The Democratic Party just had its Eric Cantor moment. In Tuesday’s New York Democratic primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer, knocked off incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley—the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Crowley was considered by many to be second in line to be speaker of the House if Democrats capture the chamber in the November elections.

Crowley, who is chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, had never faced a serious primary challenge in any of his 10 previous elections. But Ocasio-Cortez picked up steam in the 14th Congressional District by channeling progressive dissatisfaction with New York’s Democratic establishment. She tied Crowley (not unfairly) to Wall Street and real estate interests and argued that it was time for the overwhelmingly nonwhite district to be represented by someone like her, a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. That was a theme of her viral campaign ad:

Although Crowley was a reliable progressive vote in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez offered a platform that was substantially to the left. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was one of the first congressional candidates to call for the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, better known as ICE. With her victory, Ocasio-Cortez is all but assured of becoming the youngest woman ever elected to the House, and she becomes the first Democratic primary challenger to knock off an incumbent member of Congress this year.

Watch the moment Ocasio-Cortez found out she’d won, courtesy of NY1:</s>Progressive challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrartes with supporters at a victory party in the Bronx after upsetting incumbent Democratic Representative Joseph Crowly on June 26, 2018 in New York City. Ocasio-Cortez upset Rep. Joseph Crowley in New Yorks 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens.

ALBANY — About 16,000 voters in two of New York City's outer boroughs sent a message Tuesday that reverberated around the state and country.

Queens Rep. Joseph Crowley's stunning loss to first-time candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Democratic socialist from the Bronx, has the potential to shake up politics in New York and Washington, where Crowley was a high-ranking House member with his eye on succeeding Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

But Ocasio-Cortez's win wasn't the only result to grab headlines in New York, where there were several crowded primaries in marginal districts that Democrats are looking to flip this fall.

More: 2018 primaries: Key takeaways as Democrats get a shock and Trump triumphs

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday's primaries:

Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-NY, speaks about Hillary Clinton's efforts to aid in the recovery after 9/11 during the 2016 Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Arena.

Crowley was part of New York City's old school of politics: He won 10 terms in Congress, rising to become one of the city's most-powerful power brokers as head of the Queens Democrats.

His loss to Ocasio-Cortez, who is poised to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress this fall, was quickly hailed by the more progressive-minded wing of the Democratic Party as a major win over the establishment.

Ocasio-Cortez had support from Our Revolution, the political group that sprung from Bernie Sanders' Democratic presidential run in 2016. Her positions leaned heavily to the left, including support for a Medicare-for-all bill and abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

But she wasn't the only one to beat a Democrat backed by the establishment.

In central New York, Syracuse University visiting professor Dana Balter defeated Juanita Perez-Williams, who had support from Pelosi and the House Democrats' campaign arm.

Balter will take on Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, Onondaga County, in November.

Progressive challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is joined by New York gubenatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon at her victory party in the Bronx after upsetting incumbent Democratic Representative Joseph Crowly on June 26, 2018 in New York City. Ocasio-Cortez upset Rep. Joseph Crowley in New Yorks 14th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens.

New York's often-criticized voting laws split up federal and state primaries, meaning actor Cynthia Nixon's Democratic primary challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo won't be on the ballot until Sept. 13.

But Nixon's campaign — which was badly in need of a boost with a recent public-opinion poll showing her trailing Cuomo by 35 points — saw reason to celebrate Tuesday night.

She and Ocasio-Cortez had endorsed each other's primary bids this week.

Like Ocasio-Cortez did to Crowley, Nixon is challenging Cuomo from the left and will need support from progressive-minded Democrats in New York City to win.

"This is what happens when you give people a choice," Nixon said in a statement. "They show up and they reject the status quo."

Joe Morelle, surrounded by his family including wife Mary Beth, gives his victory remarks after winning the Democratic primary for Congress Tuesday, June 26, 2018 in Rochester.

Elsewhere in New York, the perceived front-runners largely carried the day.

Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, Monroe County, easily won a four-way race in the Democratic primary to succeed the late Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport. He'll take on Republican neurosurgeon James Maxwell in November.

More: Before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, here are 5 of the biggest U.S. political upsets

More: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins an upset and her supporters want the media to say her name

Antonio Delgado, a Kingston attorney, appeared to come out on top of the seven-person Democratic field in the wide-ranging 19th congressional district, which includes the Poughkeepsie area and stretches north toward the Albany area and west into Broome County.

Delgado was a fundraising leader in the race and will now take on Rep. John Faso, R-Kinderhook, Columbia County, in the district that has a near-even split of Democrats and Republicans.

Rep. Eliot Engel, a Bronx Democrat whose district stretches into Westchester County, easily defeated three primary challengers.

More: Eliot Engel wins Congressional primary in landslide, more results

Tedra Cobb, a St. Lawrence County lawmaker, won the Democratic race to take on Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik in the 21st Congressional District, which covers the North Country.

On the Republican side, incumbent Rep. Dan Donovan easily warded off a spirited challenge from former Rep. Michael Grimm of Staten Island, who resigned in 2015 after he was charged with tax evasion. (This was a bit of a surprise: An NY1-Siena College poll released June 4 showed Grimm with a lead.)

Most voters stayed home Tuesday — and that meant some candidates were able to win with support from a fairly small fraction of eligible voters.

Ocasio-Cortez, for example, won with votes from about 16,000 Democrats, according to unofficial results from the state Board of Elections. Crowley picked up about 12,000 votes.

That means about 13 percent of the 214,570 active enrolled Democrats in the district cast a ballot.

Turnout was above average for primary races in Monroe County, where the 25th District is located within.

But even there, unofficial turnout was about 19 percent of active enrolled Democrats. Morelle won with about 15,300 votes.

In the 19th District, which had seven candidates that split votes, Delgado was on pace to win with about 8,000 votes.

5) New York's split primary system had an impact

New York is the only state in the country to split its state and federal primaries. It likely depressed turnout Tuesday.

Only congressional races were on the ballot Tuesday.

Democratic voters will head to the polls again in September to decide between Cuomo and Nixon, as will voters of any party with a contested state legislative primary.

The split dates back to 2012, when a judge moved the federal primary to June to ensure there was enough time before the general election to send absentee ballots to military personnel overseas.

But the Democrat-led state Assembly and Republican-led Senate have been at odds over the state's primary ever since, unable to agree on a date to unify the federal and state races.</s>In a major primary upset, activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat out longtime Democratic New York Rep. Joe Crowley. NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with Ocasio-Cortez.</s>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seen here in a photo provided by her campaign, had never run for public office before her upset victory Tuesday over US Rep. Joe Crowley in New York. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old who is now a new face for the Democratic Party

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seen here in a photo provided by her campaign, had never run for public office before her upset victory Tuesday over US Rep. Joe Crowley in New York.

It was the biggest surprise of Tuesday's primaries.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina and Democratic Socialist running her first political campaign, upset US Rep. Joe Crowley, a 10-term incumbent, in New York's 14th congressional district.

Few experts gave the newcomer much of a chance against Crowley, who outraised her by a 10-to-1 margin. But now they must take notice after the stunning result, which marks a potential sea change in Democratic politics.</s>NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democrats searched for meaning on Wednesday in the shocking upset of U.S. Representative Joseph Crowley, a member of the Democratic House leadership, by a 28-year-old liberal organizer in a New York primary ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Crowley, a 10-term incumbent, was ousted by former Bernie Sanders organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a safely Democratic district in New York City. It was the biggest primary upset since Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost in 2014 to a little-known right-wing professor, Dave Brat.

The outcome in New York added fuel to the battle between the Democratic Party’s establishment wing, led by long-time House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and a more liberal faction inspired by Sanders’ presidential run in 2016.

Some Democrats said the result showed the growing power of the party’s grassroots left-wing insurgents.

“This is yet another canary in the coal mine for both November and the years ahead,” said Joshua Henne, a Democratic strategist. “You can look back four years to around now when Eric Cantor was knocked off and what that meant for an ascendant wing on the right. This is a big deal.”

But Pelosi shrugged off the result. Asked by reporters in Washington if it meant Democratic socialism was ascendant in the Democratic Party, she said: “It’s ascendant in that district, perhaps.”

Along with New York, voters in Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah picked candidates on Tuesday for the Nov. 6 midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress.

Democrats need to flip 23 of 435 seats to take over the House of Representatives, which would stymie much of Trump’s agenda while likely opening up new avenues of investigation into his administration. They would have to net two seats to take the Senate, but face longer odds there.

“The Trump administration is a threat to everything we stand for here in Queens and the Bronx, and if we don’t win back the House this November, we will lose the nation we love,” Crowley said in a statement, pledging to support Ocasio-Cortez in the general election.

In other races, two Republicans backed by U.S. President Donald Trump prevailed in their nominating contests, again underscoring his influence among the party’s voters.

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster beat businessman John Warren in a runoff election held a day after the incumbent campaigned alongside the president.

In a bitter matchup in New York City’s Staten Island borough, incumbent Dan Donovan easily held off the man he replaced in Congress, Michael Grimm, who resigned three years ago after pleading guilty to tax fraud.

“New York, and my many friends on Staten Island, have elected someone they have always been very proud of,” Trump said on Twitter late on Tuesday, congratulating Donovan.

Grimm, a bombastic former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent known for once threatening to toss a television reporter off a balcony, had cast himself as the true Trump supporter in what had become a nasty, insult-laden campaign. He said his conviction was due to a “witch hunt,” echoing Trump’s characterization of the investigation into his campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

The district is considered within reach for Democrats in November.

Elsewhere in the country, liberal Democratic candidates saw mixed results.

In Maryland, Ben Jealous, former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, defeated Rushern Baker, a veteran politician, in what was seen as another win for liberal Democrats.

Jealous would be the state’s first black governor if he can beat popular incumbent Republican Larry Hogan in November.

In Colorado, however, an establishment-backed Democrat defeated a liberal insurgent to win the right to take on incumbent Republican Representative Mike Coffman, whose district favored Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016.

Jason Crow, an Iraq war veteran backed by the national party, overcame Levi Tillemann, who was endorsed by Our Revolution, a group born out of Sanders’ presidential bid. Tillemann earned attention this month with an anti-gun violence video in which he blasted himself in the face with pepper spray.</s>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, in a primary race Tuesday that is widely viewed as one of the most shocking upsets for a Democratic incumbent in more than 10 years.

​Crowley is the fourth-ranking member of the House Democratic leadership and ran unopposed in his last seven races. Despite spending more than $1.2 million compared to Ocasio-Cortez's $128,000, Crowley could garner only 42 percent of his constituents' votes.

"This is not an end, this is the beginning. This is the beginning because the message that we sent the world tonight is that it's not okay to put donors before your community," Ocasio-Cortez told supporters Tuesday night.

"You have given this country hope, you have given this country proof that when you knock on your neighbor's door, when you come to them with love, when you let them know that no matter your stance, you are there for them — that we can make change," she added.

In an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" TV show Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez said that she wants her campaign to counter US President Donald Trump's controversial policies instead of pick Twitter fights with him.

"What we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision that people can believe in, and getting into Twitter fights with the president is not exactly, I think, where we're going to find progress as a nation," she said.

During her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez, who is Puerto Rican and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, advocated for universal healthcare, a federal jobs guarantee and the eradication of controversial laws by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Last Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order purportedly designed to prevent the separation of children from their parents when they are apprehended for illegal border crossings. The move followed leaked videos and images of crying kids locked in cages, which sparked outrage across the political spectrum and drew international opprobrium.

However, the "zero-tolerance" policy remains in place. Trump's order directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to seek changes in what is referred to as the "Flores" settlement agreement in order to detain children longer. Flores v. Reno was a 1997 Federal court ruling that sharply limited the amount of time immigrant children can be placed in detention, a limitation that forms the basis for the government's present policy of separating them from their parents and categorizing them as "unaccompanied immigrant children."

However, according to Lindorff, Ocasio-Cortez's win really isn't all that surprising.

"I think people in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, were well aware that something big was going to happen. I think at times the gilded cage in Manhattan doesn't have a good sense of minority communities," Lindorff told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker.

Lindorff noted the importance of her running on a platform explicitly opposing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), saying, "it's a big deal."

Following Ocasio-Cortez's win, Pelosi told reporters at a news conference Wednesday: "People are saying, ‘Oh, it's because of this, it's because of that.' It's because of a number of things. People will choose their leaders as they do. It's not about me setting somebody up."

"I think something else is afoot, which should be alarming to Republicans in general, but also alarming to establishment Democrats," Lindorff told Radio Sputnik.

"And that is that this particular election with Ocasio-Cortez winning [signifies] the rise of the Puerto Rican vote. She is Puerto Rican and most Hispanic voters in New York are Puerto Ricans for the simple reason that they are all citizens. Around 100,000 Puerto Ricans moved north because of Hurricane Maria and they are all embittered by what everyone knows is the complete neglect of Puerto Rico by both both parties," Lindorff noted.

New York's 14th Congressional District, where Ocasio-Cortez is running, includes the eastern Bronx and part of north-central Queens. Its population includes large numbers of Latino, South Asian and other minority voters, Politico reported Wednesday. According to 2016 census data, about 50 percent of the district population is Hispanic.

"Puerto Ricans are really angry. And they're not alone, Hispanics in general are all upset because of immigrant issues and the fascist ICE actions. This victory is a rising of Latino anger, which is unregistered in the same way that Trump's victory was unanticipated, and will likely show up in the 2018 elections and beyond," Lindorff added.</s>After the 2016 election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was working as a bartender in Union Square when she decided to take a road trip. An activist she knew at Standing Rock, where indigenous activists were leading a demonstration against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, told her the camp could use more women. So the then-27-year-old Ocasio-Cortez and two friends set up a GoFundMe page, loaded up a car full of supplies, and set out for South Dakota.

Still shaken by the election of President Donald Trump, they brought a camera and logged hours of footage talking with people along the way—small business owners in Ohio, housing experts in Flint, Michigan. They made it to the high plains before Christmas and then lived for weeks among Standing Rock’s water protectors in a tent with a wood-burning stove. Ocasio-Cortez was seeking a “first-person idea of what was going on” in America, she told me when we spoke last fall. What she found was that “militarized corporations” were taking over parts of the country, unchecked by political powers.

Not long after she left the encampment for good, she got a call from the executive director of a group called Brand New Congress, a project recently launched by a group of progressive organizers, mostly fellow backers of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who were frustrated with the party’s entrenched establishment and wanted to train a slate of primary candidates. Would she have any interest in running for Congress?

The rest, of course, is history. On Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez scored the biggest Democratic primary upset in years, knocking off Democratic caucus chair—and Queens Democratic boss—Joe Crowley. She will almost certainly become the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives this fall. Her victory was so comfortable it almost looks inevitable. It wasn’t. Ocasio-Cortez’s win was years in the making, an outgrowth of a grassroots resistance not just to President Trump but to the entrenched political powers in an ostensibly blue state. To the party’s leadership, Tuesday was a wake-up call; to the the party’s left flank, it was validation of the tactics and messaging they’ve been pushing for months.

Start with Brand New Congress. Ocasio-Cortez is the first candidate backed by the organization to unseat an incumbent, which, after all, is the group’s stated aim. The organization, which has backed 26 House and Senate candidates in 2018, was an important incubator during the early phase of her campaign. She attended trainings with the group in Kentucky and then again in Tennessee, and she was in constant contact with other candidates via Slack or email, sharing talking points about issues like Black Lives Matter or pension reform and exchanging best practices for door-knocking. The campaign, in the end, was her own, but it was a collaborative effort getting off the ground. She likely wouldn’t have run in the first place if she hadn’t been recruited, and her ubiquitous purple-and-white campaign T-shirts were spinoffs of a standard Brand New Congress design. Primary challengers almost never work, in part because there’s rarely a natural constituency behind them. But Ocasio-Cortez never had that problem; she started off with a base and resources marshaled by the party’s anti-establishment wing.

The 14th District, which includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, was also uniquely susceptible to this kind of insurgency. Crowley may have never faced a serious primary challenge before, but the Democratic party in the area had just suffered a series of shocks. The first was the 2016 presidential primary itself. Sanders’ rally in the South Bronx, Ocasio-Cortez said, was the first held there by a major-party candidate since Robert F. Kennedy. Sanders didn’t come all that close in New York City, but it was an unusually frenzied burst of organizing activity in a place that is low-turnout by design, and it also left a lot of progressive activists tasting bad blood. Hundreds of thousands of voters had been blocked from voting—including Ocasio-Cortez, whose registration had been mixed up during Hurricane Sandy. Other Sanders supporters ran up against the laws that cut off party registration changes half a year before the primary.

Building on the lessons of that race, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign placed a big emphasis on small-d democracy. When I tagged along with her volunteers on a canvassing walk in September, they were going door-to-door in Woodside, Queens, to alert unaffiliated voters of the looming deadline to change their party registration to Democrat. (Ocasio-Cortez had to bail at the last minute—she had to take a shift at the restaurant.)

The second shock came after the election, when a state senator in Queens announced he was joining an Albany legislative faction known as the Independent Democratic Caucus—a move that essentially threw his support to the Republican leadership in Albany. In the ensuing months, his district became the site of a huge grassroots fight against the IDC and Democratic leaders (chiefly Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but also Crowley) who hadn’t done enough to stop them. The IDC members all got primary opponents, and eventually, Cuomo did too. In New York City, people were upset about Trump but didn’t have any Republicans to take it out on. So they focused their energy on other Democrats.

Does this look like the kind of place that’s ripe for an anti-establishment takeover? Yes, yes it does:

These were the conditions in which a long-shot primary quietly gained traction. But Ocasio-Cortez won, above all else, because of Ocasio-Cortez. Although Crowley checked a lot of the normal progressive political boxes, he was also a white guy who represented, often from afar, one of the most diverse communities on the planet. Ocasio-Cortez argued that residents of a heavily Latino district had something to gain something by electing a Spanish-speaking, working-class, 28-year-old Puerto Rican. The fact that her opponent couldn’t pronounce “nixtamal” on the eve of the primary wasn’t just a goofy food gaffe; it was precisely her point.

That cultural disconnect was attached to real political concerns. Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first Democratic House candidates to call for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, which she called “authoritarian” and “a weapon waiting for a tyrant.” On the weekend before the primary, she left her district to travel to a detention facility in Tornillo, Texas, to protest the separation of migrant parents from their kids. She was a candidate for the Trump era, conveying a sense of urgency that matched the frustrations and fears of her electorate.

The candidates’ exchange on ICE at a debate last week illustrated this dynamic quite neatly. Crowley had recently tried (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to get arrested at an immigration protest and had called ICE “fascist.” But Ocasio-Cortez shut him down:

At her victory party on Tuesday, she put it another way: “There is nothing radical about moral clarity.”

Besides abolishing ICE, she pushed a platform befitting someone who touted her Democratic Socialists of America membership in a campaign ad—Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free college, a 50 percent reduction in the federal prison population, and a Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico. Above all, she channeled Sanders’ attacks on the party’s corporate wing. While calling housing “a human right,” she hammered Crowley for his ties to luxury real-estate developers—a live wire in a district where renters are feeling the squeeze while skyscraper units, some used for money laundering, sit empty. It’s not a coincidence that both Ocasio-Cortez and Adem Bunkeddeko—who nearly upset Rep. Yvette Clarke in the nearby 9th District—both made affordable housing a central tenet of their candidacies. These are the kinds of issues that often dominate local races. But they don’t have to stay local issues.

What happened in the 14th District isn’t a formula that will work everywhere. Most places aren’t as full of voters as disconnected from their party leadership as New York City is, and few longtime incumbents are as ill-prepared for a brawl as Crowley was; he had been gifted the seat by his predecessor without ever having to fight for it. Ocasio-Cortez turned out to be really good at politics; lots of long-shot candidates aren’t. And it probably helps that Republicans don’t have a prayer of winning a congressional election in Jackson Heights. But many Democrats, including Crowley, may have written off Ocasio-Cortez because of her youth and lack of institutional support. Instead, she won because of that. And after Tuesday, a lot more young progressives just might think they can, too.</s>NEW YORK — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old political novice running on a low budget and an unabashedly liberal platform, upset longtime U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley on Tuesday in the Democratic congressional primary in New York.

The surprise victory by the community organizer in a district that includes parts of the Bronx and Queens came after an energetic, grassroots campaign that mustered more than enough support in a low-turnout race that many had expected to be an easy win for Crowley, a member of the Democratic House leadership.

“The community is ready for a movement of economic and social justice. That is what we tried to deliver,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who has never held elected office and whose candidacy attracted only modest media attention.

She told The Associated Press after her victory that she didn’t have enough money to do polling in the race, but felt in her gut that her message had a chance to connect.

“I live in this community. I organized in this community. I felt the absence of the incumbent. I knew he didn’t have a strong presence,” she said.

Crowley has been in Congress since 1999 and hadn’t faced an opponent in a primary election since 2004, when Ocasio-Cortez was just a teenager. He was considered a candidate to become the next House speaker if Democrats win the majority.

“It’s not about me,” Crowley, 56, told his supporters at a campaign party following his loss. “It’s about America. I want nothing but the best for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. I want her to be victorious.”

He later played guitar with a band at the election night gathering, and dedicated the first song, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” to Ocasio-Cortez.

Crowley represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, where he is also the leader of the Queens Democratic party.

Ocasio-Cortez was outspent by an 18-1 margin during her race but won the endorsement of some influential groups on the party’s far left, including MoveOn, as well as the actress Cynthia Nixon, who is running for governor. She defeated Crowley by 15 percentage points.

Born in the Bronx to a mother from Puerto Rico and a father who died in 2008, Ocasio-Cortez said she decided to challenge Crowley to push a more progressive stance on economic and other issues.

She attended Boston University, where she earned degrees in economics and international relations, and also spent time working in the office of the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy.

After graduating, she returned to the Bronx where she became a community organizer. In the 2016 presidential campaign she worked for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Among her issues is expanding the Medicare program to people of all ages and abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. She recently went to Tornillo, Texas, to protest against policies that have separated parents from their children at the southern U.S. border.

Ocasio-Cortez gained some internet attention for a campaign video called “The Courage to Change,” a two-minute spot for which she wrote the script and featured footage from her own home.

Crowley is chair of the House Democratic Caucus, the fourth-highest ranking position in Democratic leadership in that chamber of Congress.
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His loss drew the attention of President Donald Trump.

“Wow! Big Trump Hater Congressman Joe Crowley, who many expected was going to take Nancy Pelosi’s place, just LOST his primary election. In other words, he’s out! That is a big one that nobody saw happening. Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!” he tweeted.

The Republican candidate for the office, Anthony Pappas, is running unopposed and had no primary. Pappas teaches economics at St. John’s University.</s>In a major upset for the Democratic Party establishment, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York lost his primary election Tuesday, unseated by a young progressive newcomer who reflects restiveness in the left wing of the party.

The Associated Press declared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer, the winner of the race for New York’s 14th congressional district, which includes parts of Queens and the Bronx.</s>Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday described Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a major victory on Tuesday in New York's Democratic Party congressional primary election, as the "new face" of the Democratic Party. Twitter

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday told "Fox and Friends" that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just won a stunning victory in New York's Democratic congressional primary election, is the "new face" of the Democratic Party.

Ocasio-Cortez, 28, is a Bronx native, former campaign organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

"Socialist" remains a dirty word in US politics and Ocasio-Cortez seemingly has Conway and other Trump allies concerned.

Conway said Ocasio-Cortez's views are to the "stark left of America," taking particular issue with her call to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

"I think every Democratic candidate out there could be asked now... 'Do you agree or disagree with the new face of the Democratic Party that we should abolish [ICE] altogether, the brave men and women who are trying to process these claims and in many ways protect children who may be smuggled by people who aren't related to them?''" Conway said.

She also said Ocasio-Cortez, "like many Democrats," is for "abortion on demand."

Michelle Malkin, a conservative commentator who also appeared on "Fox and Friends" on Wednesday, expressed similar sentiments.

Malkin described Ocasio-Cortez as a member of a group of "shrieking radicals" who oppose immigration enforcement and desire open borders

Ocasio-Cortez was relatively unknown before defeating Rep. Joe Crowley, who represented New York's 14th District for almost two decades and was thought to be a shoo-in as the next House Speaker.

Major media outlets such as The New York Times didn't even cover her campaign. Correspondingly, CNN Media reporter Brian Stelter on Tuesday tweeted, "The first time I heard of [Ocasio-Cortez] was 8 days ago... when Crowley sent a SURROGATE to debate her instead of showing up in person."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeats Democratic incumbent New York leader Joseph Crowley in what has been described as the "biggest Democratic primary upset victory in years".