The 116th Congress also demonstrated that political influence outside of Washington does not always translate into legislative victories, as progressives are promising.

Without question Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s influence on the Democratic Party also is striking in modern politics for a freshman House member. In her first few months in office she got normally skittish Democrats and some early presidential candidates to sign on to her Green New Deal (introduced with Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts), forced a national conversation about marginal tax rates and Medicare for All, helped tank a plan for Amazon to move to Queens, and catalyzed a vast rejection of corporate PAC money for incumbents who had just a year ago eschewed that plan as impractical at best, unilateral disarmament at worst.

But here was the reality for progressives: Medicare for All got little more than a hearing or two, while the House passed bill after bill pressing more incremental health care changes (but none of which the Republican-controlled Senate would even entertain). The Green New Deal had a messy if high-profile roll out, then fizzled. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not have even the modest legislative victories enjoyed by other freshman Democrats like Joseph Neguse of Colorado, Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Lauren Underwood of Illinois, who ran on getting health care bills on the floor.

What is more, many Democrats began to fret early on that the far left was going to do to them what the Tea Party had done to Republicans a few years back: Run them out of town, one primary at a time. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez previously suggested that Democrats who were not sufficiently loyal to an emergent brand of progressive politics should have others like her run against them in a primary. She is now suggesting that, exit polling be damned, Mr. Biden’s latest string of successes is because of the strong-arming of corporate lobbyists, something Mr. Sanders has underscored by repeatedly calling Mr. Biden the establishment candidate.

But the results speak for themselves. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez threw her weight behind Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez in her Senate primary campaign in Texas to defeat the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s chosen candidate, M.J. Hegar. Ms. Hegar ended up easily outpacing a crowded Democratic field.

“There are some people who one don’t really seem to understand the math of the majority making,” said Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a former intelligence officer, whose Richmond-area district had been held by Republicans for decades. “There’s some people that just think that we’re out of touch and that if we just worked hard, more Democrats would come out of the woodwork, and so we should just try to say all the things that excite all the Democrats. You can say that until you’re blue in the face, but there are just not that many Democrats in my district.”

Jennifer Steinhauer, a political reporter for The Times, is the author of the forthcoming “The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress.”

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