Why Is Everyone So Afraid Of President AOC?
An ongoing series
The centrist Third Way organization gathered this month in Charleston, South Carolina, to discuss the upcoming 2028 election. Co-founder Matt Bennett said, “We laid out a vision for a combative centrism, and we made clear we need a moderate nominee with big ideas.” A focus group must have tested the hell out of “combative centrism,” which reminds me of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” — just slap an adjective before your position and let the alliteration take over. Obviously, a “moderate” presidential nominee won’t actually have “big ideas” beyond winning the election and governing so that no one is so offended that you risk losing another election.
Charleston is a lovely city with historic charm and a less-charming history resisting progress, so it’s fitting that this was where Third Way would make its bold stand against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who the centrists fear will run for president and maybe even win the Democratic nomination. Axios described Third Way’s 2028 mission as “Stop AOC.”
Third Way president Jon Cowan opened the event with shots at Ocasio-Cortez, who wasn’t even trying to hold Fort Sumter. He also blasted “out-of-touch teachers’ unions” and “the language police,” which is an irritant within the left but nothing like the right-wing thought militia that got people fired for posting “heresies” about the late Charlie Kirk. Cowan dismissed “the idea that there are tens of millions of nonvoters just waiting to be mobilized by a left-wing siren song. It is delusional and widely debunked.” I don’t entirely disagree with this, but I believe both persuasion and mobilization are necessary. Studies have shown that nonvoters aren’t as rigidly or even consistently ideological as partisans. They can (and do) respond to messages from candidates who they consider outside the political mainstream. Perhaps this is why Third Way is throwing down the gauntlet against Ocasio-Cortez more than a year before any Democrat formally launches a campaign. They are worried that she can win.
After all, leftist candidates have consistently lost to Third Way-approved “normie” Democrats. Liberal Ted Kennedy failed to replace President Jimmy Carter as the party’s nominee in 1980. Jesse Jackson lost in 1984 and 1988. “New” Democrat Bill Clinton defeated California liberal Jerry Brown. Al Gore defeated Bill Bradley, who ran to Gore’s left on health care, gun safety, and campaign finance reform. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards’s populist campaign lost to whatever John Kerry was doing. Despite some later revisionist history, Barack Obama wasn’t the most liberal candidate in the 2008 primary. He found the sweet spot on key issues between both Edwards and Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders decisively lost both the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and although Elizabeth Warren led a few polls in 2019, she eventually exited the race without winning a single primary state, including her own.
Maybe Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory has Third Way scared of its own shadow but that was New York City. Moderate New Democrat Coalition members Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill crushed their Republican opponents in Virginia and New Jersey, both states where Kamala Harris collapsed in 2024.
Predictably, Third Way attributes Harris’s loss in great part to her perceived “radical leftism.” Cowan pointed out that exit polls revealed that voters considered Harris “more extreme” than Trump. Of course, that was objectively wrong: Harris ran in 2024 as a “normie” Democrat. She received endorsements from prominent non-MAGA Republicans. There’s no reality where the Democrat who campaigns with Liz Cheney is “more extreme” than the Republican who campaigns with noted crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — well, maybe the Upside Down Reality where we unwillingly reside. Until Democrats address their messaging challenges and figure out how to counter right-wing disinformation, it won’t matter if they nominate Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, or Zombie Margaret Thatcher. (The Trump administration recently smeared moderates Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly as “seditionists,” and the current Department of Injustice unsuccessfully tried to prosecute them. Facts don’t matter in this Upside Down Reality.)
If Harris fatally positioned herself in the Warren and Sanders lane during her 2020 campaign, that was her choice. One she presumably made because she believed it was important to win over the party’s left wing. That’s simple coalition building, but Third Way believes the ideal centrist candidate will actively snub the left. That might appeal to moderate and conservative Democrats/Never Trumpers, but it’s political subtraction not addition.
Third Way operates from a position of weakness when it treats Ocasio-Cortez as a threat to neutralize. Even journalist Matthew Yglesias, who attended Third Way’s SlayerFest ‘98 convention, argues that fellow centrists should just elevate and support viable candidates who aren’t like Ocasio-Cortez.
Yglesias writes:
The problem is that these mainstream figures embraced ideas that are too left-wing and also — here’s something that I maybe don’t talk about enough — largely stopped putting forward affirmative reformist ideas of their own.
It’s true in a sense that the actions of left-wing factionalists are responsible for this shift. But the mechanism is that sensible, pragmatic politicians decided that the sensible, pragmatic thing to do was shift left to avoid losing power to the left.
And if moderates and pragmatists want to break that cycle, we need to drop the obsession with boxing the left out and start just trying to articulate our ideas.
I’d argue the larger problem is that “pragmatists” too often seem like they don’t actually believe anything and are constantly “leading” from behind. Yglesias, after all, advised Democrats to roll over and play dead when Trump was disappearing people without due process.
Third Way is so darn “pragmatic” it struggle with any “big ideas.” Right now, the organization is more worried about the “nightmare scenario” that could result in a possible Ocasio-Cortez primary win. Cowan didn’t mention the former vice president in Charleston when warning against a return to “Bidenism” because he’s not certain Harris will run again, but he’s already started casting her in the role of scapegoat.
“[Kamala Harris] runs,” Cowan theorizes, “she takes a bunch of the Black vote away from the would-be moderate nominee, and somebody like AOC consolidates her [left-wing] vote and Harris screws us.”
It’s impossible to win the Democratic primary with only the Black vote. Jesse Jackson performed well with Black voters in 1988 but he also won voters aged 30 and younger. Barack Obama dominated the Black vote in 2008 but won young voters and white liberals. The Democratic Black vote is a key part of a winning coalition but it’s neither a singular silver bullet nor the anchor Cowan envisions.
Cowan dismisses Harris as a has-been, loser candidate, whose last primary run “was a disaster,” but he assumes his idealized centrist moderate somehow can’t beat her among Black voters. Does he think Black voters lack the “pragmatism” to back a candidate who can win? We’re not idiots whose only concern is a candidate’s skin color. He also seemingly can’t imagine a “would-be moderate nominee” who themselves is Black.
Third Way held its centrist-fest in South Carolina, a state where Black Democrats account for a majority of the primary electorate. Biden and Harris supporters often describe South Carolina as the state where Black Democrats have their say, but Cowan sounds like he’s more afraid that Black Democrats will make his nightmares come true.
If Ocasio-Cortez can consolidate the left-wing — who are as notoriously hard to satisfy as Prince’s mother — and no centrist-approved Democrat can consolidate their own viable coalition, then maybe Ocasio-Cortez is the better candidate. We should go with nominating good candidates. It sounds crazy but it might just work,
First, a disclaimer: anything Third Way is against I am nearly automatically for even though, like Stephen, I don't think they're always wrong. But they are running an old playbook that voters have clearly already rejected, business as usual that Joe Biden tried and failed to resurrect and was a big reason Harris failed IMO-it certainly wasn't because her positions were "radically leftist". I personally think an AOC candidate could wipe the floor in 2028-young, charismatic, big ideas that don't involve wars of choice-especially if that candidate vows that justice will be metered out unmercifully to the band of thugs we have in there now.
Exactly. And the most important feature is that if she became dem POTUS candidate, she would have done so by winning a robust primary. Whoever wins the primary is, BY DEFINITION the strongest candidate to run against the republican candidate