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.
Did you read it?
She stated over and over again in the stream that people voicing concerns about Biden’s ability are weakening him, and followed her new recurring habit of failing to rebut any of those concerns.
You’re acting like we’re entering completely unknown waters if we switch candidates. The strategy is simply to get a new candidate, likely the other person already on the ticket, run a campaign and win. The fact that several alternatives are polling neck and neck with the two candidates without even campaigning is a testament to how weak both Biden and Trump are.
That’s just more words, not more substance. You’re doing here exactly what AOC is calling out: giving a vague description of the surface of what you think will happen in a best case scenario with no tactical or even strategic consideration for first mitigating the chaos the basic act will create.
The problem isn’t that you need to come up with the play by play, the problem is that no one has. It’s literally the worst kind of plan: no plan at all.
It’s about the dumbest possible move, really, and it’s telling that the only motivation behind it is that he’s old.
Throw out the incumbent advantage, throw out all current strategies months before the election, hand wave away the candidate slate as objectively better with minimal examination, expose us to huge legal vulnerability against the most litigious party I’ve ever seen, who currently seems to have captured the judicial branch, in the highest stakes election I’ve seen so far, and do it all without any inkling of a play by play to create unity and mitigate doubt or even a hint of an acknowledgment of the problems that the move would cause in the best case scenario?
Awful.