Republicans are the ones that put her in the spotlight. Even if they are out of power, they will still need someone to demonize.
She’s not going to be redistricted into a district a Republican can plausibly win. Every New York City Congressional District is currently held by a Democrat, and except for Staten Island by overwhelming margins. Even all the inner suburbs are held by Democrats. The only way that AOC loses her seat is to another Democrat in a primary or if she decides for some reason to move to the Hamptons.
I don’t think AOC is necessarily acting, but the I’m just a bartender schtick gets old fast, especially a bartender with an economics degree from a private school.
Can you give an example of her doing the “I’m just a bartender” schtick? Because I’m pretty sure what you said above isn’t coming from her, it’s the Republican “look at the lib’rul hypocrisy” slime machine.
I’m not saying she never mentions these things. Republicans have 2 attacks against her. The first is “what an out-of-touch elite”, which is justifiably defended by pointing out that she actually worked a service job to get through college (unlike most Republican politicians). The other attack is “what a financially ignorant moron”, which justifies pointing out that she has an elite economics degree (again, unlike most Republican politicians).
I think what you’re seeing as “the schtick” is just her defending herself from the Republican schtick. And voters are very, very tired of the Republican schtick.
Almost all politicians incorporate an “I come from humble origins” storyline in their political biography. Why do you find AOC’s (entirely truthful) recounting of her experience as a bartender to be particularly grating?
I think the 48th President of the United States will continue to do just fine in her district, regardless of how they reapportion the areas surrounding her.
The way she’d get screwed by redistricting isn’t that she’d be put into a Republican district, but that her entire current district would be sliced up between a dozen new districts so she’d have no “home” district to run in, and would have to knock off an incumbent on their turf.
She already beat a 10-term incumbent in a primary by 15 percentage points because he wasn’t progressive enough, the biggest upset of the 2018 elections. That whole area is pretty far left. I suspect the result of sticking such a superstar in a district with another incumbent would be much more likely to screw the incumbent than to screw her. I doubt that any other Democrat would like to run against her.
How is the other Democrat in this new district an “incumbent” on “their” turf, but AOC not an “incumbent” on her “own” turf? Surely she’ll also be a (2-term) incumbent, in whatever district her home now falls in?
In that scenario, which I’m not saying will happen, should happen, or would necessarily work out to the benefit of the people who enact it if it did happen, there would be no district that was composed primarily of her own current constituents, but there would be districts that are composed primarily of the present constituents of other members. Like, if she chose to run in a district where 25% had been in her old district and 75% had been in José Serrano’s district, she would likely be running against José Serrano and the voters would primarily be people who have had José Serrano as their representative for at least a decade depending on where they are.
That’s obviously not impossible as she’s done it once before, but it would be a lot more work and risk than what she had to deal with this year (a scam candidate who was running solely to collect donations from gullible Republicans).
Wait, so it’s only her district that gets cut up amongst surrounding districts, rather than new districts all around? Well, suck for whoever finds her in their district, I guess? Assuming she wants to stay in the House after that, and not move to the Senate.
But anyway, I don’t think voters are that dedicated to “their” congressperson, versus degree of progressiveness and other political issues.
IIRC, that’s what happened to Dennis Kucinich in 2012 - his district got chopped up between some neighboring ones, and he found himself losing the primary to the incumbent whose district he wound up in.
There was talk at the time of getting him to move here to Olympia to run for the newly-created district we had, but it never came to fruition.
Oh, sure, but that’s Kucinich - he’s hardly a progressive- as his post-office talking-head career trajectory has shown. Whereas it seems AOC actually represents the progressive slant of not just her current district’s voters, but I suspect a sufficiently large percentage of the voters in whatever new districts might get formed in that overall area.
She doesn’t have some humble “aw shucks” bullshit false modesty or something like that, if that’s what you’re implying. She sometimes talks about doing, you know, regular work, the sort that the vast majority of Americans do, as it informs her policy. But she’s never pretended to be something she isn’t.
It actually sounds like you’re falling for the nonsensical, conflicting Republican propaganda about her. Oh, she’s not suitable to be the leader of a movement or a congresswoman because she’s just some poor bartender that doesn’t know anything! Oh, she’s totally unsuitable to be a leader of a movement and a congresswoman because she pretends like she’s just a bartender but she gets $200 haircuts and owns expensive clothes! That doesn’t add up, does it liberals!? Something is obviously wrong and sinister with her.
It’s worth mentioning that AOC’s district is already the 4th least Democratric/liberal of NYC’s 12 districts. She has some significant white enclaves in the northeast Bronx and northern Queens. It would be difficult to gerrymander her into a district that would be less liberal.
