MA-07: Tuesday's Big Democratic Primary Is Unlike the Party's Other High-Profile Clashes
At least one high-profile House primary remains on the Democrats’ 2018 calendar: Tuesday’s contest in Massachusetts between Rep. Mike Capuano and Boston city Councilwoman Ayanna Pressley. This intra-party fight, though, does not mimic the same narrative we’ve seen elsewhere.
Capuano and Pressley are both proud progressives with the track records to prove it. As a result, their primary is lacking the ideological fights over policy that have animated other closely watched Democratic primaries in places such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Nebraska. Meanwhile, the 7th District, is so liberal that Republicans haven’t bothered to contest it this century. And so with the nomination doubling as a free ticket to Washington, there’s been none of the usual messaging fights that tend to break out ahead of competitive general elections, where one candidate talks about turning out a disaffected base and the other plots a path to the middle.
Even the outsider-versus-insider trope is an imperfect fit in this one. As a 10-term incumbent, Capuano is the one carrying the insider baggage, but Pressley is an outsider only in comparison. She served on the city council for the past eight years and previously worked on Capitol Hill as a staffer for former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II and later Sen. John Kerry. She may be looking to shake up the status quo, but she has plenty of experience working within the current system, far more than political newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Kara Eastman.
With those traditional fault lines absent, this Boston-area primary has become the most explicit test yet of a question being asked increasingly on the left in the age of Trump: What counts more to Democratic voters, political experience or lived experience?
Capuano, a 66-year-old white man, has been coasting to re-election on the former for the better part of two decades, before which he was the mayor of Somerville, a residential suburb of Boston. He’s one of the most reliably liberal members of Congress, and his progressive policy bona fides are well established. He was an early backer of sanctuary cities, a vocal opponent of both the invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act, and a supporter of single-payer health care well before Bernie Sanders and co. turned it into a litmus test on the left. Capuano’s backers—like former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the state’s first black chief executive, and Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis—cite that progressive track record to argue he deserves another term.
Pressley, a 44-year-old black woman, says it’s time for a change. “We will vote the same way,” she said during a debate earlier this month, “but I will lead differently.” She was the first black woman elected to the Boston City Council, and she’d be the first elected to Congress in Massachusetts if she can take down Capuano, who hasn’t faced a serious primary challenge since he was first elected in 1998. She’s put a premium on her personal experience—not only as a person of color, but also as a woman, as a survivor of sexual assault, and as a daughter of a single mother and of a father who battled drug addiction and spent time in prison—to argue she’s better suited to represent a district, the only one in the state, where most constituents are people of color. As she has put it: “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/ayanna-pressley-mike-capuano-ma-07-democratic-primary-a-lived-experience-test.html
