‘Crisis in Queens’: Immigrant from Jamaica announces Republican challenge to AOC in 2020

A new contender has entered the ring for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House seat in New York, vowing to take the young congresswoman’s spot in 2020 and condemning her for seeking self-promotion over public service.

Scherie Murray, a businesswoman from Queens and a Jamaican immigrant, announced that she will run for New York’s fourteenth congressional district in 2020, currently represented by the progressive firebrand better known as ‘AOC.’

“There is a crisis in Queens, and it’s called AOC,” Murray told Fox News on Wednesday, announcing her candidacy and accusing the congresswoman of “focusing on being famous” instead of doing her job.

AOC is “rolling back progress,” Murray continued, with her “job-killing Green New Deal” scheme, as well as her role in helping to scrap an Amazon investment project in New York, which may have cost the city thousands of jobs.

Murray released a campaign video after her Fox appearance, and took to Twitter.

AOC’s ultra-progressive views, while they may garner support from New York and national Democrats as well as the media, do not pass muster with average citizens, Murray suggested.

“I think it’s far, far to the left and it is not connecting with everyday Americans,” she said.

Attempts by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to rein in Ocasio-Cortez and three other female freshman lawmakers – dubbed “the Squad” – backfired this week, as President Donald Trump took aim at the quartet’s “horrible” statements about America. Democrats quickly closed ranks behind the foursome, denouncing the president as “racist.”

Ocasio-Cortez effectively won the election when she edged out long-term Democrat Joe Crowley in the 2018 primary. No one has yet risen to challenge her in the New York primaries, set for June of next year, but as the gap widens between the party’s ‘progressive’ and ‘establishment’ wings, an establishment contender becomes an ever more likely prospect.

While the Republican Party has its share of female and minority voices, progressive critics argue the GOP has increasingly come to represent “white male privilege” and detached “one percent” billionaires.

Murray – a female, an immigrant, and a ‘person of color’ – is flouting those stereotypes, but she will have an uphill battle in the district that skews Democrat by almost 30 percentage points.

“A Republican can win the district,” she said. “There is an absolute path to victory when you look at a general election campaign.”

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