Cori Bush’s Win Shakes Big Donors’ Control
On Tuesday night, St. Louis nurse and activist Cori Bush became the latest progressive to topple a fellow Democrat. Her primary victory was over William Lacy Clay Jr., a congressman in his 10th term from one of Missouri’s most powerful political families.
Bush joins political insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman who have challenged high ranking members of the Democratic establishment used to claiming the progressive mantle as their own. Clay, for example, has supported some progressive policies like the Green New Deal, and his father was a prominent civil rights figure (who all but handed his son his seat in 2001). Ocasio-Cortez’s opponent Joe Crowley spent much of his campaign bashing Donald Trump, and Bowman’s opponent, Eliot Engel, was elected in 1989 and has voiced support for single-payer health care and reproductive rights.
But all of these establishment Democrats used their time in office to accumulate corporate donors who have fed Congress members’ insatiable hunger for campaign funds. Cori Bush’s supporters criticized Clay for helping payday lenders. Crowley had taken Wall Street cash and helped out the industry in turn. And Engel, who served on the foreign affairs committee, took money from the defense industry.
As money has steered the pillars of the Democratic establishment toward the right, their left flank has been increasingly exposed to a new generation largely funded, in the style of Bernie Sanders, by small donors. The new crop of candidates is therefore free to make their names on policies long abhorred by corporate America, from Medicare for All to a radical Green New Deal.
Progressive Democrat Cori Bush just beat the 20-year incumbent in a Democratic primary for a seat in Congress.
— AJ+ (@ajplus) August 6, 2020
If she wins in November, she'll be the first Black woman to represent the state of Missouri in Congress. pic.twitter.com/lCTNsVt9ls