Sitting down with Bernie and AOC...Cisneros endorsement..Really bad Engel poll
I went to New York on Saturday to cover the Bernie Sanders rally in Queens, which was just across the East River from Roosevelt Island, where I lived just after college. (It’s a weird little socialist-ish paradise, or it was at least.) Before the rally, I sat down for an interview with Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed his presidential campaign. We talked about, Syria, the Espionage Act, monopoly politics, Joe Biden, why AOC backed Sanders rather than Warren — and what they mean when they say political revolution.
The full interview will be posted later on Monday, and if you want an early look at it, sign up for The Intercept’s newsletter here. (This is not TI’s newsletter, it’s just my own thing. I’ll probably send the video out too, but if you’re a regular reader, you know that I also might not. Depends on how I feel — and tonight I fell asleep while telling Jack and the Giant Beanstalk at bedtime; didn’t know I could fall asleep while talking.)
Two things from the interview on the subject of political revolution I found interesting, which I wrote about here:
He said he told Obama that he thought the former president made a mistake in shutting down his campaign apparatus after he was elected. He has no plans to do the same, he told me.
He brushed me off when I tried to get him to talk about specific primaries where he hasn’t endorsed a challenger. A political revolution is underway, but in many races, Sanders and AOC aren’t involved. At some point, if the term revolution means anything, that will have to change.
Some primary news:
A new poll paid for by Data for Progress that was provided exclusively to The Intercept finds House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel sitting with just 29 percent support, suggesting he’s vulnerable to an upset by Jamaal Bowman in New York, who has the backing of Justice Democrats.
In her interview with me, Ocasio-Cortez said that she had recently spoken with Jessica Cisneros, the challenger to conservative Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar in Texas. Here’s a scoop: She plans to endorse her this week. That comes after Cisneros won the support of Emily’s List; the DCCC’s effort to tamp down energy for primaries isn’t going very well.