Biden courts Ocasio-Cortez – but will he go bold enough to win her support?
Progressive favorite Alexandria OcasioCortez hasn’t made an appearance on Joe Biden’s live stream. The New York congresswoman hasn’t cut a video message for the man Democrats will send out to defeat Donald Trump in November, and she hasn’t sent out fundraising emails on his behalf.
As the party aligned behind Biden last week in a show of unity, with endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez has yet to offer a fullthroated endorsement of his presidential bid. While the 30-year-old politician intends to vote for Biden in November, her active support will be harder won.
“Unity isn’t a feeling,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview on ABC’s The View this week. “It’s a process and I think that Biden can go further.”
Yet Biden has for more than a year resisted calls to embrace liberal policies like universal healthcare and the Green New Deal. He won anyway.
Now as the presumptive nominee, Biden is considering policy overtures to the left while courting leaders like Ocasio-Cortez, who is popular with young, progressive voters of color – one of the constituencies he is struggling to win over.
Winning the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman member of Congress and the heir apparent to Sanders’ leftwing political movement, could go a long way to unlocking their support.
As a top surrogate for Sanders’ presidential campaign, she drew larger crowds in Iowa than many of his top rivals, including Biden. She has a bigger online presence than Biden and, as a congresswoman representing some of the New York communities hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, is a prominent voice on a crisis that is reshaping American politics.
Her social media stardom and young followers could be particularly helpful to Biden, as the coronavirus outbreak forces his campaign to pivot to an all-digital strategy. Biden, an oldschool, retail politician, has at times struggled to break through online, eclipsed by Trump’s expansive internet operation.
At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez has been demonized on the right, cast as an extremist who wants to turn the US into Venezuela. Her public support may help fuel the Trump campaign’s attacks on Biden as a Sanders-style Democrat in disguise.
“AOC is one of the many young people who were inspired by Senator Sanders,” said Sarah Audelo, executive director of Alliance for Youth Action, referring to Ocasio-Cortez by her nickname. “The power of her endorsement, if she is able to get to the place of endorsing Joe Biden, will be in the story of how she got there – how a Biden presidency is going to move us closer to winning on X, Y and Z issues and how supporting Biden is key to advancing our movement.”
In a January interview with New York Magazine, Ocasio-Cortez said that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party”.
Now that he is her party’s presumptive nominee, she is wagering her political capital to see how far she can push him.
In interviews last week, she argued that the response to the coronavirus demands sweeping economic reforms that will help the nation recover from the crisis and make it more resilient in the future.
“This pandemic has just exposed us,” Ocasio-Cortez explained on the Daily. “People tell me, ‘I cannot believe I didn’t see this before. I cannot believe I didn’t see this before.’ I’m just thankful that people are seeing it now.”
Ocasio-Cortez believes the crisis has created more room for compromise, contending that the success of party unification efforts – and possibly the outcome of the presidential election –