Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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      ‘A particularly heinous villain’: a disdain for Musk has sparked protests across US

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      When protesters showed up at state capitols around the country and at a host of federal agencies this month, they carried signs with messages about the unelected billionaire running a slash-and-burn government-cutting campaign that moved them to action.As liberal protesters find their footing in the second Donald Trump era, Elon Musk is proving a potent target.“He’s a particularly heinous villain,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the activist organization Indivisible. “He is less popular even than Trump, and it makes sense, because he’s an unelected billionaire, in fact, the richest man in the world, who’s trying to end cancer research and nutrition assistance for the poorest children in the country.”Trump’s inauguration wasn’t met with protests like in 2017. In the 2024 election, Trump won the popular vote for the first time and Republicans took hold of both chambers of Congress, dampening the movement against him. But the ascendancy of Musk in Washington has given the leftwing protest movement somebody to mobilize against, and people across the country appear to be taking their poster boards out of storage.In Washington, Indivisible and other groups on the left have organized protests, moving from agency to agency and following Musk’s team at the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) as it tries to gut programs and services.The protests are meant to voice anger against Musk and Trump, but also to pressure Democrats into working in tandem with groups such as Indivisible as an opposition party, Levin said. Democratic elected officials have not led the resistance, he argued, so the resistance is pushing them to action.Even without Musk, though, Levin thinks people would have been moved to opposition by the actions taken by the Trump administration, which is “not starved for possible villains”.“Musk is particularly bad, and he makes for an easy opponent to rally against,” he said. “ We thought there was going to be a backlash at some point. We didn’t think that we were going to have the richest man in the world tweet out that the Department of Education no longer exists. I mean, that is bonkers.”Beyond DC, a nascent protest movement – organized on social media by people who were tired of waiting for direction on how to voice their discontent with Trump – began in late January with a Reddit post that set a date chosen at random, 5 February, for a 50-state protest. Now called 50501 (for 50 states, 50 protests, one day), the group claims people turned out in 80 cities that day. Established left-leaning groups first viewed the protest plans with wariness, given the organizers’ inexperience.The movement is planning a president’s day protest on 17 February, dubbing it the “not my president’s day of action”. On social media, the group talks about standing up to dictators and “tech bros” and against the abuse of power they see in the second Trump administration.View image in fullscreenThe 50501 group is working to build relationships with activists around the country and plan further protests, said Sydney, an organizer with 50501, who asked that her last name not be used. She had never organized before, but didn’t see anyone on social media channels planning for the 5 February protest in Pennsylvania.“I decided to pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely quickly. It’s probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” she said.Levin, of Indivisible, said he hoped those who attend protests then find further ways to get involved – many local chapters of Indivisible formed on the buses on the way home from the Women’s March in 2017, he said.Those Indivisible chapters around the country have grown steadily, and Levin is seeing more groups registering now than the same period in 2017. Chapters in all 50 states organized 300 events at local Senate offices to call on senators to oppose Russ Vought’s nomination to lead the office of management and budget.Levin said his organization was initially “really frustrated” that Democratic leadership was not responding strongly to the funding freeze that caused confusion and chaos. The group held a “Nobody Elected Elon” protest at the treasury department, and elected Democratic members of Congress made an appearance.At a protest at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on 10 February, Levin introduced 17 members of Congress. During each introduction, he asked them if they would withhold their vote on any funding bill, the next big battle for Democrats to show they are standing against the Trump agenda. Sixteen of the 17 said they would – some answering before he could even finish the question. The one who didn’t, the California representative Brad Sherman, faced a crowd chanting “withhold your vote,” Levin said.While the long-term efficacy of such efforts is unclear, Quinta Jurecic, a a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggested in an interview with the New York Times that protests outside the labor department prompted in an-person “Doge” meeting to move online.Some Democrats have privately complained that Indivisible and MoveOn, another liberal advocacy group, were pressuring them too much, considering Republicans hold the levers of government power, Axios reported. Faced with a barrage of phone calls, Democratic representative Don Beyer said: “It’s been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans.’”Republicans have also been getting calls – Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, told the Washington Post on 7 February that the Senate was receiving 1,600 calls per minute, and that calls to her office were mostly from people concerned about Musk and his agency.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative from New York, said in an Instagram story that the volume of calls to her Republican colleagues is sending the message that people are mobilized and angry. “But the pressure needs to stay on,” she said.Send us a tip
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      Ocasio-Cortez bids to become top Democrat on key House committee

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez formally launched her bid to become the lead Democrat on the House oversight committee, setting up a race against the veteran representative Gerry Connolly for a crucial minority leadership position.The 35-year-old New York congresswoman’s announcement comes as Democrats are reshaping their committee leadership, with the oversight committee set to play a critical role in challenging potential actions during the next second Trump administration.In an official appeal to her colleagues, Ocasio-Cortez wrote that the role carries “a profound and consequential” responsibility. She argues that her generation of lawmakers is ready to take on leadership responsibilities, positioning herself as a fresh alternative to more established party members.Connolly, a 74-year-old longtime representative from Virginia, is Ocasio-Cortez’s primary challenger and represents the experienced counterpoint. With 16 years in Congress and touting a track record of protecting federal employees, he offers a more traditional approach to the committee leadership.The competition reflects broader dynamics within the Democratic party – a tension between political veterans and energetic progressive voices seeking to take the reins on political strategy.The contest will be decided by the Democratic caucus’s steering and policy committee through a secret ballot, followed by a full caucus vote. Outgoing oversight committee ranking member Jamie Raskin is staying neutral in the race.The oversight committee remains a powerful platform, even from the minority position. It is meant to examine government operations, and its jurisdiction spans a wide range of issues including potential government waste and corruption and investigating federal agencies and presidential administrations.While Democrats cannot control subpoenas or hearing agendas during the next session, the ranking member can still influence public discourse and push back against the Republican legislative agenda. The final decision is expected in the coming weeks. More

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      ‘A change from the status quo’: the voters who backed Trump and AOC

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      Politics makes for strange bedfellows. US political minds will be reminding themselves of this fact as the dust settles on America’s election, with some results showing that a few voters were able to simultaneously support Donald Trump and progressive-leaning Democratic candidates.In the Bronx in New York, a strongly Black, Asian and Latino community, Trump’s support jumped 11 points to 33% over 2020, one of the largest margins citywide. At the same time, the leftwing firebrand Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez secured 68.9% of the vote, returning her to Congress for a fourth consecutive term.Welcome to the vote-splitting phenomenon of 2024, another sign of a restive American electorate committed to rejecting business as usual in Washington and voting to shake up a self-serving two-party system they often believe pays only lip service to their concerns.Trump and Ocasio-Cortez, whose politics are poles apart on almost every issue, were seen by at least some voters as sharing one very important thing: an anti-establishment authenticity.“They’re a good counter-balance for each other,” said Mamé, 66, a West African man on his way to a doctor’s appointment in the Bronx. “He’s a bully she doesn’t accept. She’s a fighter, progressive, and she loves democracy.”A Dominican Uber driver called Robin said Trump was better on the economy and security, but Ocasio-Cortez was better on democracy. “The last three years were no good economically: half a million migrants coming to New York, being given a hotel and money, and me working 60 hours a week with three kids.”Last week, Ocasio-Cortez herself prodded her own followers on X – the social media platform formerly known as Twitter – about vote-splitting between her and Trump. “I actually want to learn from you, I want to hear what you were thinking,” she said.Many in response to her appeal said there was no contradiction between supporting Trump and the avowed Democratic socialist.“I feel you are both outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’,” said one. Another, “both of you push boundaries and force growth”. And: “It’s real simple … Trump and you care for the working class.”“You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” said a fourth. Lastly, a respondent said: “You signaled change. Trump signified change. I’ve said lately, Trump sounds more like you.”Ocasio-Cortez told The View on Thursday: “One, there is universal frustration in this country, much of it I actually think justified, that is raging at a political establishment that centers corporate interests [and] billionaires. and puts their needs ahead of the needs of working Americans.”The exchanges on X prompted whoops of joy from Salon, a liberal-leaning outlet, which said there might now be an openness among bruised Democrats to “someone who simply has the sauce … And Ocasio-Cortez has the sauce.”View image in fullscreenTo some extent, the Bronx split-ticket vote phenomenon was repeated across the US. Republicans won the White House and Senate convincingly. But in the House of Representatives, Democrats more or less held their own. (Split-ticket voting had an impact but it still left the House narrowly under Republican control.)“People are looking for people to shake up the system and fight for a bold agenda so they’re voting for candidates who are different and have a clear agenda outside the norms of our political system,” said Jasmine Gripper, co-director of the New York Working Families party.“Trump is not a career politician and challenges the system, and AOC is doing that in a different way. Their approaches and philosophies and values are deeply different, but they both represent a change from the status quo that voters are rejecting.”In 2018, Trump was one of the first to recognize AOC’s rise, warning Joe Crowley, the 10-term Democrat she defeated for the nomination, of her natural political abilities. Crowley later reflected that Trump’s win two years earlier had helped to get Ocasio-Cortez elected.“It lit the fire on to the base of our party, and I think that’s a good thing in many respects,” he said.Trump and Ocasio-Cortez, native New Yorkers and Democrats in their origin stories, have often appeared to be perfect sparring partners, with an innate understanding of how to get under the other’s skin, and clapping back at each other on social media (AOC has 8.1 million Instagram followers).She has called Trump a “racist visionary” and said he is “afraid” of strong Latino women. He has insulted her right back, though mixed with compliments. “Look, she’s a fake, and in all fairness to her, she knows it. But she’s got a good thing going – a good thing for her,” Trump said in August. “She’s got a spark – I will say that. A good spark that’s pretty amazing, actually.”Both know the value of a political stunt. AOC wore a white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red to the Met Gala, where tables cost $450,000. “The medium is the message,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram, quoting the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.But the Democrat’s ultra-progressive group in Congress, known as “the Squad”, did not fare so well under the softer liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. Two of the group no longer sit in the House. Despite that, Ocasio-Cortez was a good soldier for Harris and before her, Joe Biden, supporting and enthusiastically campaigning for both.But its too soon to say how much progressives are encouraged by the phenomenon of split-ticket voting and whether it will presage a tack away from traditional party elites, as the Democrats try to regroup in the political wilderness of the next four years. Certainly there are those who think the party needs a dose of economic populism and charismatic outsiders to lead it.“What’s clear is we have to compete in a new information environment that Trump understands, the Democrats struggle with, and AOC is a genius at,” said Billy Wimsatt of the Movement Voter Project. “We need candidates and leaders that people believe in and see as authentic and not as a manufactured politicians.”But what might be more worrying for Democrats are people like 30-year-old Bronx resident Carlos Thomas. “I was rooting for Donald because he’s for business, but I liked the girl he was running against [also],” he said.But he – like tens of millions of other Americans in an election that saw turnout drop – simply failed to vote. More

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      The Democrats must become an anti-establishment party | Robert Reich

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      A political disaster such as what occurred last Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.This is known as the Lesson of the election.The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.And therein lies its power. When the Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom – when most of the politicians, pundits and journalists come to believe it – it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives and journalists approach coming elections.What’s the Lesson of the 2024 election?According to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy – and their votes reflected their class and level of education.While the US economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees – that’s the majority – have not felt it.In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure.The real median wage of the bottom 90% is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large now as it was then.Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.This has caused many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger. Harris did not.The real lesson of the 2024 election is that Democrats must not just give voice to the anger, but also explain how record inequality has corrupted our system, and pledge to limit the political power of big corporations and the super-rich.The basic bargain in America used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you’d do better, and your children would do even better than you.But since 1980, that bargain has become a sham. The middle class has shrunk.Why? While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.Democrats embraced Nafta and lowered tariffs on Chinese goods. They deregulated finance and allowed Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. They let big corporations gain enough market power to keep prices (and profit margins) high.They let corporations bust unions (with negligible penalties) and slash payrolls. They bailed out Wall Street when its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.They welcomed big money into their campaigns, and delivered quid pro quos that rigged the market in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.Joe Biden redirected the Democratic party back toward its working-class roots, but many of the changes he catalyzed – more vigorous actions against monopolies, stronger enforcement of labor laws and major investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, semiconductors and non-fossil fuels – wouldn’t be evident for years. In any event, he could not communicate effectively about them.The Republican party says it’s on the side of working people, but its policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf Republicans gain control over the House as well as the Senate, as looks likely, they will extend Trump’s 2017 tax law and add additional tax cuts.As in 2017, these lower taxes will benefit mainly the wealthy and enlarge the national debt, which will give Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – their objective for decades.Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class.They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since the second world war.They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982) and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to companies and industries unrelated to the common good).Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state”, or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains.In doing this, Democrats should not retreat from their concerns about democracy. Democracy goes together with a fair economy.Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America.Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.The Democratic party should use this inflection point to shift ground – from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney and vacuous “centrism” – to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.This is and should be the Lesson of the 2024 election.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Tim Walz and AOC play football video game on Twitch in appeal to young men

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      Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday streamed themselves playing an American football video game against each other on Sunday as the two Democrats continued their party’s efforts to secure votes from young men just nine days before the White House election.During the stream of their showdown on the latest edition of the Madden game series, Ocasio-Cortez and Walz exalted the importance of regaining Democratic control of the US House, maintaining a majority in the Senate and ensuring Kamala Harris wins the 5 November presidential election against Donald Trump.“We don’t all share the same politics, we don’t all share the same views, but the need to defeat Trump this year has been my number one priority,” Ocasio-Cortez said.She echoed others who have called Trump an aspiring authoritarian ruler and fascist supported by special interests who are exacerbating the ongoing climate crisis. She also discussed how the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post prevented their editorial teams endorsing Harris over Trump, referring to it as “a plutocracy mask-off moment”.Ocasio-Cortez said she spoke with Walz a couple of weeks earlier when he expressed interest in doing a game stream with her. They agreed to play Madden because he used to be a football coach, and he was familiar with the series having gamed with his children.Walz attended the stream prior to a campaign rally in Nevada, logging on at about 3.30pm ET before detailing a history with gaming dating back to the original Pac Man, which hit arcades in the 1980. He played with the Minnesota Vikings and Ocasio-Cortez with the Buffalo Bills as about 12,000 users watched.Walz – Minnesota’s governor – and Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitch after a recent NBC News survey found the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris had a lead of two percentage points over Donald Trump with young male registered voters.Despite the edge, Democrats have polled better among the demographic in previous election cycles, creating concern among the party. And on Friday, Trump’s campaign seemingly tried to add to concern, having the former president spend three hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast, whose audience is predominantly young men and whose show often leads the global charts on both Apple and Spotify.Harris at one point was rumored to appear with Rogan, but the sit-down never materialized. And instead it was Trump who took the spot to make his case for replacing income tax with tariffs and to reminisce about the “genius” of Robert E Lee, the Confederate military general who owned enslaved people and commanded the white supremacist, losing side of the US civil war.Sunday’s event with Ocasio-Cortez came after her first appearance on the Twitch platform in 2020 was one of the platform’s most watched events at that time. Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden weeks later.Sunday’s session also came after the Harris campaign earlier in October live-streamed a Walz rally on Twitch alongside live play of the World of Warcraft game.Another Harris campaign strategy targeting the support of young men has centered on a series of ads on the sports gambling platform DraftKings, Yahoo Sports, and on websites such as IGN (short for Imagine Games Network) and Fandom. More

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      AOC introduces legislation for low-cost housing programme backed by US funding

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Congress member for New York, has introduced legislation aimed at establishing an ambitious social housing programme that would see millions of new homes being built with US government funding.With Tina Smith, a Democratic senator for Minnesota, Ocasio-Cortez has introduced the Homes Act in the House of Representatives to address what they call a “housing crisis” that has left millions of low-income people unable to find rental accommodation they can afford. Smith has introduced the proposed legislation in the Senate.If passed, it would provide federal funding for millions of new homes and apartments that would have to remain affordable by law.The initiative comes against the backdrop of mounting concern that has seen soaring housing costs emerge as one of the salient campaign issues in the forthcoming presidential election.Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has tried to address it by pledging $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers – a proposal which critics say would drive up house prices.In their joint legislation, Ocasio-Cortez and Smith propose setting up an authority within the the Department of Housing and Urban Development to acquire properties and provide homes with explicit tenant protections.It would also set rents based on tenants’ incomes and mandate permanently affordable purchase prices.The homes would be run by non-profit organisations, housing associations or cooperatives.“For generations, the federal government’s approach to housing policy has been primarily focused on encouraging single-family homeownership and private investment in rental housing,” Ocasio-Cortez and Smith wrote in an editorial in the New York Times, which argues that the current system has led to America’s 44 million private tenants struggling to meet rental payments.They blame high rents and home shortages on decades-old “restrictive zoning laws” and rising building costs, meaning not enough new housing has been built.“There is another way: social housing,” they say. “Instead of treating real estate as a commodity, we can underwrite the construction of millions of homes and apartments that, by law, must remain affordable. Some would be rental units; others would offer Americans the opportunity to build equity.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe pair argue that the model already exists in some European cities, including Vienna, as well as in some projects in Ocasio-Cortez’s native New York, and in St Paul in Smith’s home state.Citing the New York complex of Co-op City in the Bronx as one template, they write: “[It] stands as not only one of the largest housing cooperatives in the world – with its own schools and power plant – but also the largest, naturally occurring retirement community in the country, a testament to its financial and social sustainability.”They invoke research estimating that their proposal could build and preserve 1.25m new homes, including more than 850,000 for the lowest-income households.“This is the federal government’s chance to invest in social housing and give millions of Americans a safe, comfortable and affordable place to call home – with the sense of security and dignity that come with it,” Ocasio-Cortez and Smith conclude. More

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      Walz, Bill Clinton and surprise Oprah: Democratic convention day three key takeaways

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      The third night of the Democratic national convention featured a surprise speech from Oprah Winfrey, along with scheduled remarks from Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz and other major party figures, many emphasizing the “joy” of Kamala Harris’s campaign.Here are some key takeaways:1. Tim Walz’s pitch to voters: ‘We’ll turn the page on Donald Trump’Kamala Harris’s running mate gave his keynote pitch to supporters at the end of the third night of the convention, talking about his military service, coaching and teaching days, and his family’s fertility journey. He leaned into his humble roots and deployed repeated football metaphors: “I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks … It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field, and boy do we have the right team.”He called on his supporters to step up with urgency: “We got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re going to leave it on the field. That’s how we’ll keep moving forward. That’s how we’ll turn the page on Donald Trump. That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, healthcare and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom. That’s how we make America a place where no child is left hungry, where no community is left behind, where nobody gets told they don’t belong.”2. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Kenan Thompson and other celebrities invigorate the crowdThe convention continued with a packed celebrity lineup. Oprah Winfrey earned huge cheers when she made an unannounced appearance. She denounced “people who would have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe” and took a swipe at JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment. She put Harris’s candidacy into the historical context of other trailblazing Black women, including Tessie Prevost Williams, one of the “New Orleans Four” who helped integrate public schools. And she roused the audience with her call to action, singing the word “joy”.Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson had a lively appearance, entering with a large Project 2025 book and virtually interviewing Americans who would be harmed by the rightwing agenda: “You ever see a document that can kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”Musician Stevie Wonder urged the crowd to choose “joy over anger”. Actor Mindy Kaling gave a personal account of cooking with Harris. And musicians John Legend and Sheila E performed at the end of the night.3. Bill Clinton: ‘We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy’Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, addressed his 12th Democratic convention, reading off written notes, not the teleprompter, suggesting the speech was edited last-minute. He warned Democrats against complacency: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phoney issues. This is a brutal business.” He mocked Trump for his narcissism and obsession with crowd sizes, following Barack Obama’s widely cited joke on Tuesday: “[Trump] mostly talks about himself … his vendettas, vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.”Clinton preached a message of unity, echoing Obama’s comments, encouraging supporters not to demean or disrespect neighbors they disagree with. He praised Joe Biden for “voluntarily” giving up power and celebrated the hope Harris has injected into the race: “If you vote for this team … you will be proud of it for the rest of your life.”4. Parents of a Hamas hostage were featured while protesters and AOC pushed for a Palestinian speakerJon Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave emotional remarks about their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is held hostage by Hamas. Polin praised the White House and said they had met with Harris and Biden: “They’re both working tirelessly for a hostage and ceasefire deal that will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren home, and will stop the despair in Gaza.”Members of the uncommitted movement, who have been advocating for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, said they welcomed the speech, but continued to advocate that a Palestinian leader get an opportunity to address the crowd. Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who has treated patients in Gaza, spoke on a Democratic convention panel centered on Palestinian human rights, but there hasn’t been a Palestinian American on the main stage. Gaza solidarity protesters staged a sit-in outside the convention, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on the convention to “center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment”, posting: “To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.”5. Pete Buttigieg went hard after JD Vance: ‘Doubling down on negativity’Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation, went hard after Donald Trump’s running mate: “JD Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life that he has in mind for you, then you don’t count, someone who said that if you don’t have kids, you have ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country’ … When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids … but our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical. Choosing a guy like JD Vance to be America’s next vice president sends a message … They are doubling down on negativity and grievance, committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word: darkness.”6. Prominent Republicans again rallied for Harris: ‘Our party acts more like a cult’Prominent Republicans and former Donald Trump supporters continued to earn loud applause at the convention, arguing that GOP voters should reject the former president, even if they don’t agree with all of Harris’s positions. “If Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative, it’s chaotic and crazy, and the only thing left to do is dump Trump. These days, our party acts more like a cult, a cult worshiping a felonious thug,” said Geoff Duncan, former lieutenant governor of Georgia.Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence also spoke, saying: “Being inside Trump’s White House was terrifying. But what keeps me up at night is what will happen if he gets back there.”7. Speakers uplifted LGBTQ+ rights: ‘Trump wants to erase us’Speakers repeatedly promoted LGBTQ+ rights, offering a sharp contrast to the Republican national convention which continually featured extremist, anti-trans rhetoric. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ+ organization, warned: “Trump wants to erase us … He would ban our healthcare, belittle our marriages, bury our stories. But we are not going anywhere. We are not going back.”Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor and the first gay man to serve as a US state governor, highlighted the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of Project 2025: “Democrats welcome ‘weird’, but we’re not weirdos telling families who can and can’t have kids, who to marry or how to live our lives.” Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said LGBTQ+ Floridians were enduring “endless state-sponsored hate”. And Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, earned loud applause when she said: “I got a message for the Republicans and the justices of the United States supreme court: you can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead gay hand.”Democratic convention highlights:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

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      AOC’s power comes from her outsider status. Can that endure? | Moira Donegan

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      She spoke loudly and with confidence, gesticulated broadly, and returned, several times over the course of her seven-minute remarks, to the struggles of working families. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York and standard-bearer for the post-Bernie Sanders US left, may have been an unlikely choice for a lengthy primetime speech at the Democratic national convention’s opening night. The last time she spoke at the Democratic convention, in 2020, she was given just a minute and a half, in which she indicted the party establishment from the left and endorsed Sanders’ campaign for the nomination, which by then had failed.But this time, the party showcased Ocasio-Cortez as one of its prime talents, and her rhetoric was starkly different. Though she focused her remarks on her trademark politics of class, emphasizing the struggles of whose who worry about “rent checks and groceries”, she spoke, this time, in the Democrats’ most comfortable terms. Ocasio-Cortez used to speak of the “working class”. On Monday night, she praised Kamala Harris as “for the middle class because she is from the middle class”.The remarks, and Ocasio-Cortez’s starring role at the convention, underscore both her own transformation in Washington DC and the uneasy integration of the US left into the Democratic coalition. Her presence signals not only that Washington has changed the leftist members of “the Squad” – including AOC as well as the likes of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley – but also that the left’s arrival in Washington has changed the Democrats.For one thing, it would have been easy for the Harris-Walz campaign to freeze her out. After all, AOC has not always been willing to play ball with the House Democratic leadership’s agenda. She has withheld her vote on key legislative priorities, such as Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, frustrating the likes of Nancy Pelosi. And over the course of her time in Washington, she has frequently used Instagram Live, her preferred method of public communication, to sidestep the establishment media and address her constituents and supporters directly, often in ways that counteract the party’s preferred messaging.Most recently, she took to a livestream on 19 July to push back against the then growing number of high-profile Democrats who were calling on the president to drop out of the race, saying that she thought the ageing and embattled incumbent should continue his campaign. Biden dropped out just two days later. As the party rapidly coalesced around the vice-president, it seemed that AOC had made a dramatic miscalculation.Another version of the Democratic party probably would have repaid these affronts with icy exclusion. But for the Democrats of 2024, AOC is an asset that they cannot afford to lose.This is not only because of her youth, or the extreme force of her charisma – whatever the contradictions of her position, AOC remains an uncommonly powerful speaker, signaling the Democrats’ shift to the future after their party had long been criticized for failing to develop younger talent and reflecting a stark contrast with the Republicans, whose millennial talent pool is overrepresented with charmless male grievance grifters and sex-obsessed creeps. But it is also because AOC has unique credibility with two pools of voters that Democrats have alienated over the past year, voters they cannot win without: the left block that was animated by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and the young.Biden’s successful 2020 coalition relied heavily on these voters – from the far-left Bernie supporters, who largely put aside their complaints about their hero’s treatment by the party to support Biden against a second Trump term, and young voters, who had similarly bucked historical trends to deliver an uncommonly high turnout for their age cohort.These voters, however, have drifted from the Democrats more recently. Some were turned off by Biden’s distaste for abortion; many felt that his age disqualified him, and found the ageing president an untenable vehicle for their future aspirations. But many from both of these camps began drifting away from the Democratic ticket not only because of the particular weaknesses of Biden as a candidate – they were driven away by moral outrage at his administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. These are voters who will not be so easily won back by a change of candidate; many of them are still waiting to see a change of policy.AOC is perhaps uniquely positioned, among the major Democrats who have quickly lined up to serve as Harris surrogates, to reach these voters. But her cooperation with the Democratic establishment could also threaten her credibility with parts of the left that define themselves by their opposition. At her speech on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken critic of the war, said that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire”. The Harris-Walz camp will likely use the clip in campaign promotions targeted at young voters. It is a valuable image for them. It is not yet clear what concessions AOC extracted in exchange for it.How long can Ocasio-Cortez walk this tightrope? Her career has been defined by her status as an insurgent critic of the party. But this position, which has long been AOC’s source of moral authority, may become a victim of her own success. She can’t keep claiming to be an outsider in a party that has rapidly reshaped itself in her image. But then again, it is her credibility with the left – her ability to claim status as an outsider – that is the very source of her influence.AOC’s mentor, Bernie Sanders – who campaigns as an independent, even though he has long caucused with the Democrats – has been able to maintain his distance from party leadership, showing uncommon integrity and consistency. But this stance, though it has won Sanders many moral and rhetorical victories, has largely excluded him from winning legislative ones. AOC seems to be taking a different track.She is embarking, instead, on what for American leftists is something of a novel path: an effort to join a governing coalition – and to take on the ambivalent responsibilities of real power.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More