Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) placed two scalps on her belt in Tuesday’s NY primary and President Donald Trump took a minor hit in two congressional primaries, one in North Carolina and one in Kentucky.
AOC easily beat her primary opponent and a candidate she backed, hard left educator Jamaal Bowman, against longtime establishment Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) may have won in a major AOC-sponsored upset.
Engel was first elected in 1988 and became a very powerful Democrat in the House. In this race he was substantially trailing middle school principal Jamaal Bowman. This could mark the second major upset of a veteran New York City Democratic congressman in just two years. The first was AOC’s primary upset win over Joe Crowley in 2018.
But the primary in Engel’s New York’s 16th congressional district was still too close to definitively call at press time. As of 1 a.m. EST Wednesday, Bowman had roughly 61 percent of the counted vote. Engel was in second with about 36 percent of the counted vote. That will be a hard margin for Engel to overcome, but there are outstanding results that could allow him to barely squeak out a victory. Either way it is a tremendous psychological victory for AOC and the New York hard left.
The president backed two GOP primary candidates that went down in defeat on Tuesday. But one victor is a strong supporter of the president and the other votes with the president and the GOP leadership most of the time.
In western North Carolina, GOP voters picked 24-year-old investor Madison Cawthorn, who uses a wheelchair following an accident, over Trump-backed real estate agent Lynda Bennett in that primary. Cawthorn will be the required constitutional age of 25 to sit in the House by the time he may take office next year. Cawthorn has made a point of stressing his strong support of President Trump. The seat is open because former GOP member of the House Mark Meadows left the House to become the president’s chief of staff.
U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a libertarian-leaning member who has clashed with GOP leaders and the GOP House leadership, was re-nominated for a sixth House term. Trump blasted Massie in March as a “disaster for America” who should be thrown out of the Republican Party after he forced lawmakers to return to Washington during the height of the virus to vote on a huge economic relief package.
Other results across the nation contained little surprises, as incumbents from both parties around the country, as is the usual, were easily re-nominated. Advocates of term limits decry this development. However, it is an uphill battle to get the very elected officials who would lose power from the measure to limit their own influence by enacting term limits. As British politician Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Though others have added, “Acton was an optimist.”
This piece was written by David Kamioner on June 24, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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