“I’m going to Congress to break down the doors of power,” says Zephyr Teachout, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 19th congressional district.



An outspoken critic of big business and money in politics, Teachout was endorsed by Bernie Sanders in April. On Tuesday she won the primary for Catskills and the Hudson Valley in a landslide, with 73.2% of the vote.

In November she will go up against Republican John Faso, in an attempt to be one of a slew of progressive candidates to win public office in 2016.

“Congress is corrupt, gridlocked, broken, dysfunctional,” Teachout says. “It’s not working and we need it working again. It’s not going to get fixed by people who are deeply, in one way or another, inside this really broken system.”

Teachout was born in Seattle and grew up on a farm in Vermont. A Yale graduate, now 44, she is an associate law professor at Fordham University who has occasionally written for the Guardian. In 2014, she ran in the Democratic primary against the state’s incumbent governor, Andrew Cuomo. Despite raising only $800,000, she won a third of the vote.

That brought Teachout’s liberal bona fides to a wider audience, but she had been active in progressive politics for much longer. She was involved in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, attending the group’s nightly general assemblies and serving as part of its legal working group. In 2012 she wrote an essay, Legalism and Devolution of Power in the Public Sphere: Reflections on Occupy Wall Street, for the Fordham Urban Law Journal.

Like Sanders, who encouraged his supporters to fundraise for progressive candidates, Teachout has seen an influx of supporters not usually associated with political campaigns.

“We have great teenagers who volunteer in our office, and people in their 20s and 30s who don’t get involved in that many political campaigns,” she says.

Zephyr Teachout outside a voting station at Public School 153 in New York City in 2014, during her run for governor. Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

She believes Sanders’ presidential campaign has been key in attracting formally disengaged voters to politics.

“One of the more important things the Bernie Sanders campaign did is reach people who are political but not electorally political. They’re political in either non-profits or community groups, but didn’t see how important it was to get involved in electoral politics.”

But her support doesn’t just come from Sanders fans – Teachout says her most active volunteer is actually a Hillary Clinton supporter – and she believes the interest in more progressive, non-establishment candidates can be traced much further back than Sanders.

“The financial crash of 2008, and then, in my district, Hurricane Irene and then later [Hurricane] Sandy, it was both a financial collapse and then signs of fundamental instability in the climate that changed people’s own understanding of politics.

“People saw this crash and then these really wake-up environmental moments, and nothing really changed. And that didn’t make any sense.”

Teachout is hoping a grassroots campaign can overcome Faso, who is backed by a Super Pac called New York Wins. The primary funder of that organisation is Robert Mercer, a hedge fund manager who reportedly pumped $11m into Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

Her campaign, based in Kingston, New York, has women in key roles. “Women’s voices need to be in politics,” she says, “and shaping politics from the very beginning, not serve as an afterthought. She is confident she can appeal to voters.

“People are looking for someone who’s going to be independent, and listen, and not be afraid,” she says. “People don’t need to contend every issue. They just want somebody who is going to be willing to fight.

“And bring some joy to it.”