Category: US Politics

Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, became the youngest woman elected to Congress on Tuesday evening. In her victory speech, the congresswoman-elect criticized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), accusing the agency of committing human rights abuses.

NBC News projected the far-left candidate would go on to defeat her Republican rival and St. John’s University professor Anthony Pappas in New York’s 14th Congressional District with 74.4 percent of the votes counted.

Ocasio-Cortez shocked many in New York politics, including herself, when she came out of nowhere to defeat 10-term Rep. Joe Crowley in New York’s Democratic congressional primary last spring. The victory made her the national face of young, discontented Democrats — often women and minorities — trying to move their party to the left. She takes the record for the youngest woman elected to Congress from Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican representing upstate New York who was elected at age 30.

“This is what is possible when everyday people come together in the collective realization that all our actions… are powerful, worthwhile, and capable of lasting change,” Ocasio-Cortez told attendees during her victory speech.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ofrece su primer discurso tras ser elegida como la mujer más joven a la Cámara de Representantes. pic.twitter.com/JK2daERukf

— Univision Noticias (@UniNoticias) November 7, 2018

“Words cannot express my gratitude to every organizer, every small-dollar donor, every working parent and Dreamer who helped make this movement happen,” she added. “And that’s exactly what this is, not a campaign or an Election Day but a movement… for social, economic and racial justice.”

“We launched this campaign because no one was clearly and authentically talking about issues like the corrupting role of money in politics. Like the disturbing human rights violations being committed by ICE,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “By the fact that no one was giving a voice to the idea, to the notion that an entire generation is graduating with crippling loads of student loans debt that’s a ticking time bomb for our economy.”

Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx but raised in suburban Westchester County. Her father passed away while she was a student at Boston University in 2008. A self-described “Democratic socialist,” Ocasio-Cortez got her start in politics as an organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Among several far-left policy positions, the congresswoman-elect supports a national $15 minimum wage, universal health care coverage, and the abolishment of ICE.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

The midterms weren’t a blue wave, but they weren’t shark fin soup for Republicans either, given that they lost the House by a small margin.

That said, the big loser who stands out here is hard-campaigning President Obama, the guy who thought he was the star of the Democratic Party and who, throwing the tradition of former presidents staying aloof from politics out the window, campaigned hard, long, and loud, for Democrats in this midterm. Turns out the ones he fought the hardest for lost.

Now he stands exposed as politically irrelevant, powerless, an embarrassment. Sorry ’bout that legacy thing, Barry-O.

First, he did some easy ones and those candidates marched right through, Obama or no Obama:

Tim Kaine of Virginia and Joe Manchin of West Virginia for the Senate, Jennifer Wexton of Virginia for the House. J.B. Pritzker for the Illinois governorship. A couple of minor leaguers for the House in Illinois as tag-alongs. 

Kaine and Pritzker, given their ties to the Obama administration, were probably favors repaid, and they ran in blue states, anyway, as did the Illinois pickups. Manchin, meanwhile, was primarily re-elected on his Kavanaugh vote, so Obama was likely irrelevant.

But then there were the midterm campaigns that weren’t gimmes, some very high profile, and high media-exposure ones: Joe Donnelly of Indiana for Senate. Bill Nelson of Florida for Senate. Andrew Gillum of Florida for governor. Stacey Abrams of Georgia for governor.

Those were the ones Obama went hoarse campaigning for, yelling and waving his arms, voice cracking, speeches described as fiery, telling voters to vote for these guys or die. With Gillum in particular, racial appeals were a factor and Obama’s presence was supposed to help. Gillum had a big media buildup about being a first black governor of Florida as an argument to draw votes, and he later cried racism to fend off corruption allegations. Adding Obama to campaign was obviously part of the appeal. This time, the race-politics identity card simply failed.

And Obama? What did he get? Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. The voters rather noticibly rejected the ex-president’s appeal for votes. Been there, done that.

A prized and coveted Obama endorsement, or campaign stop, obviously isn’t the election winner in a tight race it used to be. In fact, with these midterms, when it matters, Obama’s a bust. The lesson here that Democrats will surely notice is that it’s largely useless. 

Obama will be not be easy to get off the stage, given his love for the limelight. But I suspect we will be hearing a lot less about Obama on the campaign trail, except in the easiest of races, as the reality of what happened among Democrats starts to sink in.

Update: Washington Examiner argues that it was Obama’s ego that did him in.

Image credit: MSNBC, via YouTube, screengrab

The midterms weren’t a blue wave, but they weren’t shark fin soup for Republicans either, given that they lost the House by a small margin.

That said, the big loser who stands out here is hard-campaigning President Obama, the guy who thought he was the star of the Democratic Party and who, throwing the tradition of former presidents staying aloof from politics out the window, campaigned hard, long, and loud, for Democrats in this midterm. Turns out the ones he fought the hardest for lost.

Now he stands exposed as politically irrelevant, powerless, an embarrassment. Sorry ’bout that legacy thing, Barry-O.

First, he did some easy ones and those candidates marched right through, Obama or no Obama:

Tim Kaine of Virginia and Joe Manchin of West Virginia for the Senate, Jennifer Wexton of Virginia for the House. J.B. Pritzker for the Illinois governorship. A couple of minor leaguers for the House in Illinois as tag-alongs. 

Kaine and Pritzker, given their ties to the Obama administration, were probably favors repaid, and they ran in blue states, anyway, as did the Illinois pickups. Manchin, meanwhile, was primarily re-elected on his Kavanaugh vote, so Obama was likely irrelevant.

But then there were the midterm campaigns that weren’t gimmes, some very high profile, and high media-exposure ones: Joe Donnelly of Indiana for Senate. Bill Nelson of Florida for Senate. Andrew Gillum of Florida for governor. Stacey Abrams of Georgia for governor.

Those were the ones Obama went hoarse campaigning for, yelling and waving his arms, voice cracking, speeches described as fiery, telling voters to vote for these guys or die. With Gillum in particular, racial appeals were a factor and Obama’s presence was supposed to help. Gillum had a big media buildup about being a first black governor of Florida as an argument to draw votes, and he later cried racism to fend off corruption allegations. Adding Obama to campaign was obviously part of the appeal. This time, the race-politics identity card simply failed.

And Obama? What did he get? Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. The voters rather noticibly rejected the ex-president’s appeal for votes. Been there, done that.

A prized and coveted Obama endorsement, or campaign stop, obviously isn’t the election winner in a tight race it used to be. In fact, with these midterms, when it matters, Obama’s a bust. The lesson here that Democrats will surely notice is that it’s largely useless. 

Obama will be not be easy to get off the stage, given his love for the limelight. But I suspect we will be hearing a lot less about Obama on the campaign trail, except in the easiest of races, as the reality of what happened among Democrats starts to sink in.

Update: Washington Examiner argues that it was Obama’s ego that did him in.

Image credit: MSNBC, via YouTube, screengrab

MoveOn, a George Soros-funded anti-Republican PAC, was allegedly the biggest political Facebook advertisement spender last week — the final week before the midterm elections.

MoveOn’s Washington Director, Ben Wikler, bragged about the PAC’s advertisement budget, along with its “secret weapon” against the Republican Party, which consisted of using hundreds of videos of voters explaining why they’re voting Democrat.

NEW: Nationwide, @MoveOn was the biggest spender on political ads on Facebook last week. Today, we’re pulling back the curtains on this election’s “secret weapon”: a groundbreaking new way to do digital ads that leapfrogs the GOP’s political tech. THREAD. https://t.co/lhpoLDhANm

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) November 5, 2018

“Nationwide, @MoveOn was the biggest spender on political ads on Facebook last week,” declared Wikler on Twitter, Monday. “Today, we’re pulling back the curtains on this election’s ‘secret weapon’: a groundbreaking new way to do digital ads that leapfrogs the GOP’s political tech.”

“Traditional political advertising works like this: campaigns run polls to see what voters care about. They choose a message. They spend ~$10k-30k to shoot & edit. If they’re smart, they test them, often via dial-test or focus groups. Then they pay to put them online & on TV,” continued Wikler. “This year, MoveOn turned that model on its head. We started by asking real voters in key races why they’re supporting their Democratic candidates. We collected more than 2500 authentic, unscripted videos—people talking into their phones.”

“We used a new, rapid, low-cost, and highly accurate technique to test whether the ads moved people. Classic scientific experiment, with randomized treatment and control groups. We found 260 videos that worked as extraordinarily persuasive political ads,” he proclaimed, adding, “We used Facebook’s targeting technology to run the 260 ads to people matching the specific folks who found them persuasive in our tests, across 89 House races, 10 Senate races, and 10 governors’ races. In all, we’re reaching more than 20 million potential voters in key areas.”

Wikler then declared that the advertisements “don’t look slick. They look real. Because they are.”

“That might help explain their impact. Or maybe it’s the topics people talked about—not stuff brainstormed on a consultant’s whiteboard, just actual people speaking from the heart… Regardless of exactly why, the most striking thing about this program: it actually *works* to move votes,” Wikler concluded. “Which is, unfortunately, a very rare thing in politics.”
On its official website, MoveOn, which is financially backed by socialist billionaire George Soros, explains its goal is to “end Republican control of Congress,” and promote a “progressive future,” and the PAC frequently uses the hashtag #ResistAndWin.

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November 5, 2018 4:02 pm