Jamaal Bowman's Defeat Highlights Major Challenges For Progressive Movement

Big money is striking back against "the Squad," but preparedness and a local focus are still within a candidate’s control.

What a difference four years makes. Around this time in 2020, the activist left was riding high. Joe Biden had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, but he incorporated left-wing demands into his policy platform. Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) — the group of left-wing insurgents that became known as “the Squad” — were shaking up Congress, and Justice Democrats, the upstart progressive outfit that recruited Ocasio-Cortez, was spoiling for more moderate Democrats to take down.

Jamaal Bowman, a Black middle school principal from a humble background with an authentic love for the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas, seemed like a good fit to oust Rep. Eliot Engel, an aging white man with staunch pro-Israel views who represented New York’s 16th Congressional District, a majority-minority district straddling the New York City border. A progressive ecosystem was already mature enough to provide Bowman with professional fundraising, polling and even a super PAC, pushing him to a groundbreaking victory that year.

But just as Bowman’s victory in 2020 was a sign of rising progressive fortunes, so too does his defeat reflect a receding of the progressive wave. With Donald Trump out of office, grassroots energy and fundraising have grown scarcer. A backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement and other left-wing cultural forces is still a major factor in Democratic primaries. And the ideological terrain on which the left is now fighting has attracted the ire of the well-financed pro-Israel lobby.

Put together, it paints a picture of a progressive movement past its prime, with Bowman’s loss on Tuesday potentially just the latest sign of how much more hostile the environment has become for aspiring left-wing candidates.

Indeed, a number of key factors working in Bowman’s favor in 2020 were largely matters of, well, timing. For one thing, the big donor response to the activist left was only in its infancy. The main pro-Bowman super PAC beat the Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel group, to the TV airwaves and was not heavily outspent. But DMFI, a pioneer in the fight against the contemporary left, was largely on its own in 2020.