Being a woman, challenging an incumbent and spending little money don’t necessarily stop one from winning a primary, as Democratic underdog Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed Rep. Joseph Crowley and the national Democratic Party in New York’s 14th Congressional District Tuesday night.

About 26 percent of the primary winners on Tuesday were women, including Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist who defeated a ten-term incumbent, Crowley, favored by many to replace House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

More women — both Democrats and Republicans — have advanced to the November ballot at this date in the 2018 election cycle than at this point in any election cycle since at least 1994. 468 women have filed to run for the U.S. House of Representatives so far this year, of which 151 have won their primary — including 119 Democrats and 32 Republicans — and 163 have lost, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. On the Senate side, 51 women have filed to run, of which 8 have won their primaries so far, including incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) who won her uncontested race yesterday, and 29 have lost.

On the other side of the aisle, 8 Republican women moved on to the general election Tuesday joining 26 other women who won primaries earlier this year.

Neither party is close to gender parity, but Democrats are closer than Republicans. About 40 percent of Democratic primary winners for the U.S. House of Representatives this cycle have been women, while women make up only about 12 percent of Republican primary winners so far, according to an analysis done by OpenSecrets.

Ocasio-Cortez, who declined to accept money from PACs, raised nearly 70 percent of her roughly $300,000 in contributions from donations of less than $200, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. Crowley, on the other hand, raised a whopping $2.5 million in contributions, plus an additional $855,000 from other committees for a combined total of 3.3 million raised.

Some of Crowley’s biggest donors were the private equity firm Blackstone Group, New York Life Insurance and Consolidated Edison Inc. During the campaign, Ocasio-Cortez criticized Crowley for taking donations from corporate PACs and Wall Street, which she said made him beholden to corporate interests.

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Ocasio-Cortez bucked the historical trend which shows that incumbents in the House of Representatives have won reelection over 90 percent of the time since 1964, including winning 97 percent of their races in 2016.

Ocasio-Cortez was one of two Democratic women to upset the party establishment on Tuesday. In New York’s 24th Congressional District, Syracuse University professor Dana Balter defeated United States Navy veteran Juanita Perez Williams, who had the support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the lead-up to Tuesday’s primary.

This 24th District Democratic primary was doubly unusual because the DCCC supported Perez Williams by spending nearly $20,000 to get on the primary ballot, while the local Democratic Party in Syracuse threw their support behind Balter. The Democratic Party appeared to be split at the national and local level.

Perez Williams jumped into the race late, starting her campaign in April, and never caught up to Balter in fundraising. Perez Williams raised about $107,000, compared to Balter who raised a little over $300,000. Balter will have her work cut out for her in the general election since her Republican opponent, Rep. John Katko, already has $1.3 million cash on hand while she only has $101,000 as of the pre-primary FEC reports.

In both the 14th and 24th Congressional Districts in New York the underdog came from behind to beat the establishment party pick. However Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Ocasio-Cortez’s win was an isolated one, not to draw bigger conclusions from it.

“They made a choice in one district. So let’s not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that,” Pelosi told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

On the Republican side, two women in Maryland in the 2nd and 6th House Districts won their respective competitive primaries. Liz Matory, the author of “Born Again Republican,” won her four-way primary in the 2nd District taking 42 percent of the vote, while Amie Hoeber crushed her own four-way primary winning almost 70 percent of the vote in the 6th District. Hoeber raised $272,000, spending $172,000 thus far, while Matory had raised just $3,385 as of April 15th.



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