Can AOC win the Democratic nomination?

8 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by 7777777phil
(natesilver.net)

11 Comments

ReptileMan

11 hours ago

Does she want to?

A GOP win in November (albeit unlikely) creates two more years of chaotic governance, and dem win guarantees two years of disfunction while there will be a lot of weeks in which decades happens in the next couple of years.

Whomever wins in 2028 has a real chance to have Hoover and Obama first mandates - where chickens come to roost by no fault of their own and they spend 4 years trying to sort the mess. If we even assume the mess is sortable.

verdverm

11 hours ago

I think she's smart enough to know she cannot win in the presidential general, but then people can change and the ego takes over.

Nate's gotta publish stuff to get clicks these days and feed the algo, I stopped paying any attention.

jfengel

10 hours ago

Conventional wisdom says she's too extreme to win a general election, but there are a lot of far-left who sit out the general election. Republican moderates are happy to vote for a far-right candidate. Democratic centrists may well vote for a far-left one.

Republicans will present any candidate as a socialist extremist anyway. They can't vote against her any harder than the voted against Biden. (They only lost 2020 because of a literal ongoing pandemic being wildly mis-managed. Democrats will likely not get that opportunity again.)

I am one of those "centrist" Democrats who doesn't particularly want the far-left wing to control the party. But I'd vote for that in a heartbeat over continued dominance by the alliance of theocrats and billionaire-worshippers.

verdverm

10 hours ago

We elected Trump a second time, don't underestimate the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of FoxNews.

throwaway74628

6 hours ago

By a landslide, well outside the radius of influence Fox News enjoys. Swing voters feather their own nests, first.

verdverm

an hour ago

I'm not sure how ~120k votes in three states is a land slide... oh FakeNews is how

My point however was about the how FoxNews washed away the illegal deeds and disgusting Epstein encounters so average people even considered him

user

12 hours ago

[deleted]

krapp

11 hours ago

No. The Democrats are trying as hard as possible to disassociate themselves from "progressive" and "leftist" politics and pivot to a center-right position to attract disaffected Trumpists and conservatives because the DSA scares the shit out of them and AOC has basically taken on all of the "communist antichrist" energy that Obama used to get from the right (remember her "kill list?") The only woman the right hates more is Hillary Clinton.

They'll pick a white Christian man who's opposed to Trump's personality and behavior but agrees that "wokism" and progressive politics have been a failure and that the Democrats need to abandon social issues and focus on economic policy, and that rather than pursue partisan retribution we need to simply "move on" from the Trump years.

jfengel

10 hours ago

The problem is that if they do that, the DSA will continue to sit out elections. And no matter who they nominate, they'll be presented as an extremist socialist. You lose nothing by nominating an actual socialist.

There are no "disaffected Trumpists" who would vote for that anti-wokist Democrat. They might sit out but they will never vote for any Democrat. They've spent too many years certain that people like the Clintons and Obama are bomb-throwing anarchists who want to force them to get gay married. The existence of AOC doesn't reduce the "antichrist" energy thrown at any other Democrat. It just convinces them that every Democrat is AOC.

I don't know if running AOC would actually help. I think that the left-wingers who make excuses not to vote for Democrats will still not turn up even for an actual socialist. They'll find some excuse by which AOC is now too right-wing for them. But I'd be willing to consider it if I thought that there was any chance of bringing out a few left-wing non-voters.

ninininino

5 hours ago

> The problem is that if they do that, the DSA will continue to sit out elections. And no matter who they nominate, they'll be presented as an extremist socialist. You lose nothing by nominating an actual socialist.

And if they do so, they will allow another Trump to take power, who does more to move the country and world in the opposite direction of their cause than any center left dem ever would.

krapp

9 hours ago

I agree with you, it's a foolish and self-destructive strategy but it seems to be what the party leadership wants. AOC is denouncing "woke 1.0" and Kamala Harris was willing to completely alienate her base to stand firm with Israel and try to court Bush era neocons. We may be seeing an internal war between actual leftists and neoliberals similar to the war between the alt-right/Trumpists and establishment conservatives that hollowed out the Republican party.

If so I personally hope the actual leftists win but history doesn't lead me to hold out much hope.