Congressional Primary Challengers Seek to Keep Progressive Tide Going

After scoring primary victories in Congressional races in New York, Texas, and Oklahoma, progressives have their sights set on two other races in which entrenched, corporate-funded Democrats are facing challengers from their left. 

Cori Bush of Missouri and Alex Morse of Massachusetts could both make history, and send shockwaves through the Democratic political establishment, if they emerge victorious in their challenges to unseat William Lacy Clay Jr. and Richie Neal, respectively. 

“I am the people that I serve,” Cori Bush commonly says. It’s not just a slogan. Bush is an activist, nurse, single mother, and ordained pastor from St. Louis, who volunteered her services as a nurse during the protests in Ferguson in 2014. A member of the original cohort of Ferguson Black Lives Matter activists, she has gained traction in recent weeks as she was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Jamaal Bowman, and the Sunrise Movement.

On the other hand, Bush’s opponent, Lacy Clay, is a member of a political dynasty that has held the seat for more than fifty years, who is facing what is likely to be his most serious challenge yet from Bush, who outraised the ten-term incumbent Democrat by $100,000 this past FEC cycle. 

In late July, Bush launched her first TV ad, where she accused Clay of “presiding over twenty years of decline,” while emphasizing the need for bold leadership on issues of racial, social, and economic injustice. 

The Missouri primary election on August 4 is Bush’s second attempt to oust Clay. In 2018, she still won 36.9 percent of the vote to Clay’s 56.7 percent. 

“Last time, a lot of people left the polls saying, ‘Oh my goodness, I thought you were a white man,’ ” Bush stated in reference to the inability of her 2018 campaign to build strong name recognition with voters in the majority-minority district. 

This time, her campaign is much more equipped for the challenge, having more in the most recent FEC quarter than she did throughout her entire 2018 run .    

Having struggled with houselessness and police brutality firsthand, Bush is an outspoken advocate on issues of income inequality and policing. As a nurse, she can testify to the dysfunction of the American healthcare system. And as an activist, she has fought against police brutality and made it a key part of her platform long before it became a politically advisable decision. 

Bush’s chances have also been buoyed due to the decision of the progressive group, Fight Corporate Monopolies, to invest in a six-figure ad buy, calling out Clay for voting with Republicans and opposing President Barack Obama’s “fiduciary rule,” which provided financial security primarily to low-income families. 

Fight Corporate Monopolies is also making another six-figure ad buy in the Massachusetts race, in which Alex Morse is challenging incumbent Richie Neal. The ads, which highlight Neal’s votes for corporate friendly resolutions and his overwhelming fundraising from big corporations, have been airing in the Springfield-Holyoke TV market since the first week of July. 

Similar to Clay in St. Louis, Neal is overwhelmingly funded by large corporations, with less than 0.5 percent of his campaign funding leading up to the September 1 primary election coming from small dollar donations. 

Alex Morse, the openly gay, thirty-one-year old mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, made history in 2011, when (during in his final year of college), he won his bid for mayor, ousting incumbent Elaine Puta. Since then, he has presided over a rapid decline in the city’s crime rates and a twenty-point increase in high school graduations. He’s also been an outspoken progressive voice, being the first mayor in the state to support the legalization of marijuana. 

“I knocked on thousands of doors, ran a very grassroots campaign, reached out and included the Latino community for the first time in decades and became the youngest and first openly gay mayor of the city,” Morse said in a recent interview in Salon “Nine years later, I’m still the mayor, in my fourth term. I’m thirty-one years old, and now I’m running for Congress.”

Unlike Neal, Morse is funded almost entirely by small donors, with 95 percent of his fundraising coming from donations of less than $200, according to the Federal Elections Commission. He also raised only $14,993 less than Neal, who is among the top recipients of corporate PAC money in Congress. 

A recent endorsement by Jamaal Bowman, who defeated Eliot Engel, a sixteen-term Democatic incumbent in a Congressional primary in New York, has helped Morse raise money for a TV ad of his own. The ad describes his experience of losing a brother to an opioid overdose, an experience sadly not uncommon in New England, which has been hard-hit by the opioid epidemic. 

Morse has also been able to chip away at Neal’s institutional support, recently garnering the backing of the LGBT Victory Fund. He’s endorsed by the majority of city council members in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and by the president of the city council in Springfield, the largest city in the district. Recently, Morse was endorsed by Massachusetts’s largest (and America’s third-largest) nurses’ union, which opted not to endorse Neal due to his opposition to universal health care and ties to large pharmaceutical and insurance corporations.

Both Bush and Morse are endorsed by Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, two groups that played an integral part in Jamaal Bowman’s victory. The full apparatus and infrastructure of these progressive movements, combined with the rising tide of American progressivism, has made these challengers all the more formidable.

Though both Bush and Morse remain underdogs, they are among the remaining progressive primary challengers with the best chance of scoring upsets that could replace old members of the Democratic Congressional establishment with new members of The Squad.