New York Congressional Campaign Targets Diversity, Community Issues
Sitting by the register in Jackson Height’s Lety Bakery and Cafe, a small, sparingly decorated cafe that smells like cupcakes and coffee, four men plan the future of New York’s 14th congressional district.
The men are volunteers, organizing events for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign. Ocasio is a member of Brand New Congress, an organization looking to get younger, more diverse voices involved in politics.
“We are looking to essentially elect a new congress,” said Zeynab Day, press director for Brand New Congress. “The people that we’re running are working together. The idea is to bring people to the table who wouldn’t have the chance to run for congress otherwise.”
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, during which Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, Day and others working for Brand New Congress and Ocasio’s campaign say it is more important now than ever before to get involved in politics.
Many of Ocasio’s volunteers, in fact, are getting involved in politics for the first time. James Crawford, who is associated with Brand New Congress and the Justice Democrats, a political action committee founded after the presidential election, did not even vote in 2016. Less than a year later, he is one of the people spearheading a congressional campaign.
“We wouldn’t be doing this with such veracity if not for the last election,” said Crawford. “It kind of woke everyone up. It’s great to work on something meaningful instead of throwing things at the TV.”
Voter turnout in the United States has been lower than in most developed countries in recent years. According to the Pew Research Center, 55.7 percent of eligible U.S. citizens voted in the 2016 election. For comparison, in Belgium, the country with the highest voter turnout rate, 87.2 percent of eligible citizens cast ballots in the last election.
Numbers continue to shrink when looking at a non-presidential year. According to the government census data, numbers for congressional election years tend to hover around 20 percent lower than numbers for presidential election years.
“A lot of people don’t even know who the current seat holder, Joseph Crowley, is,” said Nikki Vega, a policy team leader on Ocasio’s campaign.
Patrick Bush, a resident of the 14th congressional district, was one of those people. He believes that it is the lack of knowledge about local politics that allowed Trump to be elected.
“I was just as guilty of that as anyone else,” said Bush. “Local politics have always been important, but folks have their heads in the sand.”
Ocasio and Crowley, the incumbent Democrat, are currently the only two candidates on the ballot, as the Republicans have not announced who will be running for the seat. One of the major differences between Ocasio and Crowley, her volunteers say, is that Ocasio does not take money from corporate donors, making her responsible only to her constituents.
Another is that Ocasio is from the district she is running in, has a history organizing in the district and is representative of the people in her district. As a young Latina, she understands the people in her neighborhood’s identities more so than Crowley, an older white man. Crowley’s campaign could not be reached for comment.
Although women make up over 50 percent of the U.S. population, they make up less than a quarter of all elected politicians according to a Rutgers study. Less than a quarter of those women are women of color.
In order to engage potential voters in the district, volunteers with the campaign have been engaging the constituents in the issues that most impact their districts. According to Day at Brand New Congress, those issues include the economy, families, healthcare and immigration.
“We’re targeting the unaffiliated voters, the inactive voters,” said Bilal Tahir, another volunteer for Ocasio’s campaign. “In New York City, the way the voting structure works, if you haven’t voted in a couple of elections, they take you off the voter roll. We’re going around to those people and registering or re-registering them.”
