I'm glad to have that confirmed.
A new poll suggests Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) best reflects the Democratic Party's principles.
The CNN survey conducted earlier this month handed Ocasio-Cortez the highest ratings when voters were asked which Democratic leader "best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party."
Ten percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents polled picked the New York lawmaker, the most of any candidate, with former Vice President Kamala Harris placing second at 9%, followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at 8%, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) at 6%.
The survey painted a pessimistic picture for the Democratic Party as its members continue to debate about how to recoup from devastating losses during the 2024 elections.
The Democratic Party's favorability rating hit a historic low with the public, 29%, marking a decline of 20 percentage points since January 2021 and coming 7 points short of the Republican Party's 36% approval rating.
A majority of Democrats surveyed said their leaders are taking the party in the wrong direction, as the share of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents with a favorable view of the party is down by 18 points since 2021 -- to 63% from 81%.
Matt Taibbi discusses the very real chance that this psychopathic nitwit could be the Democrat Party's nominee in 2028.
The AOC Train Wreck is Coming, and it's Going to Be Spectacular
Nationwide rallies are spurring "Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez 2028" whispers, and it's already clear: the CIA couldn't do a better job of discrediting the American left
From the New York Times Sunday article, "As the Left Looks to 2028, It Waits on Ocasio-Cortez's Big Decision."
As Democrats find... their party's popularity at a generational low, progressives are also staring down the prospect of a post-Bernie future... The 83-year-old Mr. Sanders has signaled that he does not intend to run for president again. The question now is who will lead the network he built from scratch into the next presidential election...Virtually everyone interviewed said there was one clear leader for the job: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Hoo, boy. Making Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. Vogue's "Consummate Power Dresser") the face of a left populist movement is the latest episode of the longest-running television show in history, How Will the American Left Screw Up This Time?
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Legacy outlets are already boosting the notion of AOC as a 2028 contender, which itself should scare Sanders, but somehow doesn't. Why would the same press goons who smeared him for years suddenly embrace his successor?
Taibbi talks about what brought the Democrats to their lowest point in 100 years.
His answer? Hillary Clinton.
The "aristocratic niche politics" that are the Democrats' whole agenda arose from Hillary Clinton's thirst for power in 2015-2016.
The Democrats' move toward what we now think of as social justice politics started in the early nineties, when Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council began running on social issues like abortion and gay rights after opening their doors to Wall Street money, forcing a move away from hardcore labor and economic issues. The original Clintonian idea was a move to the middle (and specifically toward a "forgotten middle class" of white swing voters), but Hillary Clinton was forced to rebrand during the 2016 primary. The upstart Sanders was drawing blood via complaints about Hillary's obscene fees for bank speeches; she fought back by picking at his lack of fluency with justice lingo, attacking "Bernie Bros" as angry white men, and asking "if I broke up the banks tomorrow... would that end racism?"
Clinton followed up by tweeting a chart showing that "We face complex, intersectional challenges" that put "investments in communities of color" at the center, along with goals like "investments in underserved communities." In a flash Hillary's banking-relationships problem became Bernie's race problem, with interviewers spending much of the rest of the campaign pushing Sanders to recite required liturgical terms like "black lives matter."
The Clintons' avaricious embrace of corporate donations and Wall Street money required them to embrace radical social policies. This became the agenda of the Democrat Party: Greedy, shameless corporate cash-grabs plus rancid identity politics pandering.
Thus the "aristocratic niche politics" that are driving them into the grave.
They stopped being the party of "the workin' man" and became exclusively the party of neurotic, bored, listless Affluent White Female Liberals looking for some great cause to bring passion and purpose to their lives.
Eat. Pray. Vote Democrat.
As Ryan Grim later wrote in his excellent book The Squad, the jargon-bombs might have been effective at knocking Sanders out in the primary, but hurt Hillary overall:
To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign toward Sanders, who spoke like a normal person, while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call "faculty lounge speak..." Former president Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics, was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary's campaign "could not sell pussy on a troop train."
Modern Democrats didn't agree with once-sainted Carville and Bill, though, and spent eight years betting heavily on "faculty lounge speak." No one exemplified the trend more than Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected in 2018 and along with three fellow congresswomen (Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tliab, and Ilhan Omar) soon made up a famed progressive quartet called "The Squad." AOC's rapid identification with social-justice gobbledygook was a bit of a stunner, because as Grim's book explains, the Bernie-backed group Brand New Congress supported the first run of the former waitress precisely because she seemed like a "normal person" who "didn't have the vibe of an activist who would turn off voters."
AOC's tweaking of the Hillary and Bill Clinton Corporatism + Social Marxism fusion involves doubling down even harder on noxious identity politics, while also promising to ravage the economy through Marxist revolution.
Before long AOC mostly became famous for her "tweetstorms," which sometimes at night, thumb-typing seemingly randomized piles of jargon, at the end of which she'd usually endorse whatever the maximalist version of the SJW position on any issue was. She planted flags in Abolish ICE, Defund the Police, Trans Girls Are Girls, Indigenous Peoples' Day, Censorship ("We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment"), and a long list of other once-fashionable positions. She even reamed fellow Democrats on Instagram for not using "Latinx"...
For all this, AOC's goofy takes need not be fatal to an economic populist enterprise. What is fatal is economic populism that doesn't know anything about economics. Unlike European counterparts, the American left doesn't want to go full Lenin and call for seizing of the means of production. That's a good thing, but it also means a person inheriting a Sanders-type movement needs to have some kind of plan for coexisting with the market. That's tough to do when you don't have a clue about it.
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AOC has shown time and again she resents having to make the numbers work at all. Her stump address on this tour is full of lines like, "We deserve better than this," and "You deserve better now" and "We just deserve so much better" and "Our lives deserve dignity" and "Our work deserves dignity" and "We have to commit to building the country we all deserve" and on and on.
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I'm no socialist, but I think working-class people need serious political representation and governments tend to run better when there's at least one legitimate labor party with influence. But instead of putting forward someone who can express the common-sense frustrations [Bill] Maher references, what remains of the left is putting its hopes in a politician whose three areas of expertise are intersectional bosh, regulations, and taxes, a chemical combination known as Voter Repellent. An AOC presidential run would obliterate progressive politics for a generation, making George McGovern seem like Kennedy. Every dipshit legacy pundit in the country is cheering the AOC rallies as the beginning of something special, which is how you know it will end in tears; when The New Yorker says the rallies are proof "the left still has a pulse," you know it's really on its deathbed. I guess it deserves to be, but man, how do they not see it?
Also clearly running for president: Tampon Timmy Walz.