Can AOC win the Democratic nomination?(natesilver.net) |
Can AOC win the Democratic nomination?(natesilver.net) |
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.
Nate's gotta publish stuff to get clicks these days and feed the algo, I stopped paying any attention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If so I personally hope the actual leftists win but history doesn't lead me to hold out much hope.