Don’t Ask AOC Why Democrats Won or Lost Swing Races This Fall
Don’t Ask AOC Why Democrats Won or Lost Swing Races This Fall
Instead, listen to the Democrats who went out and tried to beat Republicans on the front lines in the battle for our democracy.
While it’s impossible to predict exactly what will happen this November, one thing is certain: some swing district Democrats will lose their races for the House and Senate — and people will ask why.
For answers, listen to the Democrats who actually tried to win on the front lines of the battle for the majority — and ignore those who didn’t.
Recent history offers a cautionary tale of what happens when Democrats who were solely focused on primary elections dictate the narrative after general elections.
In 2018’s blue wave, moderates won the swing races that delivered Democrats control of the House, but the newly-elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues in the “Squad” got the bulk of the media’s attention. It didn’t matter that moderate and mainstream Democrats won nearly 80% of the cycle’s red-to-blue races — or that Justice Democrats, the far-left group behind the Squad, didn’t flip a single Republican-held seat that year (or any year since). It certainly didn’t matter that AOC and co. won in such heavily Democratic districts that Joe Biden carried them with more than 73% of the vote the following cycle. All that mattered was that the Squad’s disruptive brand of politics was a more sensational story than the middle-of-the-road moderates who did the hard work of winning back Congress.
The result was that too many Democrats misinterpreted 2018’s victories as a mandate to move left despite the fact that it had been anything but. Remember when Elizabeth Warren received thunderous applause for excoriating John Delaney when he argued that Democrats should run on “real solutions, not impossible promises?” Had pragmatic Black voters in South Carolina not stepped in and brought the party back to center by electing Joe Biden, it’s very likely the Democrats’ mistaken pivot to the far-left would have meant Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020.
In the aftermath of Democrats’ worse-than-expected down-ballot performances in 2020, frontline moderates like Abigail Spanberger and Conor Lamb pointed out that far-left slogans like “Defund the Police” nearly cost them their races. Both Spanberger and Lamb flipped red seats in 2018 and over-performed Biden in their districts in 2020, but this fact didn’t stop the media from passing the mic to AOC (who was fresh off a 56-point victory in one of the bluest districts in the country) for a breakdown of what had gone wrong.
The Stakes Are too High for a Midterm Misinterpretation
Fast-forward to this year: election-undermining MAGA Republicans are running for offices high and low across the country. They’re parroting Donald Trump’s big lie and advancing toward positions of power that could enable them to overturn the 2024 election. This isn’t politics as usual: this is code red for American democracy. What has AOC been up to during this pivotal cycle?
As it turns out, she’s been running a successful e-commerce business. According to just-released quarterly FEC filings, of the $9.6 million AOC has spent this cycle, she’s spent more than $1.6 million on merch and online store processing and fulfillment services alone. As WelcomePAC’s latest Conceding Democracy analysis demonstrates, that’s more money spent selling “Tax the Rich” and “Abolish ICE” sweatshirts and stickers than 12 Democrats running in flippable Republican-held districts (where Trump received between 50-54% of the vote in 2020) have raised this entire cycle — combined.
This kind of exorbitant spending on merch sales might make more sense if AOC were putting a meaningful chunk of it toward bolstering some of those Democrats trying to beat Republicans in the competitive swing races that will decide control of Congress. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case: of more than $12.1 million raised this cycle across her campaign account and her PAC, Courage to Change, AOC has contributed less than $250,000 worth of resources to other candidates running for office — that’s just two percent of her total haul. The vast majority of those contributions were made to primary campaigns; when it comes to beating Republicans in general elections, AOC has only made one general election contribution this entire cycle.
The fact that AOC has spent a lot of money on e-commerce while neglecting to focus seriously on beating Republicans isn’t just her fault — it is primarily a symptom of an inefficient Democratic marketplace that isn’t designed to produce wins where they are most needed. That said, Democrats must be clear-eyed when it comes to who to listen to in assessing why some swing seat candidates will have won or lost this November.
Time to Pass the Mic
Want to know how to beat Republicans and win swing races? Ask the Democrats who went out and actually fought to win GOP-held seats on the front lines of the battle to save our democracy.
Win or lose this fall, it’s time we pass the mic to them.
Author’s Note 11/4: This post did not initially include fundraising and contribution numbers from AOC’s PAC, Courage to Change. We have updated this post to reflect those numbers.
If the radicals say "defund the police," what do the moderates say? What is our catch phrase, what does The Welcome Party want to go viral on social media?
If Biden doesn't have his own soundbite-sized phrase or hashtag, who's fault is that?
Imagine if the debate on police overuse of violence and covering up racism lived in an Overton Window from "defund the police and refund social service agencies" on the left, to ________ that Biden and The Welcome Party say. And that — instead of complaining about each other — different folks on center-left and left have polite, showcase-democratic-debate conversations that dominate social media, crowding out the far-right hate by having two sets of ideas on the table worthy of debate.
The moderate wing is not being overrun by the left on social media, it is AWOL on messaging. Who do you go to for messaging? When you post on social media, who do you go to for cooperative efforts to get a certain hashtag to go viral?
To be honest, despite agreeing a lot with the Welcome Party, I'm not happy with this article: it's a lot of complaining. AOC is signing up new voters. AOC's wing of the party is mobilizing some of my friends, who now write letters to swing states: in my circles, in total the Bernie Sanders folks did more volunteering for Hillary Clinton in the general election than the Hillary Clinton voters, who just voted but didn't mobilize. Trying to get candidates with more fire in safe seats, while centrists take on centrist seats, seems fine to me. I don't want to support in-fighting, I want to support new ideas and better centrist messaging that doesn't compete with stronger ideals.