Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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      in Elections

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
      Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
      The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
      “There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
      Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
      Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
      The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
      “If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
      Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
      Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
      The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
      While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
      The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
      “So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
      Appearing on CNN later in the day, Ocasio-Cortez said: “Progressives have assets to offer the party that the party has not yet fully leaned into… Every single swing seat member that co-sponsored Medicare for All won their re-election, and so the conversation is a little bit deeper than saying anything progressive is toxic.” More

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      in Elections

      US elects first trans state senator and first black gay congressman

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      A deeply polarised US electorate has given the country its first transgender state senator and its first black gay congressman – but also its first lawmaker to have openly supported the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.
      All four members of the progressive “Squad” of Democratic congresswomen of colour – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – have been comfortably re-elected, and Sarah McBride’s victory in Delaware has made her the highest-ranking trans official in the US.
      “I hope tonight shows an LGBTQ kid that our democracy is big enough for them, too,” McBride, 30, who easily defeated the Republican Steve Washington to represent Delaware’s first state senate district, tweeted after the election was called.
      McBride, a former spokesperson for the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, was a trainee in the White House during the Obama administration and became the first trans person to speak at a major political convention when she addressed Democrats in Philadelphia in 2016.
      “For Sarah to shatter a lavender ceiling in such a polarising year is a powerful reminder that voters are increasingly rejecting the politics of bigotry in favour of candidates who stand for fairness and equality,” said Annise Parker of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which trains and supports out candidates.
      In Vermont, Taylor Small, 26, has become the state’s first openly transgender legislator after winning 41% of the vote to make it to the House of Representatives, making her the fifth “out” trans state legislator in the US. More

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      in Elections

      AOC and her fellow 'Squad' members all win re-election to Congress

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      [embedded content]
      All four members of the progressive “squad” of Democratic congresswomen have handily won re-election.
      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan will return to their seats in the US Congress. The four women of color, who championed ambitious climate action, healthcare for all Americans and other progressive causes while enduring frequent racism and derision from Donald Trump, will no longer be newcomers to Capitol Hill.
      “Our sisterhood is resilient,” Omar tweeted.

      Ilhan Omar
      (@IlhanMN)
      Our sisterhood is resilient. pic.twitter.com/IfLtsvLEdx

      November 4, 2020

      “Serving New York-14 and fighting for working-class families in Congress has been the greatest honor, privilege and responsibility of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Thank you to the Bronx and Queens for re-electing me to the House despite the millions spent against us, and trusting me to represent you once more.”
      Ocasio-Cortez had been expected to easily win re-election, but like other congressional Democrats was watching hopes that the party would expand their majority wane. After Republicans flipped two House seats in Miami-Dade county – where a majority of the voters are Latino – she lamented that Democrats and Joe Biden had not done more to galvanize Latino voters.
      “Tonight’s results … are evolving and ongoing,” the New Yorker wrote, “but I will say we’ve been sounding the alarm about Democratic vulnerabilities with Latinos for a long, long time. There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn’t been put in.
      “We have work to do.”
      In a message to supporters, Pressley said: “Together, we have fought for our shared humanity. We have organized. We have mobilized. We have legislated our values. I am so proud to be your congresswoman and your partner in the work. I believe in the power of us. And we’re just getting started.”
      Tlaib, who with Omar was one of the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress two years ago, tweeted congratulations to Pressley.
      “The Squad is big,” she said.
      Trump has frequently vilified all four congresswomen, and in the lead up to election day lobbed frequent xenophobic attacks at Omar – accusing her at a recent rally of telling “us” – his overwhelmingly white audience – “how to run our country”. Omar came to the US at the age of 12, after fleeing civil war in Somalia. When she was first elected in 2018, she became the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress.
      The president has also often singled out Ocasio-Cortez as a radical, socialist voice in the Democratic party. Although her seat in New York’s Bronx and Queens was never competitive, she raised more than $17m for her re-election campaign. Her challenger, Republican John Cummings, raised about $9.5m – and a group called the “Stop AOC Pac” spent more than half a million dollars on ads opposing the congresswoman.
      Other progressive representatives who have won re-election include Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin. And the progressives Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri are headed to Congress for the first time, after winning their respective elections. More

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      in US Politics

      AOC played Among Us and achieved what most politicians fail at: acting normal

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      On Tuesday night, US members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar held what is perhaps the most unusual voter outreach event in recent memory. They signed on to play a livestreamed video game on Twitch, and joined a crew of online strangers to build a spaceship and try to get away with murder – literally.They were playing the incredibly popular Among Us – a 2018 game currently in the middle of a revival in interest, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and its faddish attraction to influencers. To play the game, crewmates complete mundane tasks on a spaceship while an impostor tries to kill members of the crew without getting caught. In the first round, Ocasio-Cortez – a complete newbie to the game – was picked as the impostor, while Omar, her confidante on Capitol Hill was none the wiser, so the live stream was set to be fun from the start.And it was, by every metric we have for this kind of event, an incredible success. Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch channel garnered a staggering audience of 439,000 viewers, all watching her in real time (the record for a Twitch stream is about 628,000 concurrent viewers) with approximately 5.2 million viewers watching the stream in aggregate. Meme-makers extended the conversation well into the week. Politicians do not draw this large of an online audience so quickly on these platforms: when Donald Trump and Joe Biden stream on Twitch for campaign events, total views peak at around 6,000 and 17,000, respectively.The success of Ocasio-Cortez and Omar’s stream extends beyond their already-established popularity among young progressives. The game itself is great sport. Much like the party game you may know as Werewolf, or Mafia, Among Us casts suspicion from the start, because although players know that there is an impostor “among us” (perhaps two), they don’t know who the impostor is.AOC’s stream was as good a sale as any: she fretted over the anxiety of having to play the role of the impostor, nearly giving herself away and saying “nooooo” out loud when she realized she would be the first person evading suspicion. In later games, where she was just a crewmate, she lamented to viewers about how she was “running so behind” on her tasks, and was shocked when an impostor found and killed her little pink avatar.When another player’s body was found, viewers could speculate with her: who’s the most suspicious player? (“I’m voting early,” she would say when casting her lot against a suspect, using every opportunity to stay on-message). You don’t really have to know a thing about video games to get drawn into the suspense of the game.But Ocasio-Cortez and Omar aren’t just famous people playing an unusually popular video game; they’re members of Congress trying to get out the vote. And in this, they achieved something most politicians attempt and fail at daily: they looked like completely normal people. They were having fun, accusing each other of being the impostor, cheering when they won, shouting about how they knew all along when an impostor was finally revealed.Credibility goes a long way here: AOC, in particular, has an established online presence, and engages with the public online in an almost-collegial manner. This, like the notion of playing a video game when she and Omar ostensibly have “more important” things to do, has earned her the scorn of others in Congress, but consider the things other candidates do to get out the vote: fish fries, baby kissing and benefit concerts. You go where people are, and in 2020, young people are watching video games played on Twitch.In internet culture, there’s nothing more vulgar than a tourist, someone with a purely transactional interest in a scene. And no matter how earnest Joe Biden is, or how cynically exploitative Trump is, in certain online circles, they will always be tourists simply because they’re too far removed from what young people are doing online to do what Ocasio-Cortez did: notice that there was a game people loved to watch on Twitch, asking if anyone wanted to play with her, and sitting down for a few hours to do it with nearly half a million people watching. And in the end, that’s the secret to Ocasio-Cortez and Omar’s success: that, for a little while, they weren’t opportunistic politicians, but motivated fellow citizens, just a couple of Twitch streamers among us. More

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      in US Politics

      AOC rallies liberals over supreme court battle: ‘This is not the time to give up’

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      New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged as one of the high-profile faces of the Democratic response to Republicans’ plan to quickly seat a new, conservative supreme court justice.Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most prominent champions of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, was quick to offer a rallying cry to supporters discouraged by the late-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death last week.“This moment is not the time for despair, it is not the time for cynicism. It is not the time to give up. It is not the time for us to say ‘it’s too late’ or ‘it’s too far gone’ or ‘I don’t know what to do,’ we’re going to talk about it right now,” The New York congresswoman said in an 40-minute Instagram video posted on Saturday.“Because it’s that important. Because it is not hyperbole. The actual balance of our democracy rests in the actions that we choose to make – that I choose to make, that you choose to make, that every single individual – chooses to make between now and election day.”Ocasio-Cortez has also made appearances alongside New York senator Chuck Schumer, the top ranking Democrat in the Senate. They made a joint appearance Sunday night in Brooklyn to urge supporters to mobilize to fight against Republicans’ nominee to replace Ginsburg. That has suggested a strong sense of unity between Ocasio-Cortez and one of the most powerful establishment Democrats across the party.“I think that it sends a strong signal right off the bat that the party needs to be united in winning the fight as opposed to divided over the form of any retaliation might take,” said Matt House, a former communications director for Schumer. “It’s a recognition that tipping your hand and being public about the exact form of retribution might take in the new Senate is counterproductive at this point. And it makes clear the progressive base understands that and it’s a strong signal that the party’s united on that front.”She’s also been one of the highest profile voices laying out the options Democrats say they have if Republicans push through a new supreme court nominee before the election.Ginsburg’s dying wish was for the winner of the November presidential election to nominate her replacement on the supreme court. But top Republicans, including Donald Trump and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, have signaled that they could move to confirm a new justice before the election.Democrats have floated the idea of possibly adding additional justices to the high court or impeaching Attorney General Bill Barr as a means of stalling a new justice before the outcome fo the next election.“We should leave all options on the table, including the number of justices that are on the supreme court,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Saturday. More

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      in Elections

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accuses NBC of spreading misinformation after DNC speech

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

      Congresswoman says NBC tweet about her endorsement of Bernie Sanders ‘sparked an enormous amount of hatred’

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      1:43

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praises Bernie Sanders in DNC speech – video

      Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused NBC News of spreading an “incredible amount of damage and misinformation” overnight on Tuesday after the network construed a routine procedural speech by her as a snub of the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden.
      Speaking on the second night of the Democratic national convention (DNC), Ocasio-Cortez was assigned to second the nomination of Senator Bernie Sanders as president. Sanders ended his presidential bid and endorsed Biden last spring, but he was in line for a formal nomination as part of the process of transferring his delegates to Biden.
      Ocasio-Cortez had originally endorsed Sanders for president during the primary season before switching her support to Biden.
      “In a time when millions of people in the United States are looking for deep systemic solutions to our crises of mass evictions, unemployment and lack of healthcare,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a short speech on Tuesday, “en ​espíritu del pueblo​ and out of a love for all people, I hereby second the nomination of Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont for president of the United States of America.”
      Soon after, NBC News sent a tweet that seemed to impute some intrigue to the fact that Ocasio-Cortez had not endorsed Biden for president. Such endorsements are not typically conferred in the convention setting and there was no reason or expectation for Ocasio-Cortez to do so.
      But an NBC News account tweeted: “In one of the shortest speeches of the DNC, Rep Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse Joe Biden: ‘I hereby second the nomination of Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont for president of the United States of America.’”
      Hours later, the tweet was deleted and an editor’s note was appended reading, “This tweet should have included more detail on the nominating process.”
      But Ocasio-Cortez and others were dissatisfied, accusing the news outlet of stoking false controversy at a time when the Democratic party faces a generational divide between leaders like Ocasio-Cortez, a 30-year-old progressive, and Biden, a 77-year-old who won his first Senate race 17 years before she was born.
      Ocasio-Cortez tweeted three times at NBC, starting after midnight:

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
      (@AOC)
      You waited several hours to correct your obvious and blatantly misleading tweet.It sparked an enormous amount of hatred and vitriol, & now the misinfo you created is circulating on other networks.All to generate hate-clicks from a pre-recorded, routine procedural motion. https://t.co/crDlEymgMD

      August 19, 2020

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
      (@AOC)
      This is completely unacceptable, disappointing, and appalling.The DNC shared the procedural purpose of my remarks to media WELL in advance. @NBC knew what was going to happen & that it was routine.How does a headline that malicious & misleading happen w/ that prior knowledge?

      August 19, 2020

      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
      (@AOC)
      So @NBCNews how are you going to fix the incredible amount of damage and misinformation that you are now responsible for?Because a 1:15am tweet to slip under the radar after blowing up a totally false and divisive narrative across networks isn’t it. https://t.co/zf6Wqiotvv

      August 19, 2020

      As of this writing NBC News had not released further comment.
      Sanders was also nominated for president at the 2016 Democratic national convention, before his delegates were passed to Hillary Clinton. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard nominated Sanders, and the nomination was seconded by a state campaign director and a spokeswoman for an election watchdog group.

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

      Democratic national convention 2020

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