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.
You say you get the point, and then demonstrate that you missed it entirely.
The reason she’s speaking out is because her constituents are exactly the kind of people that will lose the most of Trump wins. And she’s calling out that the longer this uncertainty continues, the more it harms our chances. That the stakes are high, and (her) people will be hurt if the Dems fumble this again.
She’s also seemingly making the case that changing nominees will hurt our chances more than keeping Biden. Primarily because there’s no obvious choice behind Harris, who the old blood want to skip over, according to her.
Maybe I was reacting more to her rhetoric than to the substance of what she was saying. It’s not unreasonable to argue that replacing Biden at this point is not a good idea (although I don’t agree with that). What I vehemently object to is not that argument but rather the implications that the people trying to push Biden out are not serious about defeating Trump and that she has some unique insight due to representing her (politically irrelevant) constituency.That’s not what she was implying. She was talking about the danger her constituents face from another Trump Presidency.