Crowley sat on his hind end and didn’t make the rounds.
Via WACH:
A campaign manager who moonlights as an energy healer. A photographer who sings in a heavy metal band. A Muslim progressive activist who runs a cooking blog in her spare time. These are some of the political outsiders who helped propel 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a massive Democratic primary upset and into the national spotlight.
If it seems Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign crew is unconventional, that’s sort of the point. She said she intentionally built her team from the ranks of burgeoning progressive and social causes, not from the traditional Democratic Party machine.
“The best way to build this campaign was to organize around the groups that were already working and organize around the issues that mattered to them,” said Ocasio-Cortez, explaining that she drew from such groups as Democratic Socialists of America, Muslims for Progress and Black Lives Matter.
In the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning primary victory over 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Bronx and Queens, her campaign drew high marks for its consistent message of social justice, door-to-door outreach, aggressive social media, a slickly produced video that went viral and even a bold campaign poster.
“We didn’t dare to hope we had a chance, but in our hearts, we believed we would win,” said Daniel Bonthius, a 32-year-old former actor who started out as the campaign’s first spokesman and eventually became Ocasio-Cortez’s scheduler and “body man.”
Like any millennial movement, the campaign had its roots on social media. Bonthius posted a Facebook message asking his friends to wake up to the political process, and they decided to meet up once a week. The friends soon joined Indivisible, a network of groups opposed to President Donald Trump’s policies.
After hearing about Ocasio-Cortez’s primary bid on The Young Turks, a progressive commentary program on YouTube, one of the group’s members invited her to their weekly meeting. Over the next months, she worked house parties and political rallies to recruit people who were passionate about social activism and ready to engage in an election campaign.
For her campaign manager, she selected Virginia Ramos Rios, a 46-year-old who has a background in insurance marketing and energy healing. She’s studied past life regression therapy and periodically performs chakra healing. But after a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the frustrations of navigating health insurance, she turned to politics.
Like Ocasio-Cortez, she was a campaign organizer for Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders. Her only previous experience running a campaign was for a far-left City Council candidate who lost last year but surprisingly garnered nearly 30 percent of the vote.
When she joined Ocasio-Cortez, one of her first jobs was to bring order to the enthusiasm. “No one was going up against the party boss,” Ramos Rios said. “That was electrifying and exciting.”
Naureen Akhter, a 30-year-old co-founder of a progressive Muslim group and part-time food blogger, said she joined as a neighborhood campaign captain after Ocasio-Cortez went out of her way to welcome her. “There was room for anyone willing to do the work,” she said.