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.
The likely answer is Harris, but the actual answer is whoever he endorses. Everyone on both sides of the issue has agreed that forcing him off the ticket won’t work, which is why it’s been a pressure campaign.
In any case, the notion the donors are going to all line up and bring someone we’ve never heard of out of a back room to supplant the obvious choice of the vice president or even a popular governor isn’t realistic.
I agree that in practice, it’ll be Harris. I think then the sensible conversation is whether she’ll have a better chance of winning than Biden will.
To me, the fact that she polls like 2 points ahead of him, while she is as she currently is an unknown quantity without all of the attacks against Biden that have been spun up (he invented inflation, he loves immigrants way too much, he killed Palestine, he betrayed Israel, etc etc pick your poison depending on the target audience involved), is a pretty good argument for rallying around Biden instead of switching to Harris and hoping she’ll keep that 2 points. I think once the same machine that’s been trying to burn Biden down gets spun up for real against her, she’ll crumple up and get crushed worse than Biden currently is. Maybe I am wrong in that.
I can see an argument that Biden may continue to fuck up doing things like he did at the debate, and so we need to switch even if by the calculus right now it’s a losing proposition, because of that risk. That doesn’t seem crazy to me. But it’s telling to me that people are saying “We need to switch to candidate X who can’t be compared against Biden directly”, instead of having the honest conversation about why it should be Harris.
I wish Jon Stewart would attend the convention as a candidate.
The only good argument I can think of for swapping candidates last minute is it will throw the Republican propaganda machine into disarray; they’ll need a good month or so to figure out a narrative against whoever it is. But they’re already gearing up anti-Kamala stuff.