FiveThirtyEight's analysis of Ayanna Pressley's win. [View all]

[ehrnst]

Last edited Wed Sep 5, 2018, 10:41 AM - Edit history (3)

It didn’t come out of nowhere. Everyone knew this would be a competitive race. The district was publicly polled at least three times (i.e. pollsters thought it worth surveying). Capuano spent more than $1.7 million on his defense, spurred in part by the knowledge that Pressley was deploying $767,000 of her own. Both sides aired television ads. An “upset” it may have been, but it should not have “stunned” anyone who was paying attention.

It wasn’t progressive vs. moderate. Pressley herself said that there was little daylight between her and Capuano on the issues. Capuano has a -.580 DW-Nominate score,1 making him the most liberal Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation and well to the left of Crowley. Meanwhile, more moderate Democrats like Rep. Richard Neal in Massachusetts’s 1st District and Rep. Stephen Lynch in the 8th District won their primaries by 40 and 47 percentage points, respectively. Ideology doesn’t explain Capuano’s loss.

It wasn’t insider vs. outsider. Pressley has been an at-large city councilor in Boston, the district’s largest city, for nine years. Before that, she worked for 16 years as a congressional aide to the most establishment Democrats imaginable, Joe Kennedy II and John Kerry. She won a rising star award from Emily’s List in 2015. She was no political newbie like Ocasio-Cortez and in fact was a well-credentialed political insider.

It (probably) wasn’t just white vs. nonwhite. Because of the 7th District’s dark-blue hue, Pressley is extremely likely to become the first woman of color to represent Massachusetts in Congress. People will be quick to connect that to the fact that non-Hispanic whites are a minority (42 percent) of the 7th District’s total population. However, non-Hispanic whites make up 55 percent of registered voters in the district, so it probably wasn’t just that nonwhites voted for Pressley and whites voted for Capuano. (This was also probably true of Ocasio-Cortez and Crowley, by the way.) This is apparent from the town-by-town results: Chelsea, which is just 23 percent non-Hispanic white, voted 54-46 for Capuano, while the aforementioned Somerville — 70 percent non-Hispanic white, 58 percent under the age of 35 — voted for Capuano just 50.4-49.6. We’ll have to wait for precinct-level results to know for sure, but it looks like Pressley cinched her victory by winning young, college-educated white voters.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-ayanna-pressleys-upset-win-in-massachusetts-isnt-really-like-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs/

And kudos to the tried and true EMILY's list for their support!

https://www.emilyslist.org/news/entry/boston-magazine-bostons-most-powerful-people-ayanna-pressley


She also had the support of her peers - which says so much about how effective she is at working with people to get things done:

Pressley hasn’t been endorsed by any of her potential peers in the Massachusetts delegation. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and Reps. Niki Tsongas and Seth Moulton have remained neutral in the race, while the state’s other six House members have backed Capuano.

Pressley does, however, have the backing of a number of her current peers — city councilors Annissa Essaibi George, Michelle Wu, and Kim Janey — as well as a large group of state and local lawmakers and progressive groups in the Boston area. At the national level, both the grassroots anti-Trump group Indivisible and the National Women’s Political Caucus have officially backed Pressley.

Perhaps her biggest endorsement came from Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a fellow ascendant Bay State Democrat, who said the two women have a long history of working together “on issues that strike at the core of who we are as a city and a state and reflect the progress we still need to make.”

“I’ve been lucky to work with some incredible people, but just a few have been willing to lean in every time,” Healey said. “One of these people for me is Ayanna.”

Pressley also was recently endorsed by the editorial boards of the two biggest newspapers in Massachusetts: The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2018/08/31/ayanna-pressley-massachusetts-primary

And once again, another young leader who was a Clinton surrogate in 2016 makes good:

She joins a growing group of younger, progressive Democrats -- often women and people of color -- to win competitive primaries, a week after Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, 39, became the first black person to win a major party's nomination for governor in Florida.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/04/politics/massachusetts-primary-democratic-direction/index.html