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Michigan primary fallout
A transcript of an August 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon says Democrats’ primaries this week are “so critical,” with host Perry Bacon asking Ryan Cooper about what the results in Michigan showed about voting patterns.
“This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon.”
Cooper said the “class base of the socialist movement in the United States” is “downwardly mobile” and “highly educated,” and that it “tend[s] to struggle with, like, older minority folks, particularly Black people.”
Bacon pressed for surprises, and Cooper pointed to a specific case, saying “the fellow that turfed out the incumbent in the Detroit House District” is “a DSA member and a Black man,” naming “Donovan McKinney.”
Cooper also argued that left candidates can lose in the general election even when their policies would benefit voters, saying “a more moderate Democrat is more likely to be elected, and so I shouldn’t support the lefty radical who might benefit me more personally, but is more likely to lose in the general election.”
AOC, Hong, and “Woke 1”
In coverage of ABC’s This Week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., dismissed past defunding police comments by saying, “Woke 1 was crazy,” and added, “I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
The KATU report says Karl asked Ocasio-Cortez about Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and her earlier controversial comments, including Hong’s call to abolish prisons and police, while the same report says Hong has sought to backtrack on some views amid her run for the Democratic nomination.
KATU also says Ocasio-Cortez invoked New York City Council Member Chi Ossé’s framing, quoting, “Woke 1 was crazyyyy,” when responding about his 2021 comment about who should be the next speaker of the Council.
In the same ABC News interview, Ocasio-Cortez said Democrats are “unifying” and focused on “working people,” telling Jonathan Karl, “We understand that our priority is the working class of this country.”
Debate over Overton window
The Intercept argues that Ocasio-Cortez’s “woke 1 was crazy” remark was not a dismissal of policing reform demands, saying she was responding to whether Democrats who previously called to defund the police “still stood by those positions.”
““during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton Window””
It quotes Ocasio-Cortez saying, “during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton Window,” and adds that she said “the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”
The Intercept also contrasts that framing with its own account of 2020 policing and protest repression, stating that the “George Floyd uprisings represented a brief rupture” in the “mythic alignment of policing with public safety.”
In the Washington Examiner’s account of Ocasio-Cortez’s political positioning, it says she triangulated against Democratic Socialists of America members and that she told ABC News’s This Week that Hong has “moved away from” her past radical views.