...for not making herself available for more appearances with Bernie, which almost seems targeted to hurt her during the primaries.

He is a Democrat who has years of roots in the district as a community organizer.

He is charismatic.

He has raised no declared money (no FEC financial filings) his website is a one page nothing for months, his FB is basically non existent, his tweets are seen by a few dozen to a couple hundred max, even his pinned announcement tweet only has 198 likes, I have more followers than he does, lolol. AOC has 6.5 million, and you can be damn sure a shedload of those are NY-14 voters.

AOC will have millions of dollars at her disposal and a literal army of workers. Plus Velazquez (and all other challengers nationwide) are blocked from using ANY vendors that do any work with the DNC, etc. Blacklisting rules cut both ways. AOC has the weight of the Party behind her.


Good luck Jose!!

Winning in such a compact, densely populated district comes down to burning shoe leather, not money. If Jose has only 198 followers on Twitter, but those followers are knocking on doors in the district and talking to people, the game changes. AOC was a grossly underfunded candidate with hardly any followers in 2018 when she took out a well funded, powerful democrat. Also, Velazquez has been a longtime community organizer, he is likely known to a sizeable number of people in the district.

If there is a debate, that gives Velazquez eyes that he can take advantage of. The primary turnout in 2018 was small, and it is possible that democrats only want a progressive that has a progressive track record, Velazquez fits the bill.

If she were to somehow lose, it would have a massively deleterious effect overall on the Party as she is a truly national presence and is a large magnet for younger voters to become involved in politics themselves.

Too many on here want their own form of purity test, which is to purge as much as the further left from the Party as is possible. Our party is a big tent party, and that includes people further to the left than many moderate, centrists, and even more conservative Democrats. It takes a wide spectrum to capture a broad enough swathe of the overall vote to become a truly dominant force again. If you lurch too far to the centre and centre right to attempt to capture moderate Republicans, you will eventually hit an inflection point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in and we start to haemorrhage more from the further left than we gain from the centre or centre right.

He appears to be a solid person of the Left. He is not Left-center (more Left) like I am. He appears to be firmly in AOC's sphere politically, without the flights of fancy toward socialism.

In 2018, Joe Crowley was expected to cruise to victory also. It boiled down to who had made more personal contact with voters, Velazquez appears to have been doing that while AOC was going around endorsing Bernie and a host of democratic socialist candidates, against progressives.

arguably the two worst Democratic caucus (AND are both in safe Blue seats) members in the House, Henry Cuellar (who won his primary, unfortunately) and then Marie Newman (hardly a so-called democratic socialist, she has most all large endorsements across the board last time, including Emily's List, etc) against Dan Lipinski. Cuellar and Lipinski are anti-LGBTQ (I am a young married lesbian and like hell if I will support (in a primary) someone who if they had their way would null and void my marriage), they are anti-choice, Cuellar campaigned and fundraised for an odious bigot and climate change denier Trumper Rethug, John Carter against MJ Hegar, who is now running against Cornyn for one of the Texas Senate seats, if she wins her run-off.

Cuellar is A - rated by the NRA, voted close to 70% of the time with Trump and the Thugs in the last full Congress, is the biggest recipient of all House Dems in terms of private prison cash ((including the biggest sums (over 100,000 usd in the last 8 years, 32,000 just in 2018) from the Trump-entangled scandal-related immigrant detention firm GEO Group, and in the top few in terms of fossil fuel money. Lipinski ran a truly odious smear campaign against Newman in 2018, infused with close to a million dollars injected by dubious partially RW dark money pools, plus he outrageously and falsely smeared Newman as a Holocaust denier and anti-Catholic zealot. Cisneros, who lost to Cuellar, was also endorsed by EMILY's List. Newman was EMILY's List's only loss in a primary in 2018 (they are endorsing her again against the forced birther, anti LGBTQ Lipinski), and Cisneros is their only loss so far in 2020 primaries.

Those 2 (Cuellar, Lipinski) were literally the ONLY two incumbent Dems I wanted to see go down in the primaries, as they are against fundamental parts of our Party's platform and one actively supports Rethugs. I do NOT believe in primarying incumbents (for instance the also extremely problematic Collin Peterson, who is the best we can hope for in his ultra ruby red MN district) in shaky barely blue, pinkish, purple or red seats at all. I am very pragmatic when it comes to US politics.


All the rest of the Dem primary people AOC directly endorsed so far were or are running for open seats or against Rethugs. The minute she endorses a primary challenge to an endangered incumbent Democrat in a shaky seat, I will be amongst the first to condemn that move. To the best of my knowledge she has come nowhere near doing this so far. If you know of one I will gladly cry foul.

I think AOC wins in a cakewalk, she has done a tonne of community outreach, despite the plazzy meme posited repeatedly on this board that she has utterly ignored her local constituents.

I can provide a shedload of additional links for anything that I posted above btw.

Bookmark this, as I am extremely comfortable with saying I am not going to have to eat crow come June 23rd when it comes to AOC being reelected.

You may want to stock up on mustard, I heard that goes better with baked or fried crow than mayo or ketchup. I think

Velazquez has the stuff to unseat AOC, my biggest worry is the two split the progressive vote and allow one of the more rightish candidates to slip past to victory. If it looks like one of the more right can win, then Velazquez should drop out and endorse AOC, and he seems to be the type that would.

seats post-2020 census) may likely be done away with via redistricting. I have seen there is a lot of behind the scenes pressure to redistrict her out. That will interesting to see (interesting not in a good way) as I am sure she will slide over and go for another seat.

cheers

most progressive piece. That may involve a run against an incumbent. What I would like to see is republicans that are close to metropolis get re-districted into districts that contain a lot more city people. If the Legistlature is coming after AOC in particular, that will be obvious and there will be blowback, remember, a lot of those people are in office because democrats that sided with republicans were removed from office by voters.

If so, she's more pragmatic than she sometimes appears, and that's a good thing.

Or up coming elections?

And that if she wants her ideas enacted into law, she’s do better to work within the party rather than play the hostile outsider like Bernie.

This is only my guess. AOC doesn’t live in my state or represent my congressional district.

just how toxic and off-putting the vocal fraction of his support is with their sexist and misogynist rhetoric. They don't represent Sanders as a person, but until he's put them in their place, they do represent his segment of the Democratic Party.

Sometimes the innocence of youth can carry you away.

And her district might go away with re-districting.

Any democratic elected candidate who does not get on the Biden bus in the next few weeks is going to be shown the door by what they call they establishment. What everyone else calls the voters.

Nothing concentrates the mind like staring at lots of people dying. The whole Bernie resistance thing was cute and frustrating last week. It is dangerous now.

This is the Democratic Party. We can't be afraid of a discussion. Until Biden hits 1991 delegates, Sanders has every right to be campaigning in every state.

It’s clear the Democratic voters have decided.

My concern is that only one of the debaters has the best interest of the Democratic Party in mind.

I fail to understand all the fuss being made over her. What accomplishments has she made for her constituents? Based on her continual media appearances and nonstop travel with Bernie, it's obvious that she's not at home doing the work she was elected to do.

Contrast her accomplishments with those of someone like Sharice Davids. She's someone who doesn't seek a national spotlight and she's not flying around the country making personal appearances on behalf of a primary candidate... instead, she's doing the hard work that her constituents elected her to do.

I'm much more impressed with Sharice Davids... no hype, just work, just success.

What has she done? We see her in the news a lot, but what are her actual accomplishments? We need more than "celebrity" politicians who are known more for their celebrity status and their pretty faces and interviews on talk shows... rather than what they're actually DOING for the citizens.

All I'm saying is... and this is just a long way to explain the old adage that "actions speak louder than words". Number of constituents whose lives have been improved is MUCH more meaningful than number of "twitter followers".

keeps her in the spotlight. She seems to like the attention.

Reminds me of a lame joke and play on words that an old boss of mine would always say: "Hey, how's it going? Working hard, or hardly working?"

Public servants like Sharice Davids work hard and seek NO extra attention or fame for their accomplishments. Her constituents are very lucky to have someone like Ms. Davids.

In my long life, I've seen many different politicians who were famous for being famous. And this is before the age of twitter and facebook. They were well known for being handsome or photogenic or their style or their attitude (both good and bad, sweet and annoying) but they weren't known for the things they accomplished for their constituents, or for their legislative accomplishments.

The "celebrity" aspect of politics these days really annoys me. It allows politicians to do less and lower their standards as long as they can get more youtube views of their Sunday talk show appearances and more friends on facebook and more twitter followers.

I think as a nation, we deserve better.

young women who were elected to The House in 2018 and have focused on learning how to Legistlate. Those women will be the future leaders, because they are learning how the knobs of government work.

You're so right. They know and understand what's at stake. They take seriously their responsibility. They want to do the right thing for their constituents... they do not put themselves or their careers first. They are the type that realize by doing their job, and doing it well, then the voters will reward their efforts. People who think they "deserve" the office after a lackluster term, and not doing much of anything, and having no legislative accomplishments, but who think twitter followers are a measure of their worth... well... those people are in for a rude awakening.

She's excited a lot of young people, especially young women, across the country about public service and politically progressive causes. That's not about her district in particular, that's national leadership.

She has pushed, authored, and sponsored the Green New Deal, which is a bold and long overdue plan for getting this country out from under its addiction to carbon energy sources.

She's been the national leader in calling for minority marginalized communities to be included in the Green New Deal reforms.

She co-sponsored the Raise the Wage Act, which would help a LOT of her constituents of the Republican Senate wasn't killing 90% of all the books the House passes

She's been deleting sponsor on over a dozen piece of legislation, looks like 95% of all bills introduced are still working their way through the committee system

She's set the pace for all New York politicians forgetting on social media, which increases accountability and accessibility for elected politicians. She's also innovated in networking with local Brooklyn and Queens office holders to streamline her constituent services office--something that was necessary to build fences since she got elected by defeating the old power broker who held that seat before her.

Ocasio Cortez isn't unusual and groundbreaking politician, but she's definitely putting in time in her district, in addition to maintaining a national profile as a leader of the progressive faction of the party.

The smear that she's not doing anything for her district sounds like an un-researched Fox News talking point.

She's a democrat, unlike Bernie.

got 27k Likes!

Mahalo for this, showblue

Between the two, AOC is the better choice. A better choice than AOC in the race is Jose Velazquez. But, people should be cognizant of splitting the progressive vote between AOC and Velazquez and letting one of the more right candidates slip through with a win - if it looks like things are headed that way, people should vote for AOC, and we will take it up with her in two years if she doesn't become more of a true progressive team player (as opposed to flights of fancy about the wonders of socialism).