The core of Ayanna Pressley’s campaign message in ousting Rep. Mike Capuano — the promise that a younger woman of color was worth dumping a reliably liberal, older white male incumbent — represented a serious departure from past party practice. | Bill Sikes/AP Photo Elections ‘This is the first wave of an invasion’ Channeling their anger, progressives are staging their own tea party-style revolt.

Ordinary voters flocking to political protests. Activists channeling their anger at the president and his policies. Several otherwise safe incumbents taken down in primaries.

Nearly a decade after conservative activists turned their anger at then-President Barack Obama and federal spending into the tea party movement, progressive Democrats are staging their own revolt.


Their primary victories — from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley in the Northeast to Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum in the South — reflect the emerging influence of a younger and more diverse generation of Democrats infuriated not only by President Donald Trump, but by what they view as their own party’s fecklessness in Washington.

Like the tea party in 2010, the movement’s first victims are members of a congressional wing that’s seen as out of touch at the grass-roots level.

“This is the first wave of an invasion to attack the things that this [younger] generation is experiencing as pain: Student loan debt, lack of affordable health care, the anger and a sense of dis-inclusion,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist based in New York. “It is the generational revolt of the ’60s that is occurring in the early part of the 21st century. And the issue is less so Trump than it is the condition of a society that they believe will have limited options for them.”

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He added, “In order to change that, you’ve got to get rid of the old, and bring in the new.”

While Ocasio-Cortez’s toppling of 10-term Congressman Joe Crowley in New York two months ago stunned the Democratic Party, by the time long-shot challenger Pressley repeated the feat in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the outcome was far less shocking.

The core of Pressley’s campaign message in ousting Rep. Mike Capuano — that, in a majority-minority district, the promise of a younger woman of color was worth dumping a reliably liberal, older white male incumbent — represented a serious departure from past party practice. But it made perfect sense to a younger and more radicalized Trump-era Democratic electorate in Capuano’s liberal, Boston-area district.



Pressley’s win capped two weeks of party establishment setbacks, including Gillum’s upset last week of former Rep. Gwen Graham in Florida’s gubernatorial primary. On Tuesday, the forces of the progressive tea party appeared to leave their mark in another major race — playing at least a supporting role in Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision not to seek a third term.

The brash Chicago mayor had a difficult, though eminently winnable, reelection campaign ahead. But as a devotee of a vision of Democratic Leadership Council-oriented centrist governance that is no longer in favor — particularly in the nation’s biggest cities — Emanuel’s path to a third term figured to be a painful slog.

Though he had engineered the Democratic Party’s takeover of the House in 2006, back home progressives had long since left his side. And had he won another term, he faced the prospect of a City Council fortified with even more progressives.

Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said it would be wrong to characterize progressive momentum as a “left tea party movement.” But he acknowledged a change in approach to elections from within the Democratic Party this year, with voters abandoning concerns about moderation in the primaries.

“There’s no question that people feel we need change. That’s what this whole wave is all about,” he said. “But I don’t characterize it as an anti-establishment movement … The first thing we bring up to our party activists [is] ‘Don’t think that your candidates are going to have a better chance of getting elected because they’re middle-of-the-road candidates.’”

Hinojosa said, “We are going to party activists, to county chairs, to members of clubs, to people who are coming to our trainings, and we’re telling them, if you want to win, discard all these concerns that you had in the past about these labels and brands. You need to talk about what’s important to these people and families, and if people are branded as too progressive, so be it.”

Ideologically, there has been little to separate many of the Democratic Party’s insurgents from their more established foes. But in profile and style, there are wide gulfs between them, marked by the high-profile victories of women and young, non-white Democrats. Their rhetoric echoes complaints made by conservative activists in 2010 about the disconnect between Washington representatives and their constituents — and about the fitness of incumbent politicians to serve.

“We committed to running a campaign for those who don’t see themselves reflected in politics or government, and are forever told that their issues, their concerns, their priorities can wait,” Pressley told cheering supporters on Tuesday.

“These times,” she said, “demanded more from our leaders, and from our party.”

And while Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez did not carry the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of the tea party movement, the warlike framing of the primaries have been in full effect.

At her victory party on Tuesday, Presley said voters understood that “with our rights under assault, with our freedoms under siege, that it’s not just good enough to see the Democrats back in power, but it matters who those Democrats are.”

“Are you ready to bring change to Washington?” she asked, leading the crowd in chants of “Change can’t wait!”

Sal Russo, a former Reagan aide and Tea Party Express co-founder, said Wednesday that as he watched Democrats’ angst about Trump unfold last year, he initially did not see a resemblance to the tea party.

But a year later, Russo said, “Now there’s an agenda … Repeal the tax cut, Medicare for all and free higher education.” While maintaining that such policy positions will not resonate widely in November, he said progressive Democrats are “a lot more focused” than in 2017.

Howard Kaloogian, another Tea Party Express co-founder and a former California state lawmaker, described the Democratic Party’s current political climate, as for Republicans in 2010, as reflecting an “anti-establishment mood,” while noting the “great dissimilarity in the direction that the anti-establishment movement is taking.”

So far, the force of the progressive left on the midterms has not yet fully matched the pandemonium the tea party wrought on the GOP in 2010. And many Democrats loathe the comparison.

“This is just the base showing up,” said Michael Blake, a New York assemblyman and vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “This is more about a very granular, grass-roots approach in a midterm election that we haven’t seen before. … The base is not just going to show up when Obama’s on the ballot. People are ready to go.”

While Democrats are recoiling from Trump, Blake said they are also animated by new causes and candidates.

“People are genuinely excited about Ayanna,” he said. “They are genuinely excited about Andrew. They are genuinely excited about Alexandria. Being angry is not enough.”

In November, Blake said, “this election is going to be an opportunity to demonstrate, for the first time in a lot of ways … that people are mobilized and focused.”

In fact, Republicans have seized on the Democratic Party’s leftward shift, much as Democrats once sought to frame tea partyers as extremists. Rep. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, has whacked Ocasio-Cortez as a “socialist” — she describes herself as a “democratic socialist.”

The Republican Governors Association greeted Gillum’s primary victory with a statement that repeatedly referred to him as a “far-left radical.”

And Trump, framing Gillum’s contest against DeSantis, amplified the point on Twitter last week, "Not only did Congressman Ron DeSantis easily win the Republican Primary, but his opponent in November is his biggest dream ... a failed Socialist Mayor named Andrew Gillum who has allowed crime & many other problems to flourish in his city. This is not what Florida wants or needs!”

Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez are heavily favored to win election. But as with conservatives in the tea party, the test for progressive Democrats more broadly is to extend their appeal beyond base primary voters — and, if successful, remake the Democratic establishment in their image.

“The question is, can the Democrats sustain this and can they govern with new faces in a very disparate and diffuse party,” Sheinkopf said. “If they try to govern, their coalition is going to be very difficult to manage … The rules with which we normally define American politics are changing.”

In his concession speech Tuesday, Capuano acknowledged the shifting winds within the party — and the disillusionment catching incumbent Democrats in its wake.

“Clearly, the district wanted a lot of change,” he said. “Apparently the district just is very upset with lots of things that are going on. I don’t blame them. I’m just as upset as they are.”

He added, “So be it. This is the way life goes.”

