In many ways the political establishment\u2019s strengths here are just imagined. They\u2019re not real. They may have been real many decades ago, when the Democratic Party could provide jobs and structure and was a significant part of the fabric of community life, but that\u2019s not the case anymore. The Democratic Party has moved away from that, and people\u2019s relationships to it have diminished.<\/p>\n
That became clear when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran against and beat Joe Crowley, landing her in Congress. That race covered more than just Astoria, but Astoria was a big part of her victory. Importantly, her campaign was such a break from what people thought was an acceptable way to challenge power. She spent so much time in the community, meeting people and talking face-to-face, which her opponent was not doing. So the short answer to your question is organizing.<\/p>\n
Now Astoria has a socialist congresswoman, AOC; a socialist state assembly member, me; and a soon-to-be socialist City Council member, Tiffany Cab\u00e1n. All of those campaigns were won the same way, through deep and sustained organizing and involvement in the community.<\/p>\n
To back up a bit though, it\u2019s important to point out what happened right before all of this. The first campaign that I worked on in a serious way was the campaign of Khader El-Yateem, a DSA-backed Palestinian-American Lutheran pastor who ran for City Council in Bay Ridge in 2017. There was so much energy around that campaign, and the reason why people had asked him to run and rallied around him was because Bernie had done so well in his district.<\/p>\n
This was a shock because Bay Ridge in Southern Brooklyn had not been considered fertile ground for democratic socialist politics. At the time, the debate was actually about whether that area was red or blue. Nobody considered that it might go so dark a shade of blue that it might become red again. But Bernie made people think twice about it. Clearly there was untapped potential there that was being obscured by the politics-as-usual of the Democratic establishment.<\/p>\n
It was that same data and that same kind of analysis that led to AOC\u2019s race in 2018, to Tiffany Cab\u00e1n\u2019s unsuccessful race for Queens district attorney in 2019, to my race in 2020, and to Cab\u00e1n\u2019s successful race for City Council in 2021. What\u2019s really important to note is that none of us are ambiguously or incidentally socialists. Socialism is not in the margins or footnotes of our political philosophy. It’s right there in the header, which is exciting because it means people are not voting for us in spite of our socialism, but in many cases because of it.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n