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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticized the Democratic party for its incompetence in an unrestricted post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives at the top, the party would lose heavily in the 2022 midterm election. .
Noting that the internal moratorium in place while Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump had ended, the leftist representative from New York strongly rejected the notion put forward by some Democrats that progressive messages around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the defeat of the party. of seats in Congress in last week’s elections.
The real problem, Ocasio-Cortez said, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
“There is a reason that Barack Obama built a whole national campaign apparatus out of the Democratic National Committee,” he told Astead Herndon of the Times. “And there is a reason why when he did not activate or continue, we lost the majority of the House. Because the party itself doesn’t have the basic skills, and no amount of money is going to fix that. “
Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a former Democratic politician in 2018 and won re-election in his Bronx district by more than 50 points, backed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress, a group of four women known as “the squad” who won re-election last week, have followed the party line and called on grassroots activists to push for Biden. and Democrats down.
The truce is over. The party’s failure to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competition,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to go ahead in criticizing progressive messages.
“I did lose my election, and I came out and said, ‘This is the moderates’ fault.’ This is because they did not allow us to have a floor vote on Medicare for All. ‘ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found out that I only spent $ 5,000 on TV ads the week before the election. “Ocasio-Cortez said.” They’d 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 victory, and if the Democratic party doesn’t recognize that and bring in the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the polls, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It is very difficult for us to become non-voters when they feel that nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or don’t even acknowledge their involvement, ”Ocasio-Cortez said.
“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, is the Democratic party signal that John Kasich did we win 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, backing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could back. Such appeal could have had traction in some places, like northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and a half million votes.
Ocasio-Cortez’s interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. When asked what his “macro conclusion” of the election was, he said: “Well, I think the main one is that we are no longer in a free fall into hell.” When asked if there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The proportion of white support for Trump. I thought the voting was off, but just looking at it, I had that feeling of realizing the work we have to do. “
While there were concerns about the reliability of the exit polls this year with so many mail-in ballots and polling failure overall, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 almost as much as he did in 2016: 15 points.
The upcoming presidential transition period and the early days of the Biden administration will be crucial in determining whether the Democratic Party will permanently incorporate its grassroots progressive engine, or drift down a path to defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” he said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Black Lives Movement is not the enemy, that Medicare for All is not the enemy. It’s not even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they continue to pursue the wrong thing, I mean, they are simply setting up their own obsolescence. “
