Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) just effectively threw a temper tantrum in which she suggested that she may be done with politics altogether as she lashed out at the Democratic Party days after their majority in the House of Representatives shrunk.
During an interview with the New York Times [1], Ocasio-Cortez was asked if she is thinking about running for the Senate in the next few years.
“I genuinely don’t know,” she responded. “I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year. It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy.”
“But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
The congresswoman spent much of the rest of the interview shaming the Democratic Party for not submitting more to her radically liberal politics, arguing that becoming more progressive is the way to win elections.
“I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.”
“So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy,” she added. “That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
In the end, Ocasio-Cortez seems to have become disillusioned with how progressives are treated by Democrats.
“The last two years have been pretty hostile,” she lamented. “Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.”
Democrats seem to swiftly be losing control of Ocasio-Cortez, who was reelected to another term in the House last week. If they aren’t careful, she may turn into the ultimate thorn in the side of the Democratic Party.
This piece was written by James Samson on November 9, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette [2] and is used by permission.
Read more at LifeZette:
The Real Action Could Move To The States [3]
AOC Fires Back After Progressives Are Blamed For Democratic House Losses [4]
McCarthy Warns That Pelosi Is Just Ten Democratic Votes Away From Losing Her Role Of House Speaker [5]