UPDATE: (July 22, 2024, 7:36 a.m. ET): President Joe Biden on Sunday announced he’s withdrawing from the 2024 race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. Later Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pledged her “full support” for Harris.
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.
The important context here is that Ocasio-Cortez represents a majority-minority district, where a large number of her constituents are foreign-born. Earlier this week, I noted similar criticism voiced in a letter from the voter advocacy group Black Voters Matter that denounced some Democrats’ haphazard effort to overrule primary voters, oust Biden and potentially leapfrog Harris as the obvious second-in-line to be the party’s nominee. Part of that criticism stemmed from the fact that mobilizing Biden-Harris voters to cast a ballot for an entirely new set of nominees would most likely prove difficult. And the criticism didn’t end there. In fact, hours before Ocasio-Cortez’s post to Instagram on Thursday, more than 1,400 Black women who are activists signed a separate letter calling out Democrats who are seeking to push Biden out and install someone other than Harris atop the ticket. Democrats ought to heed these warnings and cease their hasty effort to oust Biden (or, failing that, to push aside Harris in the process) at the risk of fomenting resentment among voting blocs that are essential to their electoral goals.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. Recommended
