Sixteen years after Illinois’s Dan Lipinski bypassed voters to get to Congress, his constituents got revenge.
For New York’s Joe Crowley in 2018, it took 20 years, but with the same effect.
The pair of Democratic congressman defeated in primaries offer a cautionary tale about violating the spirit, if not the letter, of party nominating rules to win elections. Years ago, each used insider connections in the extreme to win their urban/suburban House seats and eventually lost in Democratic primaries to liberal party rivals more simpatico with voters in those districts.
Lipinski, on Tuesday, lost the Chicago-area seat he first “won” in 2004 to Marie Newman, a liberal primary opponent mounting her second straight challenge from the Left. Lipinski earned liberal ire over the years for his opposition to abortion rights, his 2010 vote against Obamacare, and standing against same-sex marriage long after it was embraced by mainstream Democrats.
But it was the way he entered Congress in the first place that was truly scandalous. Lipinski, now 53, won his seat in 2004 when his father, 22-year Rep. William Lipinski, decided not to run for reelection after he had already won the Democratic primary. The elder Lipinski’s withdrawal allowed the state Democratic Party to choose his successor for the nomination, tantamount to victory in the solidly Democratic district that contains southwest Chicago and its suburbs.
And of all the potential candidates, including state legislators and local officeholders, they just happened to choose Dan Lipinski, the outgoing congressman’s son and then a political science professor in Tennessee who had not lived in Illinois since 1989. The younger Lipinski effectively won a seat in Congress without facing voters in a competitive primary.
Upon entering the House in January 2005, Lipinski was in good company. Crowley had already spent six years as a House member after benefiting from his own ballot switcheroo to get him to Congress.
In 1998, then-Assemblyman Crowley was hand-picked by a congressman representing a Northeast Queens story district, Tom Manton, who unexpectedly decided to retire. The 14-year House member was simultaneously chairman of the Queens County Democratic organization, and he decided to retire from Congress after the filing deadline had passed.
Crowley, then 36, cruised into Congress that fall in the strongly Democratic district and held the seat for 20 years.
“By announcing his plans so late in the year, Mr. Manton virtually insured that Mr. Crowley would have little or no competition from Republicans or other Democrats, a maneuver that drew admiring comments from some Queens politicians but angered Democrats who also were interested in running for the seat,” the New York Times wrote at the time.
But Crowley’s hold on the district was not forever. Over two decades in Congress, he worked his way up to be a member of House Democratic leadership. But he lost his 2018 primary reelection bid to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old, first-time candidate running to Crowley’s left, in a district that had been redrawn to take in the eastern part of the Bronx and part of north-central Queens.
In both cases, the incumbents’ losses were due to ideological reasons and taking their districts for granted. Lipinski refused to modulate his voting record even as his district’s constituency moved left. Meanwhile, Crowley didn’t take Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge seriously until it was too late, and she’d won over a broad swath of local support.
But how the pair got to Congress in the first place, through last-minute ballot switcheroos, was surely at least in the back of some voters’ minds. And they offer a cautionary tale for future candidates considering trying an end run around the old-fashioned way of getting to Congress: earning it with voters’ support, not insider deals.
