https://youtu.be/adLMXI7J1wY?si=b9euma5D0qmHgpef&t=2839

JON LOVETT: In a race that may be decided by a few votes per precinct in a handful of states, success will come down to persuading people not just to vote for Harris over Trump, but whether to vote at all. Here to talk about that mission is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, welcome back to the pod!

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Thank you! Thanks for having me.

JL: You’ve been campaigning and canvassing in Pennsylvania — how are the vibes?

AOC: They’re good, they’re good! You know, I think that the ground game that Democrats have out there is really encouraging. We had 1,000 people out canvassing in Allentown, Pennsylvania. But we have a lot of work to do — we need to motivate a lot of people to go to the polls. And it’s going to be really, really tight.

JL: So, let’s talk about this. You made the case at this labor rally for Harris/Walz — and you can really feel in that speech how much you have thought about the argument to those who might sit this election out. You’ve also been canvassing in parts of PA that have traditionally had lower turnout. What’s the case you’re making, who are you trying to reach, and what’s the response been?

AOC: You know, I think the case is different depending on who we’re trying to reach. I’ve been to places like Reading, Pennsylvania, which is a very Latino and very Puerto Rican city that has historically had very low voter turnout because they haven’t seen or experienced a lot of politicians care about them. And I think that I relate a lot to that; I represent a community that experienced that for a very long time.

And so, to me, when it comes to that argument, it’s doing the work of showing up, and actually seeing communities and saying, “Actually, it’s not up to you to have to show up first, to have a politician care about you. We need to be able to be out there and see you first.” And so I think for a disconnected community like that, that’s why it’s been very important for me to go to Pennsylvania, and go to places like Reading.

Then you also have an activist left — that is also a place that I come from — that is horrified at what we see unfolding in Gaza. I have called it a genocide on the House floor, many others feel that way as well. And saying, “How can we allow our disgust at what is happening be transmitted and communicated? And can we communicate that, should we communicate that by sitting this election out?”

To me, that case is a different one. It’s a different one than communities that have been disaffected and ignored and are hearing from a politician for the first time. That case to me is very much about, first of all, the stakes of this present moment. It’s also about articulating a larger plan, and how we get the Democratic Party to shift left. For me, and what I’ve seen, and also I think what we see in general, is that the party moves left in primaries. But when we lose General Elections, the Democratic Party shifts dramatically to the right. When elections are close, as we see now, the Democratic Party shifts to the right in General Elections.

So to me, it’s multi-faceted: one, a Donald Trump presidency would be utterly catastrophic. It would put vulnerable communities — even more vulnerable communities at risk, in addition to the ones that are at risk right now. So to me, the message that I had in Pennsylvania is, I’m not going to punish trans kids in Indiana over this; I’m not going to punish single parents who are feeding their kids with weakened EBT over this, and we also need to really invest in a long-term organizing strategy, so that candidates who believe that human rights extend to Palestinians can be elected and supported by a strong mobilized left in America.

JL: So it’s interesting because what I hear there is basically a very practical case to people who are thinking about how to use their vote in the most effective way when they feel pretty disaffected by their options. At the same time, there is this kind of more emotional or identity-driven conversation about this vote, especially on-line, about — that — that feels much less driven by, just, outcomes, and much more about — there’s a lot of rhetorical questions: “How could I bring myself?” “How could anyone?”

How do you think, like — and I, I want to be sympathetic; at the same time I have this part of myself that just wants to go, like, “I know! I know! Suck it up, we just have to do this. We have to do this right now to save the country and give us any fighting chance. We can ask the hard questions, the rhetorical questions, after the election.” But you don’t do that — you seem to have much more discipline and empathy. So how do you think about people that are feeling that way — and by the way, whose feeds have been filled with monstrous images — who have been fed, since — real and awful, uh, images of reality that has alienated them from the political process.

AOC: Well, you know, I really can empathize in multiple ways. One is, I totally get the frustration — and I also totally get where — how people feel about this. First of all, our brains — our minds, the human brains are not designed to intake this amount of trauma, anger, mass everything, all the time. The same way that people just cannot — our minds are not built to withstand the trauma of what is happening in Gaza. Palestinians, Americans watching what is happening, you know, seeing this unspeakable violence — it is — it’s — we have to understand what that does to our brains. Ah, and what it does to our minds.

But to me, we have a responsibility to set conditions on behalf of individuals who are — just experiencing the horrors of what is happening. But also, I think, it is important that — to me, my vote is not about an extension of myself. And I think it’s important to validate that there are different ways to looking at voting. Some may look, or hear, or see who we vote for as an extension of ourselves. And if we look at voting that way, then every single election becomes so much more fraught, because there’s — we’re just never going to find a politician that aligns with you completely in every single way. I don’t even agree with my mother on everything. Like, it’s — it’s just — it will make these decisions much more difficult. But when I think about the history of people’s movements, of people’s struggles — when I think of the enslavement of Black Americans, and when I think about Puerto Ricans that were sterilized by the US government, when I think about people’s movements — and the horrors that peoples in the United States endured — they are often both the most radical and the most pragmatic, strategic actors in American history. And we can be both.

I draw a lot of inspiration from Latin American organizing, and the Latin American left, and we see this a lot in the Latin American left as well. What we need is an activism that is not limited by electoralism only. And that doesn’t mean rejecting electoralism — it means of thinking of elections as a condition-setting strategy for a larger organizing project. We have a lot of work that we need to do, and it’s not going to be voting alone that stops what happens in Gaza. We need a counter to AIPAC — we need a voting electorate that supports people who believe in human rights in primary elections. And you need non-electoral, of course, organizing strategies as well. But I never ascribe, personally — I do not believe in ascribing to a strategy of giving up the power that we have, and allowing this decision to be made not by us.

JL: So you mention this broader organizing of the left, and in Latin America — you were just in Puerto Rico, and there was something very interesting happening down there. And I wanted to ask you about it, because it is a kind of organizing that — I think in contrast to sometimes what you see on the left in the US — something that has been, like, exciting; there have been a lot of protests that you were saying have become, like, giant parties; you have people like Bad Bunny getting in the fight — and you kind of want to be on your side and Bad Bunny’s side, I think, in general. So what’s happening in Puerto Rico, and what are the lessons there, win or lose, for progressives organizing against corruption in the US?

AOC: Yeah, no, I actually think there’s a lot of lessons that we can gain from what is happening in Puerto Rico. It’s really, really an exciting and utterly historic moment that we’re seeing. For a very long time, there has been basically a corrupt two-party system in Puerto Rico (laughing) —

JL: (laughing)

AOC: — and, uh — but in Puerto Rico, parties are not aligned by left and right; they’re aligned by status. So there’s a pro-statehood party; there’s been a pro-Commonwealth, which is to say, like, the current status quo party — and for a very long time, there’s been an Independence party that’s got a very very small amount of the vote. But the problem is that, over time, both of these parties — neither one of them really delivered on any sort of status momentum. They used it as a fig leaf for a lot of self-serving, corrupt, machine type of politics. And we saw this after Hurricane Maria; you had Donald Trump’s enormous amount of corruption, where millions of dollars were going to his cronies, but you also saw this on the Island, too — a lot of politicians were misusing funds, and you know, everyday people were suffering.