Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Justice Democrats want her victory over Rep. Joe Crowley to be the beginning of a movement rather than just a one-off upset. | Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo Congress Ocasio-Cortez backs campaign to primary fellow Democrats The incoming congresswoman endorses an effort by the group Justice Democrats to make the House Democratic Caucus more liberal and diverse by taking on incumbents.

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday threw her weight behind a new national campaign to mount primaries against incumbent Democrats deemed to be ideologically and demographically out of step with their districts.

The incoming star congresswoman from New York again put the Democratic establishment on notice that she and activist groups on the left aren’t content with a Democratic-controlled House: They are determined to move the party to the left.


"Long story short, I need you to run for office," Ocasio-Cortez said Saturday on a video conference call hosted by Justice Democrats, as the group launched a campaign dubbed “#OurTime.” Justice Democrats supported Ocasio-Cortez's primary campaign against powerful Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.).

"All Americans know money in politics is a huge problem, but unfortunately the way that we fix it is by demanding that our incumbents give it up or by running fierce campaigns ourselves," Ocasio-Cortez added. "That's really what we need to do to save this country. That's just what it is."

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The incoming congresswoman's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, was blunter.

"We need new leaders, period," he said on the call. "We gotta primary folks."

The group said it wants Democratic members of Congress to be representative of their diverse communities and support liberal policies like "Medicare for all," abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, implementing a "Green New Deal" and rejecting corporate PAC donations. On the campaign trail, Ocasio-Cortez talked about forming a "corporate-free caucus" as a means to push for reform. That type of group, if it forms, could turn out to be the left's counterpart to the Freedom Caucus, which pushed Republican leadership to the right.

“I don't think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting climate legislation,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the call.

As for which Democrats they will target, the grass-roots organization welcomed its members to submit nominations of candidates and potential districts to target in 2020. Justice Democrats said it will prioritize women and diversity in its recruitment. All four incoming House members who were backed by Justice Democrats are women of color: Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez.

“If you’re a strong progressive leader in your community and committed to getting money out of politics, I want you to join me in Congress. I want you to run,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter on Saturday

The 29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez and Justice Democrats want her victory over Crowley to be the beginning of a movement rather than just a one-off upset. “We recruited and supported Ocasio-Cortez all the way to a historic victory and now we’re going to repeat the playbook,” Justice Democrats Executive Director Alexandra Rojas said in a statement.

Tlaib, a fellow democratic socialist who had the support of Justice Democrats in her competitive primary for Rep. John Conyers Jr.’s old seat, threw her support behind the new campaign as well.

“Help uplift women like us at all levels of government. We still need more of you to run with us. So get your squad together. We are waiting for you,” Tlaib said in a statement.

The grass-roots group expects to focus more on safe Democratic seats — as Crowley’s was — than on the swing districts, largely centered in the suburbs, that the party won en route to the House majority. That’s a slight shift in strategy after all of the group’s candidates, such as Kara Eastman in Nebraska, came up short in Republican-held congressional districts in 2018. Replacing safe Democratic incumbents with more progressives and diverse leaders, the thinking goes, could move the Overton window of what is and is not acceptable in the Democratic Party.

“There’s lots of blue districts in this country where communities want to support a new generation of diverse working class leaders who fight tirelessly for their voters and build a movement around big solutions to our country’s biggest problems,” said Rojas.

There are parallels between this effort and the tea party movement during Barack Obama’s presidency, when congressmen in solid Republican seats, like former Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia faced primary challenges from the right.

Still, it is unusual for freshmen Democrats to throw their support behind an organization that is threatening to wage primaries against their new colleagues. And it’s unclear whether it could trigger a backlash from incumbent lawmakers who want to take advantage of their newfound majority to get things done, rather than sweating a primary challenge.

But Ocasio-Cortez has already made clear she’s looking to break the mold. During her first week in Washington, she joined a protest in Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, supporting calls for a “Green New Deal."

”It wasn’t a very polite move to do," Chakrabarti said.

Ocasio-Cortez said at the sit-in that she was not there to protest Pelosi but to support the activists and their agenda.

“Should Leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back in showing and pursuing the most progressive energy agenda that this country has ever seen,” she told them. “This is about unity. This is about solidarity.”