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Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Hello, Representative Bush. Hi, Brittany. How are you? Good. It's good to talk to you again. How are you doing?

I'm great. I'm great. You know, all things considered.

Yeah.

This is Corey Bush. And up until last Friday, she was a Democratic congresswoman representing St. Louis, Missouri.

But today, she's back to being activist, Cory Bush,

organizer, Cory Bush, private citizen, Cory Bush. That's because last Friday, a new Congress began.

And last summer, she lost her bid for re-election. And yeah, I know. The losers rarely get to write history. But in this case,

I think this loser and her story are a perfect case study for understanding why Democrats,

and by extension, progressives lost the House, the Senate, and the White House.

Let's go back a few months to last August.

The dust is settling after one of the toughest races we've seen in the state, perhaps in the

country, this big primary, a lot of outside money coming into the St. Louis area to help

Wesley Bell unseat Cory Bush.

It's Tuesday, August 6th.

Primary results are rolling in, and the reality is setting in for Bush's re-election team.

I had just gotten dressed because I changed clothes from being out, you know, at the polls all day.

And I just walked in the room, and the team was just kind of frantically looking at their phones.

It's just looking really somber and that's how I found out.

It was clear that she was going to lose the race to her opponent, Democrat Wesley Bell.

The primary between Cory Bush and Bell was the second most expensive primary in the history of this country,

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