4/3/2023 0 Comments Has congress gone homeWe saw loud and clear there were a lot of canaries in the coal mine from the state ballot initiative. And it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York State Democratic Party. And so I actually think a lot of these Republican games aren’t necessarily as strong as they may seem, I think it’s really from an absence. And so when that languishes and there’s very little organizing happening, yeah, I mean, basically, you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state-level organizing across the state. And this is a machinery that is disorganized, it is sycophantic. So I think that was one prime mistake.Īnd I think another prime mistake is that in New York State, I think that - Cuomo may be gone, but his entire infrastructure, much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. Our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund, which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was, you know, other key and top priorities. I think the choice among certain Democrats to validate Republican narratives and amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it - validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. RG: What were those key differences, you think between the way they were run in New York and elsewhere?ĪOC: I think policing was a big one. And I think that that’s kind of like the glaring hole in where we did not perform as strongly as other areas in the map did. And so I think we definitely could have done better there. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York State. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. But I think even nationally, what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide I think that a lot of these races were much more uphill than what we saw in other places. I have a front-row seat to what was going on here, so I think it’s natural for me to gravitate towards that. What could they have done differently to make it an even better night?ĪOC: Well, New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map. But I’m curious if you think Democrats could have done better. RG: Because of that big polling miss, it makes it easier for him to do that. I think it was just a smart thing to do in order to frame, overall, some of what we saw. And I think it was quite notable that he mentioned young people and the climate crisis and youth turnout. But I think it was smart for him to come out right away and to really continue and formalize what was already emerging as the narrative, which is that this was, despite Republicans potentially taking back the House by a very slim margin, to really cement this as a Democratic victory and not a Republican one. Ryan Grim: What did you make of Biden’s press conference?Īlexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, I mean, I was able to catch the beginning of it, I think most of it. Part two, on the evolution of the left and her relationship to it, is here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for the head of the New York State Democratic Party to resign in the wake of the catastrophic performance by Democrats in the state in the midterms - an underperformance so stark that it may make the difference in control of the House of Representatives, and by extension the party’s ability to enact its legislative agenda.įollowing President Joe Biden’s press conference Wednesday afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez spoke with The Intercept to elaborate on her critique of the state party and discuss the role of abortion and the youth vote in the midterms, Ukraine, and the political distinction between unemployment and inflation.Īn unedited (except for ums and such) transcript of part one of the Q&A is below.
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