Or Can AOC Get Them To Vote For Democrats? She'd Have To Change Her Party First
A New York Times column Saturday was titled The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don’t Know, written by Gaby Del Valle, a reporter who’s been covering her since 2018, the year she was first elected to Congress. Del Valle talks about a future bid for “higher office,’ but never mentions running for president. But she makes a case for it.
It’s a facile and inaccurate comparison, but simple-minded journalists often compare AOC and Marjorie Traitor Greene, who tried, unsuccessfully to make herself into a rightwing version of AOC. It didn’t work because MTG is shallow, ignorant and not in the policy sphere. Like I said the other day, Moscow Marge is the Jared Moskowitz of the right. “First impressions are hard to erase,” wrote Del Valle, “and the obstinacy that made Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.” Ergo— MTG. But that’s a first impression, based on a sit-in with Climate activists in Pelosi’s office before she was even sworn in.
That caricature that suits Traitor Greene to a “t,” isn’t who AOC is. “Democrats frustrated by her theatrics,” wrote Del Valle, “may be missing a more compelling picture. In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.”
That last sentence is the thesis of Del Valle’s piece. I wish I could see it. Her Bronx-Queens district, NY-14, is very blue. Biden beat Trump there by 55.2 points. But if AOC is going to do what Del Valle suggests she will— forge “a coalition that can win election after election,” bringing together a multiracial coalition while uniting non-voters with the working class. YES! If anyone can do it, it would be AOC. But… I’d like to see that in NY-14, which has an abysmal level of voter turnout. In 2022, she won with almost 71% of the vote against a very well-financed Republican— but just 116,596 people voted. Ho does that turnout stack up to other NYC districts?
NY-03 (Nassau/Queens)- 271,228 voters (Santos)
NY-04 (Queens)- 271,493 voters (D’Esposito)
NY-05 (Queens)- 138,803 voters (Meeks)
NY-06 (Queens)- 132,984 voters (Meng)
NY-07 (Brooklyn/Queens)- 148,070 voters (Velázquez)
NY-08 (Brooklyn)- 138,139 voters (Jeffries)
NY-09 (Brooklyn)- 143,491 voters (Clarke)
NY-10 (Brooklyn/Manhattan)- 191,087 voters (Goldman)
NY-11 (Staten Island/Brooklyn)- 187,793 voters (Malliotakis)
NY-12 (Manhattan)- 245,694 voters (Nadler)
NY-13 (Manhattan/Bronx) uncontested but 117,846 voters (Espaillat)
NY-15 (Bronx)- 92,288 voters (Torres)
NY-16 (Westchester/Bronx)- 207,723 (Bowman)
Other than AIPAC/crypto-whore Ritchie Torres, the least popular member of the NY delegation, who does all he can to hold down the turnout, AOC’s turnout is the least robust. “The dream for Democrats,” wrote Del Valle, “is that one day, she or someone like her could emerge from the backbench to bring new voters into the party, forging a coalition that can win election after election. It’s too early to tell whether she has what it takes to pull that off. But what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way. Those instincts are in short supply in Washington. After five years in Congress, she has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have. Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body.”
For decades, bipartisanship has meant bringing together moderates, lobbyists and establishment insiders to produce watered-down legislation unpalatable to many voters in both political parties. What Ocasio-Cortez is doing is different; she’s uniting politicians on the fringes of American politics around a broadly popular set of policies.
Americans in both parties overwhelmingly say that they don’t trust the government to do the right thing and that donors and lobbyists have too much sway over the legislative process. A Pew Research Center poll conducted last year found that more than 8 in 10 Americans believe politicians “are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” One-fifth of respondents said lack of bipartisan cooperation was the biggest problem with the political system.
Seen in that light, Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to reach out to Republicans are offering what a sizable portion of Americans want from Congress: a return to getting things done.
The few policy matters on which progressives and conservatives align often boil down to a distrust of politicians and of big corporations, particularly technology companies and pharmaceutical giants. Ocasio-Cortez has shrewdly made those causes her passion, building alliances with conservative colleagues interested in holding these industries accountable.
Last spring, she cosponsored a bill with, among others, Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and Matt Gaetz, the Florida rabble-rouser who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies. The legislation would bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a measure that as of the fall of 2022 was supported by nearly 70 percent of voters across party lines.
On Gaza, too, she has been willing to buck other members of her party to pursue an agenda that a majority of voters support. She was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease-fire; within weeks, nearly 70 percent of Americans said Israel should call one and try to negotiate with Hamas.
As the war has ground on and the death toll has mounted, it has tested her relationship with the far left. In March, Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by a handful of protesters who demanded that she call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. She had already been supportive of the Michigan activists encouraging voters to vote “uncommitted” rather than back the president in their state’s Democratic primary and had been working to persuade Democrats to support a cease-fire. But at the time, she had not yet said that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. The protesters wanted more.
Less than three weeks later, Ocasio-Cortez did accuse Israel of genocide and chastised the White House for providing military aid to the country while it blockaded Gaza. “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor, “open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.” Last month, she voted against providing additional funding for Israel. Those were unpopular positions in Congress, where unconditional support for the country remains the norm, but they put her in line with a majority of Democratic voters.
These stances haven’t been enough to quell the doubts from a faction of the left that helped get her elected. Over the past few weeks, some have accused her of caving in to pressure from moderate Democrats on Gaza, noting that she was the only founding member of the Squad to sign a statement saying that while she and the other signees opposed “supplying more offensive weapons that could result in more killings of civilians in Rafah and elsewhere,” they supported “strengthening the Iron Dome and other defense systems.”
This pattern is, at this point, familiar to close followers of the Squad, whose members are routinely criticized from the left. Ocasio-Cortez has taken much of the heat from leftist activists who see her as a symbol of the contradictions and compromises inherent in the political system. It may not be realistic to expect absolute purity from her; she is, after all, a politician. But these critiques overlook the promise of what she’s doing behind the scenes.
…A more gifted orator might have been able to make the structural impediments in [Biden’s] way clear to voters, while also putting forth a proactive vision for dismantling the core problems baked into our politics.
In that, someone like Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Biden for re-election in 2023, may be able to help. She’s the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders. Crucially, she can offer voters something more substantial than a hollow rebuke of Trumpism. Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters— some of whom have lost family members in Gaza— where they are. She was, in effect, acknowledging their pain and attempting to channel their righteous anger into a political movement.
There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza. The moderate Republicans who turned out for Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive. But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new— from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process.
The Democrats have a chance here to expand their base— and build a coalition less reliant on the whims of a shrinking group of moderates. Analyses of election data suggest that many of the Democratic voters who have defected to the other side identify as conservatives, particularly on social issues. What’s more, the once-strong Democratic support among Arab Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans now seems shaky, and Republicans have captured a large majority of white voters without college degrees. In other words, the coalition Democratic leaders could once rely on to defeat Trump is already falling apart, and their current strategy— to hammer the former president— may not be enough to win in November.
If she ever runs for higher office, Ocasio-Cortez might be able to galvanize voters of color who, despite leaning left, do not regularly show up at the polls. She could contrast her commitment to issues that matter to a large number of voters, like raising the minimum wage and protecting reproductive rights, with Republicans’ endless culture wars. And she could frame herself as one of the few Democrats who opposed unconditionally spending billions on an unpopular war while Americans struggled to afford groceries and gas.
She could take the message that catapulted her into Congress— as a tireless champion of the underclass— to the national level. In some ways, she already has. Ocasio-Cortez hit the picket line with striking United Auto Workers members in Missouri and requested a hearing on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, nearly a year before Biden visited the community. These are constituencies the Democratic Party has been losing, perhaps because they’ve written them off as Republican voters, if they bother to vote at all. But in the same way Ocasio-Cortez isn’t afraid to collaborate with conservatives when it helps her policy agenda, she has shown up for people whom other Democrats have abandoned— and voters may remember that when they cast a ballot in 2028.