Jamaal Bowman’s Defeat Highlights Major Challenges For Progressive Movement

What a difference four years makes. Around this time in 2020, the activist left was riding high. .

Once in office, Bowman had become a star on social media for his confrontations with Republican members of Congress. Back home, though, Bowman had to contend with a local Democratic establishment that still viewed him as an unwanted interloper.

Amid last-minute redistricting chaos in 2022, a number of prominent Democrats privately encouraged then-Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), a less radical Black progressive from a neighboring seat, to challenge Bowman in the primary. Neither the Westchester County Democratic Committee nor the Bronx Democratic County Committee endorsed Bowman’s reelection that year. And Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Party, maxed out to one of Bowman’s primary challengers.

Notwithstanding that level of official resistance, even some of his allies think he has not always dedicated enough time to building local relationships. Partly as a result, a precious few local elected officials stood up for him when he pulled the fire alarm as he was rushing to exit a House office building in late September.

“He never built up enough relationships with some groups to get the benefit of the doubt,” said the former Bowman aide.

Kasheem Maclin, a city marshal in Mount Vernon, New York, felt Bowman was not a regular presence in the city.

“Before this election, I’ve never seen Bowman,” Maclin told HuffPost on Tuesday. “I’ve seen Latimer, I don’t know how many times.”

Then, in the fight for his political life, Bowman made AIPAC and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which he calls a “genocide,” a central theme of his stump speeches. He went so far as to visit the pro-Palestine protest encampment at Columbia University in Manhattan, far outside his congressional district. And Justice Democrats’ super PAC chose to feature the topic in a pro-Bowman television advertisement.

“In 2020, Bowman beat a 30-year incumbent by setting up a clear contrast — between an incumbent who was too focused on foreign policy and himself, a challenger focused on the needs of the district,” said Alyssa Cass, one of Bowman’s press and communications consultants in 2020. “In 2024, Latimer was able to litigate a very similar case.”

Bowman “let himself get defined by an issue that wasn’t top of mind for his voters, only critics who were never going to vote for him,” Cass added.

Bowman’s campaign was also slow to define Latimer with strategically placed opposition research. A story about Latimer’s slow-walking of a federal housing desegregation decree went to print weeks before Election Day. And another item about his vehicle registration being revoked due to unpaid parking tickets never made it out of the niche local press.

All of those factors gave Latimer — by Bowman’s own admission, the consummate “retail politician” — an opening to use a similar line of attack on Bowman as he, four years ago, had used on Engel.

“Jamaal Bowman got out of step with the district. He stopped working the needs of the district,” Latimer said on CNN on Monday. “He stopped caring about every one of the municipalities and the residents there, because there’s a certain amount of national image that he seems to care more about.”

By the time Election Day rolled around, Latimer was the strong favorite to win the race. A public poll in mid-June had him ahead by 17 percentage points — exactly the margin by which he ended up winning.

But in appearance after appearance, Latimer sounded bitter, as if he felt victimized by Bowman’s identity and ability to appeal to Black and Muslim voters.

In a June 10 debate with Bowman, Latimer tied him to donors in the Muslim community and left-wing circles in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Your constituency is Dearborn, Michigan. Your constituency is San Francisco, California,” he said.

And days before the election, Latimer claimed Bowman had an “ethnic benefit” that would net him Black votes.

Those comments hurt Donny Khan, a Muslim resident of Irvington, New York, who helped Latimer campaign in the Muslim community during his 2017 run for county executive.

“George Latimer came to the Muslim community center, took pictures with women in hijabs, took their votes when he needed them,” said Khan, a co-founder of Westchester Progressives and American Muslims Indivisible. “And then ever since he started running [for Congress], because he knows who’s giving him the money, he’s made the Dearborn comment. He’s made the San Francisco comment. He’s talked about the ethnic advantage. Anybody who watches Fox News knows exactly what all of those things mean.”

But Latimer was defensive on Tuesday night when he was asked whether he would reach out to constituents offended by his comments.

He emphasized that he meant to refer to Bowman’s alliance with Tlaib, Congress’ sole Palestinian American member whose district includes Dearborn and who contributed $500,000 to a pro-Bowman super PAC.

“They shouldn’t be offended by the Dearborn comment,” Latimer said to reporters. “I’ve explained it three or four times.”

Pressed on whether he might still need to do outreach to groups irked by some of his language, Latimer blamed the media for misinforming people about his comments.

“There are bridges to be built, and those bridges to be built come from mutual respect and don’t come from attack ads,” he said. “They don’t come from misrepresenting someone else’s position.”

“I had a number of positions that I had misrepresented in this campaign. I’m not beyond defending — I have thick skin,” he continued. “But let’s understand that some people drew judgments about me negatively because of the misrepresentation that was made in some cases — I’m not accusing anybody here — repeated by members of the press as fact.”