The Democratic Socialists of America pulled its endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York this week, accusing the progressive congresswoman of being insufficiently supportive of the Palestinian cause and efforts to end the war in Gaza…
Her approach has increasingly strained her relationship with some of the left’s most strident critics of Israel. When she rallied last month in the Bronx with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Jamaal Bowman, dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators angry over her endorsement of Mr. Biden chanted “You’re a fraud, A.O.C.”
She’s an incumbent in a heavily gerrymandered safe seat. Very little was going to pry her out shy of the kind of primary upset she used to take the seat in the first place.
But even as the ostensibly far-left flank of the party, she’s constantly pulling her punches in order to avoid getting censored and reprimanded within the Democrat’s caucus. Its not inconceivable that she could be thrown out, the same way George Santos was, if enough of her colleagues decide being Pro-Palestinian rises to the level of an expulsion-worthy ethics violation.
You can argue the DSA is unreasonable. And you can argue that Congress is so swarmed with AIPAC loyalists that not being censored is cause for alarm. But however you slice it, she’s putting her career ahead of any kind of personal conviction.
Do you mean New York is gerrymandered in the other direction? The 2022 map is +4% efficient gap for Republican. So she has her seat dispite the gerrymandering going the other direction.
I’m not with the tankies, but I do think you have a misunderstanding of how gerrymandering works, so I wanted to try explaining it.
Part of gerrymandering is packing:
The committee packs as many voters of the party they want to discriminate against, in as few districts as possible. This creates a lot of wasted votes in those packed (now safe) districts, which will benefit the other party in other more contested districts. So yes, the gerrymandering benefits the republican party when looking at ALL districts, but democrats within the packed districts have very safe general elections.
AOC is elected in one of those safe packed districts, so in that way she “benefitted” from the gerrymandering. I’m not going to hold that against her though, she didn’t make the map and the fpp voting system isn’t her fault either.
This picture shows it best imo: in one of the disproportiate examples there’s a majority of blue voters, but thanks to 2 packed blue districts, there are more yellow representatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#/media/File%3ADifferingApportionment.svg
Yeah that’s what the efficiency gap measures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_gap
Although I’m getting different numbers for the NY efficiency gap. It could be D leaning but other places calculate it as R.
The statewide efficiency gap is when you look at wasted votes across all districts of that state, it is not applicable to any single district. It is not correct to state that aoc was elected despite a state efficiency gap, because that gap is not applicable to the single district that she was elected in.
Court rules N.Y. Democrats gerrymandered congressional map: The judges ruled that the 2022 map “was drawn to discourage competition and favor Democrats.”
Regardless, NY-14 is a D+40 seat. Hard pressed to name a seat anywhere in the country that’s safer.