Ocasio-Cortez Toppled a Giant. Are These N.Y. Democrats Next?

The night after Rep. Joseph Crowley’s stunning defeat, another Bronx politician who faces an energetic primary challenge from the left, state Sen. Jeffrey D. Klein, happened to be holding a birthday party at Limani, the upscale Rockefeller Center restaurant.

The topic, inevitably, turned to Crowley’s fate. Making the case why his own primary would be different, Klein told attendees the story of when he ran into Crowley, whose district overlaps with Klein’s, at a Bronx parade last year.

“Good to see you here,” Klein recalled telling the congressman, according to a person at the party. “You must have gotten a new GPS.”

The victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old activist, over Crowley, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats, has reshuffled New York’s political order. As emboldened progressive activists dream of their next targets, Klein and the band of renegade Democrats he led in Albany, who for years broke with the Democratic Party to help keep Republicans in power in the state Senate, are at the top of the list.

The districts of two of the eight senators, those of Klein and Jose R. Peralta, overlap with the seat Ocasio-Cortez won, underscoring just how close to home the progressive insurgency had struck. As in Crowley’s race, younger female candidates are challenging both men.

“Even though I set out on this race knowing this is possible,” Alessandra Biaggi, the 32-year-old challenger to Klein said in an interview Thursday, “it feels like voters are waking up.”

Biaggi, the granddaughter of a former congressman, Mario Biaggi, got an important boost Thursday when an influential union in New York, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, endorsed her, as did the New York City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who also endorsed three other challengers to members of Klein’s former group, the Independent Democratic Conference.

Beneath the banner headline of Crowley’s defeat, there were other signs Tuesday of anti-establishment energy coursing through the Democratic Party in New York. In Brooklyn, Rep. Yvette Clarke barely survived a challenge from a 30-year-old newcomer, Adem Bunkeddeko, that she had claimed she was “laughing” off. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, in a district that covers parts of three boroughs, was held below 60 percent by a 34-year-old challenger, Suraj Patel. And in the Syracuse area, the national party’s handpicked candidate for the House, Juanita Perez Williams, was routed by Dana Balter, the preferred pick of local Democrats.

“There has been a progressive wave rising in New York for seven years,” said Monica Klein, a Democratic strategist, who traced it from Occupy Wall Street to the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, to Ocasio-Cortez. Monica Klein, no relation to the state senator, is supporting the IDC challengers. “People who aren’t paying attention are going to be blown away on Election Day.”

The state Senate primaries will be held in mid-September, sharing the ballot with Cynthia Nixon, who is challenging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. Ocasio-Cortez and Nixon endorsed each other Monday, and Nixon has argued the same energy that drove this week’s upset will drive her own; the governor has called the races “apples and oranges.”

Two officials who worked on Crowley’s campaign said Jeffrey Klein should be concerned about Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, particularly if she uses her newfound influence and campaigns against him.

Ousting the former IDC members has been a top priority of New York progressives for months, with phone banking to identify voters in their districts dating back to November.

“There is a lot of cross-pollination between the grass-roots folks who were powering Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign and those interested in insurgent campaigns for state Senate,” said Lisa DellAquila, co-leader of TrueBlue NY, an activist group. Jeffrey Klein, who confirmed the parade anecdote (“He wasn’t happy,” Klein recalled of Crowley), said the difference between him and the defeated congressman is his own constant presence in the district, which even Klein’s critics have acknowledged.

“This is what I do,” Klein said of being a politician. “Seven days a week.”

On Saturday evening, he said, he was knocking on doors in an apartment complex just hours after Ocasio-Cortez had been there. “Almost to a one,” Klein said of residents, “they said they were voting for her because they didn’t know who their congressman was.”

Klein touted his legislative accomplishments, such as gun control and paid family leave; his opponents cite the long progressive wish list he helped bottle up by empowering Republicans.

He also called Biaggi accepting Johnson’s endorsement “bizarre.” “I find it strange that my opponent would accept an endorsement from somebody who was one of the loudest supporters of Joe Crowley,” Klein declared.

For Biaggi, the endorsement of SEIU 32BJ is one of her most significant to date. Hector Figueroa, the union’s leader, said Klein had declined to sit for an endorsement interview, as did state Sen, Diane J. Savino of Staten Island, another former member of the IDC. The IDC formally disbanded this spring, in a deal brokered by Cuomo, to reunite with the mainline Senate Democrats. Cuomo had for years tacitly supported the split among them, as it allowed him greater leverage in legislative negotiations.

Nixon made Cuomo’s blessing of the arrangement, which helped keep Republicans in power, a centerpiece of her early campaign. The group dissolved soon after.

But Figueroa remains skeptical of just how dead the IDC is. He said Klein had “betrayed” unity deals before and feared they could regroup.

“I see the IDC as a zombie, and only a blow in the head can kill a zombie,” he said of targeting Klein.

Jessica Ramos, a 33-year-old former aide to de Blasio who is challenging Peralta in Queens, said she had crossed paths with Ocasio-Cortez on the campaign trail in recent months and hoped “to speak to her soon” about her own race.

Peralta declined to be interviewed. His staff instead sent a statement calling him “a fixture within the community he lives in with his family.”

Theotherformer IDC members facing challengers are state Sens. Jesse Hamilton of Brooklyn, Marisol Alcantara in Manhattan, Tony Avella in Queens, David J. Valesky in the Syracuse area and David Carlucci in the Hudson Valley.

Biaggi said she watched Tuesday’s election returns in her campaign’s headquarters: her house.

“It makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, and you are,” she said of Ocasio-Cortez’s victory. “It felt like the future isn’t dim. It just felt like there is hope.”