Zephyr Teachout Is Battling Big Money and Cynicism in One of This Year’s Tightest Congressional Races
Sarah Jaffe
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/zephyr-teachout-is-battling-big-money-and-cynicism-in-one-of-this-years-t
The question on everyone’s mind since Sanders lost the Democratic nomination has been: Does that political revolution have legs? Teachout’s campaign, which is fighting to flip a red district blue in upstate New York, will be seen as a referendum on this question. Like Sanders, Teachout is running a broadly populist campaign focused on the economic struggles that Americans have faced in recent decades; like him, she is drawing on a small-donor base, touting an average donation of $19. She is an expert on political corruption who has focused much of her activism on the issue of money in politics, challenging a career politician and political operative who is backed by some of the richest campaign donors. And she is determined to frame her campaign as that of an outsider taking on a broken system. Her race is a near-perfect prism for the issues of the 2016 election.