Much has been said about why Democrats lost the 2024 election, but if you’ve been waiting with bated breath for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s opinion, wait no longer. Appearing on MSNBC with Joy Reid, perhaps the worst person to have a postmortem conversation with about any kind of election campaign, the New York congresswoman put on her thinking cap and “explained” the real reason Democrats came up tiny.
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As the utilize of the quotation marks above shows, “explained” does a lot of work in this description. Still, what Ocasio-Cortez says is revealing. Just not in the way she thinks.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: You know, all this debate that people are talking about with this woke thing, right? “Oh my God, it’s because we care about trans people, so there’s a backlash.”
REID: And by the way, only Donald Trump cared about trans people because he was the one who ran $130 million worth of ads. The Harris campaign said nothing on the issue.
You can probably see where this is going, and right now Ocasio-Cortez is completely missing the boat. Still, it’s worth talking about Reid’s reaction first, because she’s just as clueless. It is wrong that Harris never highlighted transgenderism in her campaign. Just days after announcing her presidential candidacy, the vice president claimed on “Ru Paul’s Drag Race” that transgenderism was under attack.
Additionally, Harris’ previous stance on using taxpayer money to fund gender reassignment surgeries for convicted criminals and illegal immigrants became an issue. That she tried to evade it doesn’t mean it wasn’t relevant and something that ultimately brought her into the public consciousness. Nobody made her say that in 2019.
What Reid is doing is what Democrats always do when something they’ve pushed becomes toxic. In fact, they claim that it’s not a problem and that Republicans are wrongly making it one. Tell that to the transgender actors invited to the White House, the Biden administration’s statements, and the codification of transgenderism in the military. Republicans did not invent this problem. The Democrats were ecstatic to create it.
That brings me to Ocasio-Cortez’s theory.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: That’s right, that’s right, and listen, it’s not even about denying the fact that these ads were effective in certain areas. What I think people are paying too much attention to is the first half of this ad, which says, “Kamala Harris is for she/her.” That’s what everyone is focused on. You don’t focus on the second half of that ad where he said, “Donald Trump is for you.”
REID: Yes, yes.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: And Democrats very often speak in terms and concepts in their messages and not in the second person. “You matter to me” and political races are not about one candidate running against another candidate. Too often it is put in a drawer. It’s a race to see who cares more about you.
Is it too cliché to utilize the term “cope” to describe the above? Because that can be managed. The idea that these Trump ads weren’t effective because they accurately described the Democrats’ position on transgenderism is nonsense. Certainly there is some truth to the idea that the now president-elect managed to convince voters that he cared about them, but the juxtaposition with Harris’ views on transgenderism in those ads was the only reason this argument made worked. Would an ad that simply read, “You matter to me” have been just as effective? Of course not.
However, Democrats don’t want to admit the obvious because that would mean admitting their obsession with transgenderism Is actually the problem. For them, this is not a messaging problem. Speaking in the “second person,” as Ocasio-Cortez says, will not suddenly make boys playing girls’ sports acceptable to most Americans. Nor will it lead to “gender-equitable care” of minors becoming popular.
In other words, the Democrats have a position problem. Unless they change these positions, which in turn will change the way they talk about them, they will continue to lose support among ordinary Americans. Ocasio-Cortez and others who want to whitewash this are doing their party no good. On the contrary, they inadvertently tell us exactly why they lost.
