When it comes to defining extremist views, somehow, the Republican Party can’t bring itself to consider that the demon is actually inside its own house.
In a recent appearance on Chris Wallace’s series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace on HBO Max, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) took no time to push back when Wallace asked if she would concede that “people want both parties to move from the fringes, from the extremes back to the center.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded by saying, “I think a lot of people in this country may say yes, but it’s important for us to dig into the substance of what that actually means.”
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Ocasio-Cortez added, “As someone who is often, I think, characterized as extreme, I, of course, would object to that. I do not believe that I am as extreme, in the way that Marjorie Taylor Greene on the Republican side is extreme. The idea that there is an equating, of believing in someone who believes in guaranteed universal health care in the United States with someone who believes that undocumented people should incur physical harm, are somehow in the same level of ‘extreme’ is something that I would object to.”
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In that same interview, the Democratic congresswoman from New York told Wallace that she “absolutely” feels afraid since she began serving in Congress, even keeping her head “on a swivel.”
“It is a very real dynamic, and very unfortunately and tragically, we’ve seen political violence play out,” AOC said, referring specifically to the recent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi.
AOC told Wallace she has faced a tsunami of threats since taking office, adding that she’s afraid to walk her dog, and when she comes home, she asks her fiancé “to come out to where my car is to walk me just from my car to my front door. […] It means that there’s just a general disposition where you kind of feel like there’s almost a static electricity around you,” she said.
In an October interview with The New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez said it took more than two years for her to receive an added security detail.
As the most threatened member of the House, theTimes reports, she’s spent over $120,000 on security services since 2021.
When Wallace asked the young congresswoman about the future of the Democratic Party, she said, “I do believe we need to have not just generational shifts, but potentially substantive shifts as well.”
She added, “I think that, and I hope that, what we’ve seen, whether people think it’s too left or too right, or up or down or whatever, it may be that we shift in a direction where the leadership of the Democratic Party is less reliant on large and corporate donors and sponsorship because that does have a shaping effect of our legislative priorities.”
The reality is that without the next generation of voters, the midterms would have indeed been what the GOP hoped for—a blood-red wave.
Andrea Pringle, voter engagement expert and executive director of the organization Registration Nation, told The Washington Post, “Gen Zers are making it clear that they’re voting based on where you are on issues that concern them. [...] If the Democratic Party is the party that is benefiting, that’s because they are the ones being viewed as somewhat aligned or doing something about it.”
As Victor Shi, 20, the youngest Biden delegate, reported, “94% of students voted for Gretchen Whitmer. Only 6% voted for Tudor Dixon.”
Another pollster tweeted: “#GenZ did their job.”
The future is with the kids—at least those under 30, most of whom lean politically a lot closer to AOC than MTG.
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Election Night 2022 was full of surprises—mostly for people pushing the last couple months of traditional media narrative of a "red tsunami." The problem is that Americans are not super into the GOP. Markos and Kerry have been saying the media narrative was wrong for months, and on Tuesday, Daily Kos and The Brief team was validated. Time to celebrate!