Waiting for the subway signals the working class identity of the candidate and campaign. Campaign video by Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, Means of Production.

How much does the look of the campaign posters, mailers, buttons, video, and social media matter?

Let’s look at the interplay between inspiring politics and inspired design in the dramatic victory of a 28-year-old, socialist community organizer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crushed the fourth-ranking Democrat in the house. She defeated 10-term incumbent, Queens machine boss Joe Crowley, her $600,000 in mostly small donations against his $3 million from real estate and financial interests — her campaign’s people in the street against his TV ads and glossy 4-color mailers.

First let’s look at her campaigning and then at the campaign’s design aesthetic.

A social movement campaign: “We’ve got the people, they’ve got the money”

Her campaign was movement politics, both in its aspirational platform and in its practice in the street. She was a community activist and, in 2016, a Sanders campaigner; then she was approached by Brand New Congress the day after she left the pipeline protest at Standing Rock. But she doesn’t just have a Sanders-style, democratic socialist platform —  Medicare for All, free public higher education, guaranteed jobs and living wage, affordable housing, criminal justice reform … and abolish ICE. Unlike many formerly centrist politicians who are suddenly sounding radical, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just talk. She built her campaign on a coalition of movement organizations, and hundreds of volunteers hit the streets. And then she showed what authentic socialist politics can look like in an election when, just two days before the primary, she interrupted campaigning in New York to go to Tornillo, on the Texas border, to protest ICE.

Her platform was not designed to get the big corporate money that went to Crowley. So her challenge, above all others, was how to gain visibility and reach voters without the media buys that define conventional campaigning. She had to win the election in the street. There’s a good account of this in her Jacobin interview. Conventional campaigning depends on big donors for big media buys, and news reporting ignores underfunded campaigns because, conventionally, it is only media buys that win elections. Crowley had an insignificant “field operation,” but the field was AOC’s strength. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t have a single TV ad. Hundreds of volunteers knocked on 120,000 doors, made as many phone calls to voters, sent 170,000 text messages.

“I will take that question to our movement for a vote”

But that story began over a year earlier. The clue to that was in her surprising answer to Crowley’s challenge in their debate. Crowley pledged to support her if she won, and asked if she would support him if he became the Democratic candidate. Her answer: ““Well, Representative Crowley, I represent not just my campaign but a movement. I would be happy to take that question to our movement for a vote.”

Woman’s March leader Linda Sarsour and Muslims for Progress tweet their support.

Hers was a movement campaign that could only win if it could enlist hundreds of  movement activists.  But these are people who had become increasingly disgusted with electoral politics, again and again watching candidates pose left, but, when elected, move to the center — “Hope” that ends up disappointing. Months before announcing her candidacy, she went to one activist group after another to convince them that this time was going to be different; her campaign would be a social movement campaign.

Compare the mayoral challengers in Chicago — they all talk “progressive” now, but who among them has a constituency, who among them has built a coalition, and who has convinced activist volunteers to go into the street for them? ” Progressive” campaigns that are all entirely top-down.

Where design comes in

The media that now calls her “an instant rock star” was ignoring her.  Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the Times, tweeted her anger at her old paper’s “horrible mistakes,” saying, ““Missing her rise [is] akin to not seeing Trump’s win coming in 2016.” But the media discounts cash-poor candidates, assuming that without TV buys they have no chance, and so aren’t “news.” So Ocasio-Cortez had to get her message across with her own media, and this is where design comes in. Without the ability to saturate the media with your face and message, effective design matters that much more.

Ocasio-Cortez’s design team at Tandem faced an added challenge: They couldn’t rely on the conventions of political design because their candidate is unconventional. They wanted a different visual language.

Different politics, different design. Crowley’s poster design could work for any Democrat — just change the names. Or for any Republican — just change the colors. Photo from @Ocasio2018.

Tandem’s Scott Starrett: “Branding is like giving an organization one pair of clothes they have to wear all the time. We knew we couldn’t put Sandy — a true David and Goliath story — in the same old clothes. You look at Joe Crowley’s identity, and you swap colors and suddenly it’s a Republican campaign. That’s the majority of political identities today.”

There’s a lot to be said about the branding, and a lot has been said. Read this interview in n + 1 for the designers’ process, and be amazed that the talented lead designer in Starrett’s five-person team, Maria Arenas, was just two years out of a Pratt Institute MFA and hadn’t worked on political campaigns before. It is telling that Starrett and team were already friends of Ocasio-Cortez and offered their work as an in-kind contribution to the campaign; it mattered that so many young artists swam in the progressive culture that burgeoned after the financial crisis.

For the details of the design, I like the just-published description in Sevy Perez’s article in F Newsmagazine. The color palette immediately sets the aesthetic off from traditional campaign design, yellow on some posters (who uses yellow in campaign design?), purple on others, combining the partisan red and blue colors, asserting her message of inclusion and working class interests over party identity, and of course the deep blue of the Democratic Party. Then there are the bilingual identifiers: everything in both English and Spanish, equal weight to each, and the use of the Spanish exclamation point before and after the shortened name “¡Ocasio!” rather than “Ocasio-Cortez.”  That type has the “optimistic” upward slant of the popping sans serif type echoing her upward gaze in the photo.

The excitement in the design world is best captured by the editors of Design Observer, Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand, both prominent designers and design critics, who devote a full episode of their podcast The Observatory to the campaign’s aesthetic, in “The Politician’s Gaze.”   Bierut’s tribute has a special resonance because he designed the logo for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — visual politics with a quite different aesthetic and messaging.

And that ¡photo! — “She was her own logo”

“For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.” Susan Sontag, “On Photography,” p. 62. Quoted by Jessica Helfand. Campaign photo by Jesse Norman, ocasio2018.com.

The eyes go to Jesse Korman’s portrait, which dominates the posters, the buttons, the social media. Bierut points out that the designers are “blessed with an extremely photogenic and animated character in this candidate, who just is like a charisma bomb. …  They focused on one single, very dramatic photograph of her, where she’s looking upwards toward the horizon in this really confident, visionary, arresting sort of way. She was her own logo, in a way that I thought really served the campaign well.”

Helfand also described the photo. She’s seated in one position, looking in another, not looking at the camera. Helfand mentioned Susan Sontag’s comment in “On Photography” on “the politician’s three-quarter gaze … a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.” (“On Photography,” p. 62.)  In a “crushing era of defeat,” Helfand says, this feels like the hope of a new beginning.

The viral video: Here too a progressive aesthetic

Here you also have to talk about Ocasio-Cortez’s viral campaign video, with over a half a million views on Youtube.  Its two minutes and 250 words brilliantly crystallize the meaning of her campaign, embodying in it her charismatic presence and working-class, Puertoriqueña identity. Like the rest of her campaign, it was made without high-priced consultants. She wrote the script herself, and two movement videographers shot the video on the cheap in a month of following her around (Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes of Means of Production).

In image after image, the video sends the message that she, unlike Crowley, is of the neighborhood — she was born in it, she lives in it, and “it is time for one of us.” Crowley’s video begins, “With Donald Trump in the White House … ” But her video begins, “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family. Mother from Puerto Rico, Dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny.” The first frames show her doing her hair and makeup in a small apartment, the typical Bronx low-income high-rise. You see her get on the subway to go to work, walk through multiracial, working class neighborhoods, and in one scene that stood out for many people, you see her change her shoes on a train platform.

“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for Congress. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family. Mother from Puerto Rico, father from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny.” Opening words of campaign video by Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, Means of Production.

She doesn’t need to mention Crowley by name:  “But after 30 years of the same representative, we have to ask who has New York been changing for. Every day gets harder for working families like mine to get by. … This race is about people versus money — we’ve got people, they’ve got money. It’s time to acknowledge that not all Democrats are the same. A Democrat that takes corporate money, profits off of foreclosures, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air, cannot possibly represent us.”

Compare Crowley’s video, banal and conventional in its vague aspirational language, without one specific commitment. Ocasio-Cortez closes her video with clear commitments; she reasserts the underlying class identity of her campaign, she is one of “us”: “What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare-for-all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee and criminal justice reform. We can do it now. It doesn’t take a hundred years to do this, it takes political courage. A New York for the many is possible; it’s time for one of us.”

This video may endure as a teaching example of campaign propaganda … or at least movement propaganda. Frame after frame, word and image invoke the markers of gender, race and class, as she gives voice to the grievances and aspirations of working-class people in simple language devoid of cliché, stereotype and political jargon. This seamless embodiment of class and identity politics expresses her implicit intersectional perspective: She uses her gender, working class and  Puerto Rican identities as the lenses (her word) she has to “organize and communicate with the people who live here”:

“At the end of the day I’m a candidate that doesn’t take corporate money, that champions Medicare for all, a Federal jobs guarantee, abolishment of Ice and a green new deal, but I approach those issues through the lenses of the community that I live in. And that is not as easy to say as ‘identity politics,’ but it’s something our constituents understand on a deep level.” (The Intercept.)

Charisma counts, but …

To say Ocasio-Cortez is photogenic misses the impact. Context is everything in campaign design, and campaign design, like everything, is also about something else. She is photogenic, telegenic, charismatic, and looks count — but none of this would matter if her campaign didn’t come out of a movement and carry with it the movement’s messaging and history. You watch, and you know where the words and imagery are coming from, if you lived through the financial crisis and the progressive upsurge ushered in by the Obama campaign, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Sanders Campaign, the immigrant justice movement, the Women’s March. Before all that made her victory possible, it made her candidacy resonate, attracting volunteers and voters. Charisma is only possible with an audience, and that audience was created by many others who came before her.

Ocasio-Cortez ends her video, “A New York for the many is possible,” and she gives credit to the many in her organizing as well as in her media. But her victory and the new hopes it feeds don’t answer the questions her success poses: What kind of movement and organization will it take to make a New York, or a U.S., “for the many”? The Trump/Republican regime has shifted attention almost exclusively to electoral politics and anchored hopes in the Democratic Party. But history has not been kind to such hopes, and even when Democrats held both houses and the presidency, the progressives were used and marginalized, when there wasn’t also a powerful insurgency in the streets and workplaces. Ocasio-Cortez, unusual among progressive politicians, belongs to both the party and the movements outside it.

I share the widespread enthusiasm for this extraordinary activist, but hope there is enough enthusiasm to spare for building the independent mass movements we need to keep the pressure on our political class and keep the best among them true to the people who raise them into office.

—Paul Elitzik

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Sevy Perez for starting me on this article — for the three years listening to him go on about fonts and color palettes. 

Some additional notes and images follow.

Ocasio-Cortez’s lead designer: Look at Maria Arenas’ work on her website,  and at Behance.

Ocasio-Cortez speaking: Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand says, describing the campaign video, “You could listen to her forever.” And it would take a long time to read or listen to all the interviews she’s done since her victory. But it’s worth listening to a few to see a candidate who doesn’t just give you canned answers. To quote Jessica Helfand about her again: “It’s a really great time to be a smart girl.”

Here are a few:

• Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept
• Jacobin’s “The Dig” 
• In These Times
• In the Thick/Futuro Media, via Latino Rebels
• The Young Turks
• Trevor Noah, The Daily Show
• The Cut

Ocasio trivia: Actually she’s not a star, only an asteroid. She was one of 4000 winners of high school science fairs to have an asteroid named after her.

Not so trivial: Which precincts did Ocasio-Cortez lose?

Crowley is from a political dynasty, one that has been in Queens politics for more than 40 years. His district is staggeringly diverse, with a 50 percent Hispanic population and 70 percent minorities overall. It is so diverse that the various ethnic groups had not coalesced around an outsider candidate before.
And they didn’t entirely this time either. Crowley won the African-American precincts and performed well in the Hispanic and Asian ones, but he got overwhelmed by white gentrifying liberals in Astoria, Jackson Heights, and Woodside in numbers unlike any that campaign pros had seen before.
—David Freedlander, “Ocasio-Cortez Not Only Beat Crowley — She Beat Old-School New York Politics.” New York magazine, June 27, 2018.

Ocasio-Cortez is doing important work aiding progressive candidates nationwide, but also has important work to do at home.

Those gentrifying liberals … include millenial artists and designers. Maria Arenas, just graduated from Pratt, had a good job with Tandem, but her cohort of recent art school graduates were working bars, serving tables, juggling part-time jobs, just like Ocasio-Cortez — all part of the new precariat. It’s a a sign of the times that Ocasio-Cortez’s design team were friends, that Scott Starrett had known her for some time and they offered their design services as an in-kind contribution to the campaign. The milieu of these young creatives is full of political talk and engagement, as we have seen since Occupy Wall Street.

Campaign videos:  Some comments comparing Crowley and Ocasio-Cortez’s videos are above. Take a look at this viral video for another woman, a Democratic challenger to a Tea Party Republican congressman.

M J Hegar’s campaign video opens with a family shot, the door on the wall in the background all that’s left of the helicopter she was flying when she was shot down in Afghanistan. Screen shot of campaign video.

M. J. Hegar’s video is all image-making — a stirring personal narrative about her backstory as a combat helicopter pilot — with a Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor. She was “barred because I was a woman” from her career choice, sued the Pentagon and won, so women could have elite ground combat jobs. Yet she couldn’t get her own Congressman to meet with her because she wasn’t a donor. And so she ran against him. The exceptionally well-crafted video is all image-making, inspiring personal narrative; it doesn’t mention one specific political goal, not one specific commitment. It has three times as many views (2,633,866) as Ocasio-Cortez’s video, if that says anything about left electoral politics. Her official logo is professional, and conventional.

Ocasio-Cortez video: “It’s time for one of us”
This is one of the moments in the video Michael Bierut mentions; it especially addresses working women, a moment when it is gender identity that is salient. A sign of how remarkable this image is: Bierut said he didn’t remember Ocasio-Cortez’s name but wanted to look at the video again, so he searched for “candidate changing shoes on subway platform” and found it. Try the search. (Maybe the train does go underground, but this is an El platform. You need to call it a “subway” if you’re a New Yorker, and that’s the way the search returns the video.)

Who uses yellow in a campaign poster? The only one any of the design critics could point to, before Ocasio-Cortez’s posters, was from the exciting progressive campaign of Jesse Jackson for president in 1988. There were at that time the same movement debates about engaging in electoral politics — were the progressives using the Democratic Party to advance their agenda, or was the Democratic Party exploiting Jackson’s appeal to reinvigorate the party and coopt his supporters? Should activists focus on their local organizing, or should they pour their energy into a presidential campaign that in the end would advance not their goals, but a centrist Democratic Party? After each of his presidential runs, Jackson, predictably, called on his supporters to support the Democratic candidate.