 70 percent of the vote.
