Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has issued a dire warning to her party about the chaos that could ensue if they succeed in pushing President Joe Biden off the ticket. And she criticized Democrats who’ve given off-the-record quotes that suggest the party has resigned itself to a second Trump term.
In an Instagram Live video on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez warned liberals that a brokered convention could lead to chaos, in part because she says some of the Democratic “elites” who want Biden out also don’t want Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee in his place.
“If you think that is going to be an easy transition, I’m here to tell you that a huge amount of the donor class and these elites who are pushing for the president not to be the nominee also do not want to see the VP be the nominee,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez claimed none of the people she’s spoken with who are calling on Biden to drop out — including lawmakers and legal experts — have articulated a plan to swap out the nominee without minimizing the serious legal and procedural challenges that are likely to ensue.
Ocasio-Cortez also highlighted the racial, ethnic and class divisions that appear to have formed between the majority of those pining to blow up the ticket — led mostly by white Democrats and media pundits — and those elected officials who feel they and their constituents have too much at stake to upend the process at this point and so are willing to do the work to re-elect Biden-Harris. She alluded to this cultural divide in her video when she spoke out against anonymous sources expressing a sense of fatalism on behalf of Democrats about what might happen if Biden remains on the ticket:
What I will say is what upsets me is [Democrats] saying we will lose. For me, to a certain extent, I don’t care what name is on there. We are not losing. I don’t know about you, but my community does not have the option to lose. My community does not have the luxury of accepting loss in July of an election year. My people are the first ones deported. They’re the first ones put in Rikers. They’re the first ones whose families are killed by war.
If Biden stays in and loses, AOC doesn’t want centrists to blame the left. They will anyway.
If he stays in and wins, centrists will consider it a mandate to continue moving right from a position that includes Trump’s border policy and genocide.
You’re acting like Centrists don’t want climate change legislation, or didn’t support the Inflation reduction act. Or that they don’t support a wealth tax.
Sinema and Manchin do not represent the full body of Centrists. There are hundreds of them in Congress that supported all of these initiatives.
The Problem Solvers Caucus has 32 Democratic members. And they were notably opposed to keeping Build Back Better intact. They very much do not support a wealth tax and are always shaky on climate change. Centrists are a small problematic sliver of the Democratic caucus.
Centrists? Ooohhhh, republicans who would “have a beer with Obama”.
Nah, you all vote straight R. Own your bullshit.
Y’all gotta start thinking strategy instead of getting all emotional.
Humans are surprisingly easy to manipulate. If you come across a centrist, that’s a perfect candidate to hit em with communist propaganda and get them thinking critically about how Republican bullshit is bullshit.
The blame and shame strategy doesn’t work cuz it’s just reactionary.
It’s a little more effort dragging the centrists to the left, but we can do it with a bit of kindness and understanding. Unless they prove to be unwaveringly intolerant, in which case blame and shame into oblivion.
(I say this from experience. I have been pushed from right leaning as a teen, to pretty far left from first seeing how shitty Republicans are, and then from kind internet strangers explaining different leftist ideologies to me)
In the USA at least, they are not centrists.
A centrist here is someone who votes Republican but won’t admit to it. They are worse than republicans because they are cowards and won’t own up to voting for the racist fascists.
I wonder how people like you become so far gone. It’s like you must be extreme left or it doesn’t count. I would love to walk a mile in your shoes and see how you got here.
In my 20 years of voting, I’ve voted for a republican precisely twice, one that was the only judge on the ballot and he was recommended by our state union. The other was a local moderate mayor in a sea of further right whackjobs, there was no dem on the ticket.
Keep an open mind, brother, you’ll learn a lot more in life.
See this is your problem, you think anyone who isn’t progressive is a republican. Nice job adding to their tent and limiting yours.
Nope. Just less than adequate.
If they vote dem, they’re adequate.
I’m not super happy with “adequate”, but that’s why we call it “adequate”.
Lemme clarify: There are a whole host of issues we need to keep in mind as we do our little part in the hopes of directing our own country:
We have a list of basic minimums, and for me they look like that quick list above, but surely with a few more I’m not thinking of right now.
I will judge the character of governments, governors and people according to the completeness of their support for that list. So there’s a long spectrum of increasing inadequacy between progressive people and republicans, and people who are fail the test are just somewhere on that spectrum.
And that’s okay: everyone gets their opinion. Some people aren’t fit to lead, though, nor to manage our consolidated and shared resources (taxes), and those people need to be retrained for a role where they CAN work effectively.
You vote straight R, you are a Republican. What you pander and pretend online doesn’t matter.
If Sinema and Manchin hadn’t stepped up to represent the full body of all centrists to perfection, some other centrists would step up to do so.
I think you’re buying into the Right Wing kool-aid just a little too much.
Obama was able to pass the ACA even with the Centrists. Biden was able to pass the largest green bill in history after concessions were made for Manchin, who particularly didn’t like the stick part of the act, which would have impacted him personally.