Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley campaigning on Medicare for all, guaranteed jobs and abolishing ICE

By Jeff Stein
June 27 at 12:04 AM

The challenger who defeated Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday night campaigned on a suite of socialist policy demands, from a single-payer health-care system to a guaranteed job for every American.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, ran on issues well outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party, including health care, the environment and criminal justice. Her campaign in the Bronx and Queens district lifted her above Crowley, who raised more than $3 million for his campaign.

Ocasio-Cortez also vocally backed calls to “abolish” Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency created in 2003 and increasingly decried by left-leaning activists for its punitive impact on undocumented residents. Only a handful of sitting House Democrats have called for the abolition of ICE, and Crowley did not.

Ocasio-Cortez — an activist who worked as a restaurant server less than a year ago — summarized her policy platform on a one-page sheet distributed at her campaign headquarters in Queens.

Not all these policies reflect legislation that can be signed into law, and many hurdles remain before they could be implemented. Republicans retain control of Congress, and even if Democrats were to take power, it's unclear how many members of the Democratic Party would be on board. These proposals would also involve overhauling rules governing large parts of the U.S. economy, and many details would have to be worked out — including financing.



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