The Next AOC? Meet Mckayla Wilkes
“I’m not running to be a politician, I’m running to be a representative.”
“I’m not running to be a politician, I’m running to be a representative.”
Last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then a 28-year-old bartender, upset Joe Crowley to win the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district. At the time, Crowley was the fourth-ranking House Democrat, in line to potentially replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House after the 2018 midterms.
Having served in Congress since 1999, Crowley was a 10-term incumbent and, due to the power he wielded in New York, fit the title King of Queens. Yet Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just beat him, she crushed him, garnering 57.5% of the primary vote. The lesson for establishment politicians and potential challengers alike was immediately clear: “no one is safe.”
Mckayla Wilkes, a 28-year-old student and mother of two, has taken that lesson to heart. Inspired by Ocasio-Cortez, she is taking on Steny Hoyer, the current House Majority Leader, in the 2020 Democratic primary in Maryland’s 5th congressional district. Wilkes is a political outsider, a democratic socialist with an unabashedly progressive platform. Hoyer, on the other hand, is a longtime member of the House — he has served since 1981 — and he makes no secret of his more right-wing inclinations.
After first announcing her bid in late March, Wilkes officially launched her campaign on Saturday, June 8th in Waldorf, Maryland, where she has lived for many years. According to the campaign, 66 people attended the event. Speaking before the crowd, she addressed a wide array of issues, focusing particular attention on criminal justice reform, healthcare, housing, and climate change, all of which she considers top concerns of her campaign.
Wilkes sharply contrasts with Hoyer on these crucial issues, and she was not afraid to call him out for his views and record in her speech. She believes in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. He is a cosponsor of neither of these proposals and has in fact actively worked to undermine the chances of success for the Green New Deal.
While Wilkes brands herself as a progressive fighting for regular people and against corporate America, Hoyer is a seasoned corporate Democrat. He, for instance, diagnosed the losses suffered by Democrats in the 1994 elections as a result of the fact that “too many Americans believed that our party had become weak on crime and national defense, incapable of making hard decisions on welfare reform and fiscal policy, and irrevocably wedded to the idea that all of our problems could be solved by government and more spending.”
Wilkes doesn’t hold back when talking about Hoyer. After the campaign launch on Saturday, I asked her how she responds to voters who are hesitant to support her for fear of losing the sway a party leader holds in Congress. She replied, “I think that people of district five need to not look at it as you’re losing a leader, because Steny Hoyer’s not a leader. He’s a coward… He doesn’t look out for our interests. He looks out for corporate interests.”
Wilkes distinguishes herself from both Hoyer and the other declared candidate for Congress in the 5th district, a progressive civil rights lawyer named Briana Urbina, by referencing her personal experience with the flaws of the current system. “I’ve been in the position where I’ve needed affordable housing and it’s not available,” she told me. “I’ve been in the position where… my healthcare insurance didn’t want to cover for life-saving medications.”
Her experience with the criminal justice system features centrally in her campaign. She has shared her history of spending time in juvenile detention as a teenager and of being “jailed for driving on a suspended license” at a time when she “was seven months pregnant, living paycheck to paycheck,” and had to drive to get to work.
In Wilkes’s view, her past struggles strengthen her candidacy. They both rouse her passion for progressive goals and connect her to those disconnected from the political process, making her a true candidate of ordinary people. As she put it, “I’m not running to be a politician, I’m running to be a representative.”
Hoyer, by contrast, is a fixture of the Democratic establishment. In 2014, he framed cutting the deficit, and implicitly cutting Social Security and Medicare, as a way for “America to get its swagger back.” He supported the Iraq war and voted last year for Trump’s bloated $717 billion military budget. And, as Wilkes noted in her speech on Saturday, Hoyer backed measures, including the 1994 crime bill, which accelerated the mass incarceration crisis throughout his years in Congress.
Wilkes lists staunchly progressive proposals on these issues on her website. She calls for enacting Medicare for All, ending support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, cutting at minimum $200 billion from the military budget, legalizing marijuana, and ending cash bail.
Wilkes faces an uphill battle in the coming months. So far, her campaign has raised around $40,000, far below the $651,000 Hoyer’s campaign brought in during the first quarter of this year. Furthermore, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) blacklist of organizations that support candidates challenging incumbents in Democratic primaries has already affected Wilkes’s campaign, and Wilkes expects it to continue to be a problem.
Incidentally, Hoyer himself has a long history of undermining progressive Democrats’ bids for Congress. Most recently, a story run last year exposed Hoyer for having pushed a progressive to exit a Democratic congressional primary and clear the path to victory for a more moderate candidate during the 2018 midterms. “You keep saying I would like you to get out of the race, and of course that’s correct,” Hoyer stated in leaked audio of a conversation between him and the progressive candidate.
Unfortunately for Hoyer, Wilkes has no intention of dropping out of the primary against him. And she won’t go easy on him either. Her circumstances do not exactly match Ocasio-Cortez’s in her campaign against Crowley — Wilkes’s district is less diverse than Ocasio-Cortez’s, for example. Nevertheless, the broad similarities between the two campaigns and the early enthusiasm for Wilkes suggest an upset could be in the making.