Jeff Roberson/AP Photo
Bush, a Ferguson activist who has favorably responded to calls to defund the police, will become arguably the foremost Black Lives Matter candidate in the House.
Though votes are still being counted, our latest installment of mid-pandemic democracy has so far yielded yet another triumphant night for progressives and another set of disappointments for Trump-allied conservatives. Squad member Rashida Tlaib defied news reports and trounced her opponent in Detroit. Medicaid expansion passed in Missouri. Progressive Beth Doglio is so far in position for a runoff for an open House seat in Washington. Reform-minded prosecutors won top races in Michigan and Missouri. Trumpist vote-suppressor Kris Kobach lost a Senate primary in Kansas, and pardoned criminal Joe Arpaio is on the brink of losing his primary for Maricopa County Sheriff in Arizona.
But the night belonged to former nurse and activist Cori Bush, who banked Tuesday night’s highest-profile win, which may well be the most impressive victory for the progressive flank of the year. In Missouri’s First Congressional District, Bush knocked off 10-term incumbent Lacy Clay, senior member of the House Financial Services Committee and chair of a subcommittee on housing. Clay’s father held the seat for decades before him, meaning that Bush didn’t merely topple an incumbent, she knocked over a political dynasty. When January comes, it will mark the first time MO-01 has been represented by someone not named Clay in 52 years.
There was little sense from the outside that Clay was vulnerable. In the run up to Election Day, Bush’s race was optimistically compared to Jamaal Bowman’s June primary against Eliot Engel, but there were plenty of reasons to doubt that that particular result was replicable. Bowman’s trouncing of Eliott Engel in New York, an earlier progressive primary scalp, was in part a function of Engel’s abandonment of his district and a series of stunning gaffes, including refusing to appear in his own district and getting caught on a hot mic saying he wouldn’t care about speaking about coronavirus at a community event if he didn’t have a primary.
It will be worth watching now to see what effect all this might have on Joe Biden.
Clay, who has been chastised from the left for his coziness with payday lenders and predatory Wall Street financiers and spurning St. Louis’s Black Lives Matter activists, cruised to victory over Bush in 2018 by 20 points. He kept Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared in support of Bush last cycle, out of the race by endorsing the Green New Deal. In fact, the only Congressional Democrat to endorse Bush was Bernie Sanders, who did so back in January (Bowman, not yet a congressman, endorsed her as well). Clay was able to keep leftist Democrats who came in for Bowman out of St. Louis, and own the support of the Democratic establishment and the Congressional Black Caucus, including vice presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. Only a few progressive groups—important ones, as I’ll explain later—stuck their neck out for Bush.
So how did Clay manage to squander a half-century of name recognition and community support? Part of it was the laziness that sets in on longtime members who aren’t challenged seriously for decades. Clay had family members staff his campaign, an arrangement that is not illegal but speaks to the perception of the campaign from the incumbent as a money-making formality rather than an exchange of ideas. He didn’t raise very much money and much of what he did raise went to his sister’s law firm and her husband’s sketchy “internet engineering” company. As a result, Bush was able to significantly outspend Clay on TV and radio in the final weeks. Only in the final weekend did Clay take Bush seriously, going negative on her repeatedly in mailers. The late negative attack ads are a sure sign of trouble.
Second, Bush had a battle-hardened set of insurgent campaigners behind her, capitalizing on a massive mistake by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats. The DCCC created a “blacklist” last year that barred campaign organizations and consultants who work for primary challengers to incumbents from working on any DCCC-sponsored campaigns. While this was supposed to starve primary challengers of talent, it had the opposite effect: creating a pool of progressive campaigners who solely work on these types of races, learning from their experiences and growing in knowledge and sophistication.
Justice Democrats and Fight Corporate Monopolies made significant media buys on Bush’s behalf, giving her that boost over Clay on TV and radio. Sunrise Movement, who also endorsed her, led a phone-banking blitz. Matriarch, an organization supporting progressive working women that Bush co-founded, provided budget and messaging and campaign filing support, some of the nitty-gritty of politics, as well as building grassroots infrastructure.
This blueprint, unveiled in the Bowman race, looks like a real winner, and these particular groups should have the entire corporate wing of the party on high alert. All eyes will now turn to Massachusetts’s First District, where those groups have thrown their support behind Alex Morse in his attempt to oust Richard Neal, the epitome of a corporate Democrat.
Finally, the race revealed the changing zeitgeist in the country, and the ways in which this has vexed the Congressional Black Caucus, which Clay’s father co-founded. While the country has seen a massive outpouring of public support for the Black Lives Matter movement, with tens of millions participating in marches against police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the CBC has found itself as something of a bulwark against pro-Black movement politics, with its loyalty to incumbents winning out over any other political commitments.
Democratic Party leadership has turned to the CBC for suggestions on legislation to curb police brutality and structural racism, hoping, too, to capitalize on the popular movement to help boost turnout in the fall. But the CBC, in turn, has used this moment to back politicians like Eliot Engel, who is white, or Lacy Clay, who was apparently on the outs with the activist community, or to refuse to endorse Mondaire Jones in NY-17, a Black candidate running in a vacated seat. Bush, a Ferguson activist who has favorably responded to calls to defund the police, will become arguably the foremost Black Lives Matter candidate in the House, and she will have gotten there by overcoming the Black Caucus.
Bush’s victory, too, proved again the two-race hypothesis—that it takes two primary challenges to knock off an incumbent. That logic held earlier this year, when Marie Newman knocked off anti-choice incumbent Dan Lipinski in Illinois, after running a close race against him in 2018. That means that right-wing Democrats like Henry Cuellar and Josh Gottheimer, who escaped their primary challenges earlier this year are far from out of the woods, and their opponents will likely be back in 2022.
It will be worth watching now to see what effect all this might have on Joe Biden. Nearly every major upset progressives sprung Tuesday sported a Bernie Sanders endorsement, while the composition of the House, come 2021, will likely be far further to the left than it is currently. That’s the direction the party is headed, despite nominating Biden for president, and it will be interesting to see if he shows either understanding or defiance of that with his vice presidential pick.
