Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are ideological allies, but it seems they disagree on how to convince voters to join them.
Sanders’s campaign has been growing more and more frustrated with the New York representative, who endorsed Sanders back in October, lending her political stardom to his presidential bid while he recovered from a heart attack. While the Vermont senator was stuck in Washington, D.C., for the Senate’s impeachment trial, Ocasio-Cortez campaigned on his behalf in Iowa.
The problem was that she didn’t really campaign for Sanders. Instead, she campaigned for herself and her ideas, pushing policies the Sanders team considered too extreme given the tight margin that separates Sanders from his moderate opponents. She denounced comedian Joe Rogan’s unofficial endorsement, encouraged Iowa voters to work against immigration authorities, and even refused to mention Sanders by name at one event.
It’s not that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez don’t see eye-to-eye. They do. On immigration, for example, Sanders’s plan would dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is exactly what Ocasio-Cortez called for during one of his rallies. But Sanders’s team understands something Ocasio-Cortez, who represents a deep-blue district, does not: To win a national election, you must win swing districts, and to win swing districts, nuance is somewhat necessary.
Sanders is by no means a moderate, and he has no interest in becoming one. He is not ashamed of his liberal policies, and he does not intend to change them, even if that means losing the Democratic nomination. But he can at least avoid discussing controversial policies that might isolate moderate and independent voters.
There’s no doubt Ocasio-Cortez has helped generate enthusiasm for Sanders’s campaign. But if he’s going to win the Democratic nomination, he’ll need to appeal to a wide swathe of voters, many of whom could be turned off by Ocasio-Cortez’s radical rhetoric.
