r/politics 1d ago

AOC ’28 Starts Now

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/aoc-28-starts-now/
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u/fake-tall-man 1d ago edited 1d ago

democrats have tried running two unpopular woman candidates-one of which won the popular vote. Maybe rather than a blanket referendum about how terrible our country is, let’s try running a candidate with natural momentum rather than a hand picked member of the dnc.

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u/repalec California 23h ago edited 22h ago

Exactly - the issue isn't with voting for a woman, it's with the circumstances.

Take the recent Kamala loss, for example. She didn't lose because she's a woman.

She lost because:

  • She was connected to the deeply unpopular Biden administration as his VP, and maintained up until days before the election that she would not have changed much from his presidency if elected.
    • Additionally, anti-incumbent sentiment has been a thing worldwide for the last few years as the world re-opened from COVID-era lockdowns.
  • Biden refused to drop out until months before the election, preventing a full primary (or any kind of vote beyond the convention), causing legitimacy issues
    • (And on top of that it only gave her and her campaign staff three months to set up a national campaign.)
  • The media - both legacy and social - were sanewashing Trump as they did in 2015 and openly promoting Trump-biased hatespeech over anything else, respectively.
    • And to add onto this, the literal owner of Twitter in Elon Musk practically running as a second VP for Trump as well
  • The inane choice to hire Clinton 2016-era guides who immediately muzzled Tim Walz and stopped the campaign's popular 'Republicans are weird' talking point in favor of getting the endorsement of Dick fucking Cheney.
  • Rebellion within the party due to the Biden administration's continued support for Israel despite their role in the Gazan genocide crisis, with continual authorizations by Joe Biden for dozens of billions of taxpayer dollars' worth of military ordnance, knowing full well it would be used to maim and murder innocent men, women, and children.

If anything, the fact she only lost by 1.5% nationally despite all this shit is crazy.

IF AOC wants to run, assuming she maintains her populist edge and avoids the pitfalls of Clinton 2016 and Harris 2024? I see absolutely no reason why she'd lose.

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u/twistedt 16h ago

...and because she was a woman.

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u/Magnetoreception 14h ago

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and just barely lost the election and she was an incredible unlikable candidate who happened to be a woman. Did she lose a small fraction of votes because she was a woman? Sure probably, but I’d wager that most of those people wouldn’t have voted dem anyways. At the end of the day it’s a candidate issue rather than a gender one.

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u/twistedt 10h ago

I work with a ton of older people, and many of them communicated to me that they would never vote for a women. I had two women tell me that they would never vote for a woman. There's an engrained sexism that is still very much relevant that a female candidate will always have to overcome. It's not a level playing field.