Why the Progressive Group Behind AOC Thinks Democrats Have it Backwards

The Justice Democrats want a new Congress. Or at least a Congress full of representatives who want the same things that their voters want—and they're willing to pick off incumbents if that's what it takes. The progressive political action committee is only two years old, but it's already scored some major wins: In 2018, two of the candidates Justice Democrats endorsed and organized for, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Ayanna Pressely in Massachusetts, beat incumbents who had held their seats for a combined total of 30 years, and they both won by double-digit margins.

The logic behind these primary fights is that Democrats running for office should back policies and positions that most Democratic voters want, but the establishment has been capitulating to a minority of more conservative voters who don't represent the base. The Justice Democrats platform includes support for things like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, as well as less buzzy goals like a federal jobs guarantee and closing corporate tax loopholes. To make something like single-payer healthcare a reality though, progressives will need a coalition that can throw its weight around, make demands, and stick together as a voting bloc. And that's what Justice Democrats wants to build.

High-profile wins aside, the Justice Democrats' overall scorecard is a little lopsided, which is, perhaps, to be expected when taking on incumbents. Though they endorsed other candidates that have become big names in their own right, including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the group actively recruited 12 candidates to run against Democratic incumbents in 2018, and Ocasio-Cortez was the only one to go on to win both her primary and general election. Of the total 66 candidates they endorsed for the House, the Senate, and a few governorships, only seven ultimately won. And three of them—Ro Khanna of California, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Raul Grijalva of Arizona—were incumbents themselves.

Still, the wins they racked up provoked a backlash from the Democratic establishment—perhaps a sign of the group's potential, if not fully actualized, power. In April, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the arm of the party dedicated to keeping Democrats in Congress, threatened to blacklist any firm that worked against incumbent Democrats, essentially trying to scare off any political strategists and vendors from working on upstart campaigns.

Looking ahead to 2020, Justice Democrats are trying to be more focused and judicious, putting resources into fewer races and seeing if their strategy can last. Shortly after the first round Democratic presidential debates, Waleed Shahid, the communications director, spoke to GQ about the group's rapid growth and its plans for what's next.

GQ: How are Justice Democrats changing their tactics after the midterms? What's changed after getting as big a win as AOC's?

Waleed Shahid: We were a totally new organization in 2018, and we were trying to do lots of stuff. There are things that we’re working to sharpen, though. One example is the number of endorsements we made. I think we stretched ourselves a little too thin capacity-wise last time, and we're small organization. So I think we're trying to be a little bit more focused on the kinds of endorsements we make the kinds of races we get involved in the kinds of candidates we select, and trying to just replicate some of the successes and strengths to be discovered from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s race. I think we're also thinking longer-term, not just focusing on like, one district alone at a time, but trying to think of how these things add up to a larger discussion about the role of the Democratic Party. The other thing we're working on is being more of a movement connector, because we can't do this alone. So we’re working with groups like Sunrise Movement, an organization made up of young people responding to the climate crisis. We have to because Justice Democrats is not a direct action organization. We don't organize rallies and stuff like that.

Justice Democrats has endorsed only eight new candidates so far for 2020. The first candidate you endorsed this cycle was Jessica Cisneros, who's running for Congress in Texas, running from south of San Antonio down to the U.S.-Mexico border. What about her campaign appealed to you guys?

I think what we were inspired by in Jessica's campaign was her commitment to fighting on behalf of the disenfranchised, fighting on behalf of the poor. Jessica had a really compelling story: She's the daughter of Mexican immigrants, she was able to put herself through college and law school, ultimately became an immigration attorney and a human rights lawyer, and has been taking on abuses by ICE at the border and the courtroom for the past couple years. She started to realize that fighting case by case against federal law was not a solution to the ways that the immigration system had divided her community. She talks about how there's whole classrooms in her district that has children whose parents work for ICE work and the Border Patrol or whose parents are in the crosshairs of ICE and Border Patrol. And that is really harmful to the fabric of a community and really tragic in lots of ways.

What exactly does a candidate get with a Justice Democrats endorsement then?

The first thing the DCCC does is ask a candidate how much money they can raise on day one. Go through your cell phone contacts, and estimate based on all your contacts in your cell phone, how much you can raise. They also connect you with their donor network, which tends to be generally more conservative than the Democratic Party base on a whole range of policy issues. So what we do instead is that we are largely focused on building momentum in the district and nationally to help activate a volunteer base and a small dollar donor base. We do that by advising on field strategy, by sending out emails to our to our list of people who are in the Justice Democrats network, by up setting up like a text banking system and a phone banking system to help contact voters and potential volunteers. It's not so radically different from what traditional Democratic Party organizations do, but the values guiding it are what’s mostly different. If you're a working class person who is kind of outside the political establishment, then it’s actually very, very difficult for you to run for office. That's why Congress is made up of rich white millionaires. So what we were trying to do is create an alternative path to power for people locked out from the political process: we do is help candidates set up their campaigns, find staff, file their run, explain to them the process, help them understand policy and organize trainings.

And why did her opponent, Henry Cuellar, seem like someone worth primarying?

Jessica likes to call him "Trump's favorite Democrat." Despite the fact that the district is very blue, and Hillary Clinton won the district by 20 points in 2016, Henry Cuellar voted with Trump 70 percent of the time in 2018. He takes money from the NRA. He's anti-choice. He has worked with Republicans to expedite deportations of asylum seekers on the border, and to defund reproductive health services for women. At the end of the day, Henry Cuellar is more of a Republican than he is a Democrat. Primaries are an opportunity for voters to hold their leadership accountable, and so Cuellar hasn't really been held accountable for supporting Trump's agenda.

Was it surprising on your end when the DCCC threatened to boycott firms that works with challengers in Democratic primaries? Justice Democrats has kind of become synonymous with targeting incumbents, after all.

I think so. I think they shot themselves in their own foot a little bit there. It's completely absurd to me, that after Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won their races in competitive Democratic primaries—and inspired lots of progressives and young people and women and people of color to get involved in Democratic Party politics—that the DCCC would basically go out of their way to make a statement saying that they didn't want more. I just think that it was kind of a slap in the face of people who are trying to enter the party but keep finding the party closing doors. And this amazing thing has happened on the digital blacklist where a number of progressive organizations, consultants, and vendors are pledging for the first time in history to actively work on primary challenges. That’s never happened in the progressive movement before, where you have this movement of aligned organizations that's pledging to work together to unseat Democrats who are out of touch, or just not fighting as hard. At the end of the day, power protects power.

It got lost pretty quickly after Donald Trump got involved, but there was also a pretty public spat between Nancy Pelosi and "the squad"—AOC, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib—after they spoke out against a border funding bill the speaker brought for a vote.

The big thing here to know about this debate is that it actually started out as being a substantive policy debate over why Nancy Pelosi was going along with Mitch McConnell's border funding bill when we did not strengthen any oversight or accountability over the camps or over Border Patrol. It wasn't just the squad that voted against this deal with Mitch McConnell. It was also the entire Congressional Hispanic Caucus. But subsequently Nancy Pelosi spoke to Maureen Dowd about the squad and it became a whole thing after that. But I think tension can produce growth. At the end of this, I think the Democratic Party leadership and Nancy Pelosi will hopefully be more accountable or think twice about bills like this, and be more sensitive to what lots of people in the Democratic Party feel about the crisis.

And you don't think that Pelosi has been responsive to the Democrats' base before?

One thing about the Blue Dogs, or the centrist or the conservative Democrats, they are constantly threatening to pull out from bills that Democrats propose. They're doing what the Freedom Caucus does, what the Tea Party did, but it's often behind the scenes, so the public doesn't see it, which is why Pelosi feels so accountable to them. Pelosi, in some ways, feels more accountable to pro-life Democrats than she does to Democrats who are fighting for what the base wants. A lot of her attention is focused on keeping the Blue Dogs and the centrist together on bills, and that means that she's offering them concessions to keep them on board for "yes" votes. Again, a lot of it's behind the scenes, they don't do it very publicly. At the same time, I think the progressive movement is stronger than it's ever been before. And so a lot of what is happening here is progressive trying to flex their muscles to counter that force, and to fight for the base wants rather than for what swing voters or Republican voters want.

When a 26-year-old American missionary set out for a lush island in the Indian Ocean last year, it was with one objective in mind: to convert the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe, who had lived for centuries in isolation, free from modern technology, disease, and religion. John Chau's mission had ambitions for a great awakening, but what awaited instead was tragedy.

Originally Appeared on GQ