Ilhan Omar Wants To Build Progressive Power. She’s Starting With This Muslim Candidate.

In the final months of the 2020 election cycle, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is exercising her influence as a national progressive leader, endorsing Ihssane Leckey, a former Wall Street regulator and an immigrant Muslim woman.

Leckey — running on a platform backing the Green New Deal, “Medicare for All,” and canceling student debt in a packed, nearly all-white field of candidates to take over Rep. Joe Kennedy’s Massachusetts House seat — is the kind of candidate lawmakers like Omar want as an ally in the halls of Congress.

But the progressive movement has struggled to build a robust infrastructure around candidates like Leckey.

Without major corporate donors, the party’s backing or name recognition, first-time progressive candidates have struggled to find footing. Those like Charles Booker in the Kentucky Senate race came within striking distance of the Democratic nomination with a fraction of their opponents’ spending, but still, the resource hurdle proved too big to overcome. Just two years ago, not a single candidate backed by the Sen. Bernie Sanders-inspired group Our Revolution won a seat in Congress.

Now, as the majority of the 2020 primaries are done and gone, some of the highest-profile progressives who won in the 2018 cycle are making a concerted effort to put more resources toward new progressive candidates.

Omar’s endorsement of Leckey is the first through her political action committee, the Inspiring Leadership Has A Name PAC (ILHAN PAC), a leadership PAC she established less than a week after getting elected to Congress in 2018 as one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the House of Representatives.

For Omar, endorsing Leckey through the PAC is the start of what her campaign sees as a long-term project to build out a more robust bench of progressive leaders in Congress. Alongside fellow House progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, collectively known as “the squad,” Omar has a uniquely large platform as a freshman House representative that can energize progressive voters and — hopefully — bring in donations.

So far, the PAC has been dormant. In 2019, it raised $5,000 from an agricultural cooperative in Minnesota and now sits on roughly $85,000, despite Omar’s personal campaign raising more than $3.3 million. Omar’s campaign says fundraising will become a priority through the PAC going forward, but wouldn’t comment on how much money it was hoping to spend on progressive candidates.