By C.M. Lewis and Kevin Reuning

Incumbent Democrats have good reason to be worried.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset primary victory over Joe Crowley, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in House leadership, signaled that the Left is no longer content to settle for the incrementalism of the Democratic old guard and that the base is willing to buck the familiar.

Although the Left’s political influence is still limited in the grander scheme of American politics, organizations like Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America are utilizing the 2020 campaign as an opportunity to push for left-wing politics. And as with any attempt to change the status quo, this comes with significant pushback, including attempts to blacklist anyone helping to challenge incumbent Democrats.

But what does all this actually mean for policy? We decided to measure that by assessing differences through a core issue: organized labor.

We picked it for two main reasons. First, tackling income inequality⁠—particularly through strengthening organized labor⁠—has been a key position in the Left’s resurgence. Second, unions are arguably the most powerful organized institutions that undergird Democratic and otherwise left-of-center politics. When these two things are taken into account, and you throw in the ongoing strike wave, it’s no surprise that organized labor has been front and center in the Democratic political discussion in a way it hasn’t in decades.

So one would expect progressive insurgents running against staid old guard Democrats to highlight their ideas on labor and their union bona fides.

To test this we measured both incumbents and their primary or presumptive general election challengers by their record on labor policy. We started by identifying their position on the progressive labor policies that we previously found to be widely popular along with other mainstream progressive policy proposals. In sum we looked at the following categories:

Expanding Union Rights?

Raise the Minimum Wage?

Federal Jobs Guarantee?

Worker Representation on Corporate Boards?

Card Check Elections?

Ban Right-to-Work?

Ban Bad Actors From Federal Contracting?

Ban Forced Arbitration?

Just Cause?

Federal Right to Strike?

Resolve First Contract Disputes?

End Domestic Worker Loophole?

End Agriculture Worker Loophole?

Worker Misclassification?

Sectoral Bargaining?

Repeal Taft-Hartley?

After collecting data, we used a latent variable model, commonly used to identify the broad ideology position of elected officials. This allows us to estimate candidates and incumbents on a scale of labor progressivism. The results are surprising.