Julia Salazar: The Progressive Aiming to Follow in Ocasio-Cortez's Footsteps

By Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK

30 August 18

The 27-year-old Latina socialist speaks about the flurry of national interest in her run for New York senate and ‘extraordinary’ current political moment

t’s been two months since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stunned the Democratic establishment by beating Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary for US Congress. Now Julia Salazar, a fellow Democratic socialist, is hoping to recreate that victory, in what would be another boost for the progressive left.

Salazar is challenging Martin Dilan, a 16-year Democratic incumbent, for a seat in the New York state senate. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, her campaign was moving along relatively quietly until an endorsement from Ocasio-Cortez led to a surge in donations, and a flurry of national interest in Salazar’s run.

We meet at Salazar’s campaign office, a former cafe in the midst of Bushwick, a once blue-collar neighborhood at the heart of New York’s gentrification debate.

To the west of the office, bustling with enthusiastic young volunteers, lies the industrial warehouses that represent Bushwick’s past, to the east a slew of trendy dive bars and restaurants that represent its rapidly changing present. District 18 also includes Williamsburg and Greenpoint, two neighborhoods which have seen huge population change over the last decade, as younger people have moved in and rents have increased.

Sitting in the backyard beneath a pop-up canopy, the 27-year-old is a quiet, thoughtful presence, more at home discussing the affordable housing crisis in New York’s district 18 on a one-on-one basis than she is on the campaign stump.

“I’m naturally shy and soft-spoken and introverted. So it’s very unnatural and counterintuitive for me to be doing something like this, to be a political candidate. And at the beginning of the campaign it was like, the most stressful thing,” she says.

“But because I was thrown into the deep end, I had to swim.”

Salazar was born in Miami to a cargo pilot father and flight attendant mother. Her father, who died when she was 18, was Colombian, and the family had moved there for a short time before Salazar returned to south Florida with her mother as a young child. She moved to New York in 2010 to attend Columbia University, and worked as an organizer for the non-profit organization Jews for Racial and Economic Justice before launching her campaign.

Before that, Salazar says she “didn’t have any political ambitions” and had never planned to run for office.

But early this year activist friends began pushing for her to challenge Dilan, a former member of the New York city council, and in March she agreed. Salazar launched her campaign in April, and has spent the past few months going door to door and holding events at homes around the district. She faces Dilan in the 13 September primary.

Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Crowley in June brought attention to Democratic socialists across the country, and Salazar is no exception. Both Salazar and Ocasio-Cortez are Latina women in their 20s, which has brought further comparisons between the two.

“It had a huge impact on how much attention people were paying to this race: much, much more than your average state senate race,” says Salazar.

“In that regard alone it was a big boost to me and to people who were suddenly paying attention and recognizing that this is actually extraordinary.”

Salazar campaigned for Ocasio-Cortez during her run against Crowley, and has been endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez since then. In the 48 hours following Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Salazar took in $20,000 in donations, “many of them for $27”, she says, which was the average amount that people donated to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

When Salazar is out going door-to-door speaking to residents, which she has been doing six days a week, her political orientation rarely comes up. “I get more questions about it from the press,” she says – but does get asked about it and believes democratic socialism is “becoming more normalized”.

“I am really eager to talk about it if it comes up. But even when it does, I’ve heard from other canvassers who have mentioned it – ‘She’s the democratic socialist running’ – people don’t even blink. It doesn’t faze them.”

Instead, Salazar focuses on increasing the amount of affordable housing. She has criticized Dilan, the incumbent, for being ineffective as rent has increased and forced families out of the neighborhood – claims Dilan has rebutted, saying he has an unimpeachable voting record on housing.

Salazar’s run certainly seems to have the Dilan camp feeling threatened. The state senator has hired a lobbying firm and has issued a series of forceful attacks on Salazar’s past as a registered Republican, on her anti-abortion beliefs while in college; she was president of the Columbia Right to Life organization at Columbia University, and on her residency in the district.

“She claims to be fighting against gentrification when she herself is a gentrifier, living in an expensive market rate apartment, built with city subsidies with no provision or inclusion of affordable apartments,” said Bob Liff, a spokesman for Dilan.

“She is trying to claim the mantle of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she has not earned it and does not deserve it.”

Salazar defends that history as a product of being raised in what she says was a “very politically conservative home”.

“We weren’t by any means politically active. But Fox News was on this little TV in our kitchen all the time. I was raised by a single mom, who was very working class, no college degree. So I had a lot of miseducation about abortion and about a lot of issues.”

Despite their different politics, Salazar’s mother is fully supportive of her campaign. As well as that Ocasio-Cortez endorsement, Salazar has also been backed by Cynthia Nixon, who is currently mounting a leftwing campaign against New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, and Zephyr Teachout, a progressive who is running for New York attorney general.

If Salazar can win in September it would be another victory for a young democratic socialist over a more establishment figure in New York, and another boon for the Democratic Socialists of America. It might also be a further sign that, slowly, the Democratic party is being dragged to the left.