evidence: By any measure, Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez ran a remarkable 2018 race that was tailored to her district and benefited from shrewd organizing and even technological innovation. Running as a Democratic Socialist, she drew a large, multiracial progressive coalition that overwhelmed an incumbent, in Joseph Crowley, who personified the Wall-Street-friendly Democrat uninterested in local concerns but assumed to be too powerful to be held to account. [...] Embracing the Democratic Socialist label (after some early trepidation), Ocasio‑Cortez countered Crowley’s cautious centrism by pushing a platform that included a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, tuition‑free public colleges, a $15 minimum wage, ending for‑profit prisons, and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She also leaned into her deep district ties, criticizing Crowley for pulling his kids out of the local schools and moving his family to Northern Virginia to better accommodate his busy life in Washington. Most of all, Ocasio‑Cortez stressed her working‑class background. With less than a month to go, she poured her remaining money into a campaign video she wrote herself that was shot by a pair of socialist filmmakers from Detroit. The ad shows Ocasio‑Cortez getting ready for work in an unglamorous apartment, climbing out of the subway, swapping comfortable shoes for nicer ones on the platform, greeting people in the neighborhood not in the stagy way a big‑time politician does it but like a normal person who lives there.