The inside story of how AOC defeated the Democratic machine

Some congressional seats are safer than Fort Knox, and it just happened to be Joe Crowley’s luck that he had one of these, in the outer New York boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. A native of Queens, Crowley first won election in New York’s 7th District in 1998, a tribune of lunch-pail Democrats who were central to New York’s legend about itself. Fourteen years later, the district was redrawn to include a slice of the Bronx and rechristened the 14th District. Crowley easily won that too.

By 2016, Joe Crowley was one of the elder statesmen of the national Democratic Party. And though the New York seat gave him no worry, he yearned to ascend ever higher in the party’s power structure in Washington, D.C. Crowley saw his chance in the aftermath of the cataclysm that was the 2016 presidential election. Colleagues grappling with President Trump’s appeal to working class whites pushed him to challenge Nancy Pelosi, the powerful California Democrat slated to become House minority leader of the 115th Congress.