St. Louis voters are going to send a young black progressive to Congress, but it won’t be the young black progressive who has been representing them in Washington for the past four years. Tuesday’s results in the Democratic primary in Missouri’s first congressional district had Rep. Cori Bush soundly defeated by Wesley Bell, a local prosecutor.
Bush was a member of The Squad, the informal caucus formed in 2018 with the election of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. In the ensuing years, The Squad expanded. Now, it is contracting. Bush’s defeat was preceded by the ouster of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who hails from the Westchester County suburbs of New York. In Bowman’s dark blue district, as in Bush’s, winning the Democratic primary was pretty much the ballgame. Neither race was close.
Even as some moderates have been lamenting that Kamala Harris had passed over selecting Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania because of pressure from the anti-Israel far left, progressives are complaining that Bell only defeated Bush because of pressure—and money—from right-leaning pro-Israel groups. And to be sure, in both cases, several such groups spent exorbitant amounts to topple the incumbents, who since Oct. 7 have strongly criticized the Jewish state in ways that critics have sometimes called anti-Semitic. In a recent interview with The New York Times, for example, Bush said she wouldn’t call Hamas a terrorist organization.
“You can influence an American election, but you can’t buy one.”
“No matter what a singular Super PAC can spend to try and buy an election, nothing can take away from the transformational effect Cori Bush has directly had on the people of St. Louis,” Justice Democrats, a political group closely affiliated with the Squad, wrote in an X post.
The reality is that you can influence an American election, but you can’t buy one. And Bush left herself vulnerable to such influence by catering to her brand more than to her constituents.
In the end, what was her “transformational effect,” exactly? Bush will leave Congress in December without having seen the passage of any significant legislation she introduced. She voted against President Biden’s signature infrastructure bill, intended in good part to help communities like her own. She is probably best known for being one of two members of Congress, along with Tlaib, to vote against barring Hamas members from the United States. That she was being investigated for alleged misuse of campaign funds probably didn’t help.
Bush appears to genuinely believe that she is “on the right side of history” when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For all I know, she is right. The problem is, there is no reason to believe St. Louis voters sent her to Washington to adjudicate intractable Levantine disputes. And polls have tended to show that Bush was out of step with most Americans when it came to the Middle East, too.
“If this were the most important issue, and she was representing people’s views on this most important issue, she’d be doing a lot better than she’s been doing,” Mark Mellman of the Democratic Majority for Israel told me on Tuesday, as St. Louis voters headed for the polls.
Progressives may want to take a different lesson from her defeat than the one offered by Justice Democrats. “In order to have the full agenda, we had to hold firm,” Bush told St. Louis’s public radio affiliate after her “nay” vote on the infrastructure deal, which she framed as evidence of her uncompromising progressivism. But that kind of binary thinking is the wrong way to think about politics. The most important legislative victories in American history, such as the Civil Rights Act, have been won through grinding and incremental progress, and often required compromise with unsavory characters.
“Cori Bush lost tonight because she didn’t take her district seriously,” Democratic activist Brianna Wu opined on X. “Any future for progressive politics is going to look less like Bush and more like Walz,” she added, referring to Kamala Harris’s recently unveiled veep pick.
Progressivism is perfectly viable. So is conservatism. They just have to come in the form of good policy that improves people’s lives—as with Walz’s impressive track record in Minnesota. The reason Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whom pundits were briefly comparing to Ronald Reagan, fared so poorly in the GOP primary is because he expended all the political capital he’d earned through his contrarian handling of the coronavirus pandemic on battles with Mickey Mouse and drag queens. He and Bush have far more in common than either realizes.
As for The Squad, it increasingly looks less like a legislative unit than a lefty group chat made public. “The Squad isn’t dead, but they are and will continue to be dormant until Democrats can afford the luxury of intra-party ideological spats,” the Republican political strategist Liam Donovan told me. There is, to be sure, value in ideological spats, which is why we need think tanks with intellectual integrity and publications that court genuine debate. But the last thing Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries needs is to pacify mutinies from within his own conference as he tries to steer legislation past the likes of the Freedom Caucus. That may be why Jeffries did virtually nothing to rescue Bowman or Bush. After all, they never helped him.
“Very curious to see how AOC, their smartest member, continues to evolve politically in the 119th,” a Capitol Hill staffer who works for a moderate Democrat from the Northeast wrote to me in a text message, referring to the congressional session that will begin next January, and that will see Bell and George Latimer, Bowman’s all-but-certain successor, sworn in. Ocasio-Cortez has been gradually moving into the Democratic establishment, shedding her image as an uncompromising firebrand. Now, she may want to look for legislative victories, perhaps even ones that boast Republican support. To be sure, she isn’t in danger of losing her seat, the way Bush and Bowman lost theirs. But she also doesn’t want to see her politics become irrelevant. Other progressives who share this ambition should draw the right conclusions from Bush’s loss.