The New York City native progressives thought they’d be celebrating this election cycle was Brooklyn’s own Bernie Sanders. Instead they’ve been celebrating Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal from the Bronx. Bowman resoundingly defeated Eliot Engel, the 16-term chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in New York’s 16th Congressional District, in one of the biggest takedowns of a Democratic leader in years.
Nearly everything had to fall into place perfectly to even imagine the outcome. Engel did his part to lose the election, making high-profile gaffes and avoiding his hard-hit district during the worst months of the coronavirus. Bowman, meanwhile, took to the streets during the George Floyd protests, allying himself with a powerful local movement, and showcasing his particular skill as a speaker and campaigner.
But it wasn’t just what Bowman did, or Engel didn’t do, that made the race so important. Bowman’s campaign was advised, supported, and flanked by a rapidly evolving progressive electoral apparatus that, on that night in late June, announced itself as a fully formed campaign coalition. Numerous firms providing advertising, polling, email, and voter outreach, many of them outside the usual wheelhouse of Democratic politics, emerged as a viable force that could face up to the most powerful members of the Democratic establishment and win.
The left has long been criticized for its disorganization. And yet here was a multipronged battalion of independent groups toppling an entrenched incumbent. How did that happen? What brought this growing assemblage of progressive campaign infrastructure together was not the charming principal from New York; it was instead a staggering strategic misstep from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democrats’ official recruiting, fundraising, and campaign organizing body in the House. As the 2020 election cycle was getting under way, the DCCC attempted to preempt the new progressive electoral movement before it took off. And it backfired spectacularly.
In March 2019, just weeks after the 116th Congress was sworn in, the DCCC issued a formal statement that any firm, consultant, vendor, strategist, or pollster that signed up to work on a primary challenge would be forbidden from receiving any future contracts to work on other DCCC-run races. The DCCC has long been known to be averse to primary challenges; its business is incumbency protection. But this was something different.
While the language officially referred to barring vendors from working with any “opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus,” everyone knew it was directed at progressives challenging incumbents from the left. The move was unprecedented and shocking. Progressive primary challenges were hardly an existential threat to Democratic incumbents. The Squad was only a few weeks old, and half of its four members had won in open seats. But the goal was clear: stanch the flow of talent and resources to progressive candidates, fatally wounding their chances to take on sitting members of Congress.
The decision, made by DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos and upheld by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, did exactly the opposite. Rather than scatter and isolate progressives, it drove them into collaboration. Exiled from the walled garden of the Democratic establishment, this newly activated pool of strategists, pollsters, campaigners, vendors, email writers, and video makers pulled together to create a self-contained political ecosystem that could challenge incumbents, despite financial limitations and outlaw status. They methodically identified districts where incumbents might be vulnerable, where the voter base had moved left of their representation, and where, with the right strategy, a challenger could compete if these groups all piled in to help. And they did so with a newfound urgency: If they didn’t win, there would be no contracts from other races to tide them over.
“For the first time ever, progressive organizations and vendors were literally pledging to work on primaries,” said Waleed Shahid, spokesperson for Justice Democrats. “It happened because Cheri Bustos overplayed her hand.”
The strategy paid off. Bowman won handily, and one month later, Cori Bush did the same thing in Missouri, knocking off ten-term incumbent William Lacy Clay, a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee. Clay’s father held the seat before him; next year, the district will have its first representative outside the Clay family in 52 years. Bowman and Bush joined Marie Newman, who defeated anti-choice eight-term Democrat Dan Lipinski in Chicago. Add to that Mondaire Jones, whose looming campaign announcement was rumored to have pushed 30-year incumbent Nita Lowey into retirement, who then bested several challengers in that open seat in the district next to Bowman’s. Add that up, and progressive newcomers took down 98 years of seniority in just a few weeks.
Just 18 months on, the blacklist has been the best thing ever to happen to the progressive movement, the surprise catalyst that helped transform some promising if scattered political elements into a powerful compound in a surprisingly short time. “The ecosystem for support is the best it’s been since 1936 when the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] was helping people get elected to office,” said Shahid. If the left continues on this road, building a critical mass and beginning to meaningfully sway the direction of Democratic policy, they will have Cheri Bustos to thank.
The DCCC blacklist has been the best thing ever to happen to the progressive movement.
THE QUESTION OF when this story begins is the subject of some disagreement. What’s certain, however, is that even a few years ago, a winning progressive campaign infrastructure didn’t exist. And without Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly successful presidential run in 2016, it still wouldn’t.
Spores of that campaign flew to various groups, and germinated new ones, many of which focused on the thin progressive bench in Congress. In 2016, only one senator (Jeff Merkley of Oregon) and seven sitting House Democrats endorsed Sanders; progressives hadn’t focused enough attention down-ballot. A combination of seasoned progressives frustrated with the status quo and a horde of newly animated young people set to work on competing in electoral politics, a playing field where previous versions of the left had seen little success. Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, and Indivisible all sprung up basically overnight, while more veteran groups, like Democracy for America and the Working Families Party, recommitted anew.
Many of these groups were headed up by people in their twenties, who, perhaps to a fault, believed in Bernie’s near-miss result. “Bernie’s candidacy in 2016 made a lot of people realize that transformative populist left politics was possible at a big scale,” said Joe Dinkin, campaign director at the Working Families Party.
Developing various electoral theories, recruiting candidates, honing messaging strategies, and building a base and fundraising on the fly, these upstart groups aimed at the 2018 midterms with buckshot. Brand New Congress endorsed 30 candidates; Justice Democrats recruited 12 candidates and endorsed another 66.
In some sense, they picked up in 2018 where Bernie left off: losing. Running multiple candidates for office requires a lot of cash, which they didn’t have. The progressive seal of approval wasn’t enough against an entrenched, well-funded, and experienced electoral machine. Many of the races were long shots, but the results weren’t all that heartening. Justice Dems won under 10 percent of their races in the first cycle; Brand New Congress saw just one of its 30 endorsees win office. There were some near misses—Indivisible nearly got endorsee Andrew Gillum over the hump in the Florida governor’s race—but elections, in many ways, are nothing like horseshoes. You only win if you win.
After those losses, some wondered whether starting out in the House was presumptuous, and whether building the bench in state legislatures and city councils was the better way to go. If Sanders winning would’ve meant building electoral power from the top down, and state legislatures represented more of a bottom-up approach, targeting the House was like starting in the middle. (Indeed, the Working Families Party did work hard on those local and state races in 2018, with some success.) Meanwhile, the mainstream press and some Democratic establishment politicos delighted in the perceived 2018 flop. They insisted repeatedly that Democrats retook the House in spite of progressive challengers, and on the backs of the unassailable moderates.
But there were two shock exceptions. First, of course, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City, one of the most exhaustively analyzed primary races in history. Catalogued in everything from major magazine profiles to a Netflix documentary, the story of a 28-year-old former bartender knocking off a ten-term incumbent and member of the House leadership, Joe Crowley, made for an irresistible political story in the post-Obama era.
The AOC victory “was a major turning point,” said Lucy Solomon, independent expenditure political director at Indivisible. “It proved that it was possible for progressives to compete and win even against longtime incumbents.”
And then, a few months later, Boston city councilmember Ayanna Pressley toppled Michael Capuano, another ten-term incumbent. Pressley was an experienced politician, and Capuano pretty progressive in his own right. But there was a common thread: two left-wing women of color defeating white men in diverse, heavily Democratic districts. Once is an aberration, twice is a trend. “Losing sucks,” said Luke Hayes, a veteran progressive staffer who in 2020 became Jamaal Bowman’s campaign manager. “But winning—the door opens.”
The shared traits in those victories by Pressley and AOC, in tandem with Squad colleagues Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib winning open seats in deep-blue districts, sketched the contours of a possible strategy going forward. The way to put progressives in power, it seemed, was not to go wide on dozens of candidates, but to get narrow on a small number of races, mostly in liberal neighborhoods, and go all in, building compelling narratives around particular candidates over a sustained period of time.
The Democratic establishment and the D.C. press corps continued to dismiss progressives as the new Congress was sworn in. “They flipped exactly zero House seats. Zero point zero,” boasted senior vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way Matt Bennett, not entirely correctly (California’s Katie Porter, a progressive, won a narrow red-to-blue victory in the state’s 45th District). But if the party showed no concern outwardly, the DCCC blacklist issued in March 2019 belied that confidence.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Bernie Sanders’s surprising 2016 presidential campaign showed the viability of progressive politics.
CHERI BUSTOS, A FOUR-TERM moderate from the Quad Cities area of Illinois, unveiled the policy in the 2020 DCCC preferred-vendor form, swaddled in a statement on the committee’s commitment to diversity. Bustos, a former PR director for hospital networks who after being elected to Congress joined the bipartisan group “No Labels,” immediately took heat for the decision; even her predecessor, Rep. Ben Ray Luján, termed it counterproductive. But she stuck with the rule, and its implicit attack on progressives.
So much viability in politics comes down to money, and the DCCC is lifeblood for firms working in Democratic politics, especially “red to blue” races, where it spends lavishly to try to flip seats held by Republicans. For some firms, a contract on one red-to-blue race can cover the bills for all its other work. Of course, the DCCC approves which consultants and vendors get those contracts, steering candidates to their approved firms. So for the committee to formally foreclose on the possibility of any firm working with a primary challenger to ever receive such a contract was a galling escalation. When House members in the past were primaried from the right, this response didn’t come. The Republican Party has no similar standard.
No one in Democratic politics, progressive or otherwise, harbored any illusions about the DCCC’s penchant for playing favorites with vendors and consultants, or its tendency to intervene in races for preferred candidates, or even its leaders’ own politics. But protecting incumbents against Republican challenges is a different task than stopping intraparty races in safe seats.
At first, the blacklist did have its intended effect. Cut off from the money needed to sustain their livelihoods, some people jumped ship. Marie Newman, gearing up at the time for a second go at legacy incumbent Dan Lipinski, saw her vendors flee right as the campaign was getting started. “There was a chilling effect for recruiting talent,” said Morgan Harper, who announced a progressive primary challenge against Joyce Beatty in Ohio shortly after the blacklist was published. “You could see the fear in people.” Monica Klein of the newly blacklisted Seneca Strategies wrote in The Intercept, “[A] client told me that two consultants dropped out that morning—and now the candidate may not run at all.”
Staring down what looked like an existential crisis, Justice Democrats came up with a solution: They bought the URL. Quickly, they got dcccblacklist.com up and running, which featured a list of blacklisted firms that were ready to help progressive challengers. “It was one of the smartest things ever,” said Rebecca Katz, whose New Deal Strategies was only a month old when the blacklist was announced.
Dcccblacklist.com became a one-stop shop for would-be candidates to get the campaign support they needed.
The site, built by the blacklisted digital strategy firm Middle Seat, proudly displayed the names of all the blacklisted firms in two long columns, beneath its own call to arms: “The DCCC is using their financial leverage to intimidate and blacklist many hardworking people in our movement in a blatant attempt to protect a handful of out-of-touch incumbents.”
Rather than be bullied into submission, they announced themselves proudly as a ragtag bunch, slingshots in hand, staring down the DCCC’s Goliath. There was Think Rubix, a racial-justice consulting firm; Mijente, a Latinx organizing and campaigns organization; Left Rising, a fundraising organization; Grassroots Analytics, a digital fundraising and strategy firm. The list featured 29 groups in all, many of them no more than a few years old, many of them minority-owned, plus more veteran groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the Center for Popular Democracy, Color of Change PAC, and more.
For those outside the inner circles of politics, the blacklist made the Democratic establishment look villainous, and its outcasts sympathetic. Liberal Democrats and young voters of color became allied with the challenger movement almost by default. “We were trying to turn the attack into something positive, our movement was growing,” said Shahid.
Shortly after, New Deal Strategies began using its blacklist status in advertising. “It was very comforting to be on the blacklist, with other people that share the ideology, working together for a common good,” said Katz. “Instead of it being scary, they were actually opening up a whole new door for us. Those races would not have hired many of us anyway because the DCCC has a whole situation going with their preferred consultants.”
But it wasn’t merely an act of defiance; it proved to be a tactical advantage. All of a sudden, progressive hopefuls and would-be candidates had a one-stop shop to find all the vendors, consultants, strategists, and pollsters needed to make a go of it, gathered under the aegis created for them by the DCCC’s overreach. And because the DCCC had made working for progressive challengers an actual matter of life or death, they expedited progressive groups’ development process, as they built the internal capacity to provide everything a client would need. It grew into a freestanding, independent election machine.
“Firms, vendors, and strategists that are locked out of DCCC now have to work exclusively on progressive candidates,” said Dinkin, of the Working Families Party. “That decision crystallized who was in and … who was out.”
The blacklist even altered the trajectory of more mainstream groups. Indivisible, a post-2016 Resistance outgrowth with local chapters across the country, worked for plenty of DCCC-approved candidates in 2018. But with its endorsement process, it became an ally in the districts progressive primary challengers could win. Soon enough, the national organization was spending on major television ad buys to boost candidates like Alex Morse, who ultimately lost his race against powerful House Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal.
The progressive electoral infrastructure was still young—it existed properly in only one cycle, and was still figuring things out. But thanks in no small part to Bustos’s misstep, they’d managed to create a formal alliance, with a clear, shared vision. Before long, “the blacklist” became shorthand for their website, not the DCCC’s decision. “There was constant communication with other progressive groups on where people are seeing energy,” said Solomon, of Indivisible. It became the “ideological and intellectual center on what our theory of change is.”
The blacklist validated that progressive upstarts were a threat to the House Democratic leadership.
The DCCC could see that ideological center too, however, as the blacklist flushed the perceived enemy out into the open. While Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley had snuck up on their incumbent challengers, that would not happen again. But the blacklist also validated that progressive upstarts were a threat to the House Democratic leadership. Four years prior, it remained an open question as to where progressives should be looking to start gaining a meaningful electoral foothold. House districts that fit a certain set of criteria seemed like a winning possibility, but that was just a guess. “What it confirmed is that the party establishment was scared that we were making inroads there and wanted to do whatever they could to stop that from happening,” said Shahid.
Meanwhile, blacklisted groups began to refine their approach, incorporating new strategies and technologies. REACH, an app used in the Ocasio-Cortez race, helped identify registered voters and steer them to their local polling places. Groups drafted candidates based around strong, progressive policy commitments, and began to attack incumbents for the substance of their records in a way that hadn’t been done before. Fight Corporate Monopolies, a new group formed in the summer, began making major TV ad buys hammering incumbents on past votes. Sanders 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir is an outside consultant to the group, and Morgan Harper joined after her campaign concluded.
Most importantly, progressives began to devise a strategy that would raise enough money for competitors to stay competitive with well-funded incumbents, relying on online donors at the national level and quick, small-dollar appeals throughout the campaign cycle. That was a drastic departure from the DCCC approach, which starts out with how much money a candidate can raise from max donors, and goes from there. “They’ll tell you if you don’t think you can raise $200,000 out of the gate, you probably shouldn’t even bother,” said Harper. “On the establishment side of things, there’s an endless source of money.”
None of these races was going to see a progressive challenger outraise the incumbent, even with an animated national base. But following the Sanders model in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, and Sanders’s blowout fundraising operation in 2020, there was plenty of reason to believe the small-dollar strategy could provide campaigns enough money to at least stay in the neighborhood of those with max-level donors and DCCC support. While trying to raise money down-ballot could seem difficult during a presidential cycle with progressive candidates fundraising in record numbers, it had more of a cumulative effect. And once his presidential race was over, Sanders chipped in, blasting out fundraising calls to his network for a handful of these challengers.
Where candidate dollars couldn’t reach the heights of the incumbent war chests, the groups made a controversial decision: Groups like Justice Democrats and Sunrise created super PACs to run outside ads on digital, TV, and radio, paid for through their networks. Money in politics has long been a cornerstone issue for these progressive candidates; swearing off corporate PAC money has been a minimum requirement. But the question of super PACs was a thorny one. Sanders condemned them categorically in his presidential run. For primary challengers, name recognition is often the biggest deficit to overcome; their fundraising strategy, too, relied on it. So being able to compete on the airwaves, and channel additional resources in tight races, outweighed the moral discomfort.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo
Bowman’s election night party in June. He ultimately defeated House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Eliot Engel by 15 points.
THIS STRATEGY HELPED Bowman tread water against the well-funded Engel campaign, with multiple major ad buys on TV and radio from the Working Families Party and Justice Dems. “Engel and their independent expenditure groups were always going to outspend us on TV,” said Hayes. “But if you’re halfway, you’re in the mix.” Outside ads from blacklisted independent-expenditure groups helped to increase Bowman’s name recognition and highlight the most grievous parts of Engel’s record. “Those outside groups looking at our race found weak spots,” Hayes explained.
Bowman enjoyed a massive ground game, with Justice Democrats and Sunrise teaming up to make over a million phone calls. Data for Progress supplied polling and New Deal Strategies communication services. The campaign did voter outreach on the Reach app and email from Grassroots Analytics.
The Engel campaign, relying on the DCCC-approved vendors and strategists, constantly lagged a step or two behind. When his campaign tried to highlight endorsements that kept coming in from just about every top-ranking Democrat and senior New York congressmen, their digital graphics firm churned out designs that looked like they had been made on Microsoft Paint and expedited via time machine from 2002. So while Jim Clyburn, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and more came running to Engel’s aid, they triggered derision rather than fear.
In one particularly illustrative moment in the race’s final weeks, the Bowman campaign paid $5,000 for a poll from Data for Progress, to get a sense of where they were in the final days. Meanwhile, the Engel campaign had to turn to pre-approved DCCC pollsters for their data, many of which are known to enjoy exorbitant negotiated rates. For polling data in a similar window, the Engel camp spent $45,000, a ninefold markup. And the Engel poll ended up being wrong, giving them false assurances that they weren’t decisively behind. The poll the Bowman campaign commissioned had him up by ten points; in the final tally, he won by 15.
Bowman’s race showed that, with a solid ground game, talented video and email outreach, and a little outside help, these campaigns could be won. “The establishment tries to scare you off by making campaigns out to be ninth-dimensional chess. It’s not that,” said Hayes. “Those in charge are being exposed as frauds in some way.”
The first post-blacklist cycle has still featured losses, some in heartbreaking fashion. In March, attorney Jessica Cisneros, just 26 years old, came within four points of knocking off Henry Cuellar in Texas’s 28th Congressional District. Cuellar, who votes with Republicans consistently and sports an A rating from the NRA, showcased the same dinosaur sluggishness that caught Engel, Lacy Clay, and others flat-footed, first refusing to engage with Cisneros’s challenge at all, then calling in favors with five-alarm urgency. If Nancy Pelosi hadn’t traveled to Laredo to campaign for him in the race’s final days, he may have succumbed. Still, Justice Democrats, which radically narrowed its focus this cycle, has won five of the ten races it has targeted.
Jamaal Bowman’s race showed that, with a solid ground game and a little outside help, these campaigns could be won.
Marie Newman’s victory, which came just a few weeks after Cisneros’s loss, featured a watershed moment for the blacklist team. EMILY’s List, a pro-choice women’s electoral outfit with very institutional liberal commitments, seen by many as simply an extension of the party, made the surprising decision to defy the DCCC and support Newman, the progressive outsider. At the time, Cheri Bustos was supposed to hold a fundraiser with Lipinski, similar to Pelosi and Cuellar, to bail some water out of his sinking campaign. Shortly thereafter, she had to cancel the event, owing to a backlash from abortion rights groups. Among other things, that decision showed just how formidable the blacklist groups who were boosting Newman had become: Mainstream, party-friendly campaign organizations were now unafraid to flout blacklist prohibitions to team up with them. Newman’s successful two-cycle challenge shares more than a few things in common with Cisneros’s race against Cuellar, should she run again.
Of course, the blacklist was never just about incumbent protection, a tacit reality made explicit during the 2020 cycle as well. Antone Melton-Meaux, a more moderate challenger to incumbent Ilhan Omar in Minnesota’s Fifth District, engaged in numerous campaign finance violations in his race, all but admitting to having used shell corporations to circumvent the DCCC blacklist and get access to vendors and strategists that were supposed to be reserved for incumbents only. That resulted in legal action, and in early August, Melton-Meaux got wiped out anyway, 58 to 39.
Nancy Pelosi did endorse Omar. But then, in late August, Pelosi broke ranks to endorse a primary challenger, Joe Kennedy, in his failed attempt to take down incumbent progressive Sen. Ed Markey, co-sponsor of the resolution for the Green New Deal (“the Green Dream, or whatever” in Pelosi’s words). Pelosi’s defense for that action was that she supports “my members,” which … decide for yourself what that means.
If it wasn’t clear before that incumbency wasn’t inviolable and sacrosanct, Pelosi’s endorsement cleared that up. “Cherry-picking races, saying all of these consultants can go help Joe Kennedy isn’t lost on us,” said Rebecca Katz. “It’s not about working for a challenger, it’s working for a challenger on the left.” And it didn’t help; Markey trounced Kennedy anyway.
The wave of progressive primary challenges in the country’s big cities brought a number of enthusiastic young people into the world of campaigning in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere, people whom the Democratic Party had no interest in bringing on board, unless they were willing to run moderate red-to-blue races in exurban swing districts. The party was closing itself off to new technologies, strategies, and talent that could help them win, over an unnecessary incumbent protection gambit.
There’s no reason the DCCC would have to be so adversarial toward progressive primary challenges. They should be a part of any healthy democratic system, and for the Democrats in particular, they’re an effective way of bringing in young talent and building a bench in a party that has an extremely old leadership class and that has struggled to develop, elevate, and maintain young representatives. Not only did a wave of primary challenges from the right resurrect what looked like a flatlining Republican Party in the post-Bush era, there have also been plenty of times when the blacklisted firms and the DCCC are on the same page. Last cycle, the DCCC resisted spending money on progressive Kara Eastman in the swingy Second District in Omaha, Nebraska, and she lost the general election by just a couple of points. But this year, with Eastman winning the primary again and the district within reach for Joe Biden (Nebraska issues its electoral votes by district), the DCCC is playing there. “Sometimes we are in close alignment,” said Solomon at Indivisible.
What’s the future of the blacklist? In some ways, it doesn’t matter. Even if the blacklist is repealed, its legacy in catalyzing a robust and ever-expanding progressive coalition, which still doesn’t even have two full cycles under its collective belt, has been cemented. “We’ve got a nice positive feedback loop going now,” added Hayes.
Even in the final months of the cycle, the strategy has evolved and scaled up its ambition, making inroads in districts that wouldn’t have seemed competitive even early in the year. While AOC and Pressley, and to some degree Bowman, won in urban districts with large minority populations and white representatives, Cori Bush’s win in St. Louis came over a fellow Black candidate in Lacy Clay. Bush beat him as much on his record as anything.
With that trend in place, progressives can now credibly pressure sitting moderates to the left in their legislating, for fear of a forthcoming primary challenge. And with the movement understanding how to handle progressive House races, and redistricting in 2022 potentially opening up new targets, there will be plenty of opportunities to add to the Squad next cycle. And there could be a new frontier: the Senate.
Senate races are far more expensive, spread across a larger geographical region, and require many more votes to win. The grip of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is more iron-clad than the House’s DCCC. But momentum continues to build. Ed Markey’s victory proved that progressives could defend a Senate incumbent from challenge. Charles Booker, a state senator from Louisville, nearly pulled off the unthinkable in a narrow defeat in Kentucky in June, and that was without the total support of the blacklist. The 2022 cycle isn’t far off. And in the epicenter of the progressive left, New York, Chuck Schumer is on the ballot.
