Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for New York's establishment Dems to eliminate her district

After the 2020 census, the nation's electoral districts will be redrawn and it's a widely accepted fact that New York City will lose a seat, despite its growth since the 2010 census.

Ocasio-Cortez's district is a thoroughly gerrymandered Democratic safe seat, which is why her primary challenge was effectively an early election: whomever holds the Democratic nomination in New York's 14th automatically goes to Congress (which is how her predecessor Joe Crowley was "elected" ten times in a row).

New York's districting is controlled by a powerful, secretive Democratic machine, the kind of Democratic establishment figures whom Ocasio-Cortez has been criticizing, and whose candidates Ocasio-Cortez has been helping to ouster through primary challenges, with the threat of more on the horizon for the 2020 elections.

Combine these three facts -- an NYC seat being eliminated, a gerrymandered district, and the burning hatred of the Democratic establishment who control the district boundaries -- and Ocasio-Cortez is right to be worried that her seat will be eliminated in two years.

Even though NY Dems would claim that this is just business as usual and nothing personal, the decision to eliminate Ocasio-Cortez's seat would be intensely personal, and political. She has been a thorn in the side of the establishment since she got on the scene, and her short Congressional career has marked her out as someone who shouts the unutterable truths that no one was willing to mention in polite society, and that the tactic works. Ocasio-Cortez has shown herself to be willing to upend the "natural order" of politics and cost some very powerful people a lot of money, even turning them into pariahs for having accumulated that money in the first place, and she's shown that she has a very good chance of succeeding. Read the rest