AOC just spent an hour weighing in on efforts to...
Length: • 2 mins
Annotated by Eleanor Konik
AOC just spent an hour weighing in on efforts to replace Biden as the nominee. It’s an important listen.
She thinks an open convention is lunacy & that multiple red alerts on the dashboard aren’t getting enough consideration.
Here are her 7 main points, as I understood them: 🧵
NEW
Congresswoman @AOC just did a nearly hour long live where she shared her grave concerns with replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Here’s the full video minus the very short intro she did on other work she is doing at the moment.
1. Legal viability
AOC thinks that pundits, pollsters & columnists are underestimating the legal challenges Republicans could mount to the presence of another candidate on the ballot in key swing states including but not limited to Ohio.
She says lawyers specialised in elections—those meeting with Congress Democrats like her—cannot game out how defending against those might look.
Michigan’s ballot deadline is just 2 days after the Dem convention, for ex: one of many reasons AOC thinks an open convention is nuts.
2. Time
Even at breakneck pace, she suggests, Democrats might not be able to get a new nominee and ensure they have the time it takes to get on all ballots, garner key endorsements, etc.
And certainly not if there’s an open convention.
Getting union endorsements takes weeks, for example, she says. And early ballots start going out in September. “This election is not in November,” she says. “It’s in September.”
“This is not 2023,” she states. We can’t let decisions be made by “groupthink, momentum, inertia.”
3. Replacement efforts, AOC argues, are primarily donor driven not voter driven—especially insofar as they’re motivating her colleagues in Congress
“What I’m hearing from my colleagues is ‘my donors this, my donors that,’ not ‘my voters this my voters that.’”
“I’m not here to dismiss everyday people who have this opinion,” she says [i.e. that Joe needs to go]. But “the mechanisms by which this decision is being made are concerning me.”
She portrays replacement efforts as the work of elites who have not gamed out a clear alternative.
4. Donors & elites driving “Joe must go” are not united behind Harris, AOC argues.
“The people in these rooms,” she says, “don’t have a plan.” Many are critical of Harris, or engaging in wishful thinking about other candidates & impracticable notions of an open convention.
5. There is “no safe [alternative] option”
AOC says polling points to no clear candidate who would necessarily beat Trump, and that no alternative process avoids those other pitfalls.
“I have not seen an alternative scenario that doesn’t set us up for enormous peril,” she says.
6. Biden has outperformed electoral expectations w/ key demographics
He’s done well historically w/ “marginalised” demographics (I think she meant Black voters).
She also says that Biden does well with older people who aren’t on social media & are hard for Democrats to win.
AOC added that Biden has “strong, broad union support” & that his union support does not automatically transfer over to another candidate.
The union endorsement processes “takes WEEKS,” she says, if you’re going at a breakneck pace.” Which gets back to the time challenge.