Southern comfort

This weekend, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ traversed Michigan with mentor Bernie Sanders – who pulled off a stunning primary upset of his own in the state a decade ago – headlining a trio of massive rallies for another insurgent progressive: MI-Sen candidate Abdul El-Sayed. 

It’s a race that looms large for the left, representing their best opportunity to prove they can win in battleground states, with control of the Senate potentially hanging in the balance. The stakes are particularly high for AOC, should she decide to run for president in 2028 – and she made clear she hasn’t ruled that out in a backstage interview with newly-minted Playbook co-author Adam Wren – as selling people on her electability figures to be the defining challenge of her candidacy. 

This is the only statewide primary AOC has waded into this cycle – and she’s going big. After headlining one the GOTV rallies, she was apparently cutting closing argument ads for El-Sayed, as he attempts to overcome a sharknado of dark money spending against him. (Sidenote: democracy is so fucked.)

This weekend also saw AOC star in a new piece by Axios’s Alex Thompson, who wrote that her “message on the campaign trail increasingly echoes” 2008 Barack Obama – complete with validation from David Axelrod, as well as an effective endorsement from UAW President Shawn Fain, who is one of the more influential figures on the left these days. And a new UNH poll shows her surging into first place in New Hampshire.

And yet, it was her swing through Tennessee on Friday to boost Justin Pearson (TN-09) that left the biggest impression on me.

To anyone who still doesn’t think AOC would be formidable, I suggest you watch this speech at a Black church in Memphis – and listen to all the mmhmm-ing and amen-ing and c’mon-now!-ing from the congregation. It mirrored the reception she got at RAPHAEL WARNOCK’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and at a voting rights rally in Montgomery. 

This Southern comfort is not a thing Bernie Sanders ever had in his repertoire. And it wasn’t just the stylistic limitations of a curmudgeonly Jew with Resting Yell Voice; it was also his monomaniacal focus on economic issues to the exclusion of social ones, an acrimonious relationship with the Black Democratic establishment (which kinda persists to this day), and a cellular aversion to bridgebuilding.

AOC, by contrast, believes deeply in coalition politics, and – after blazing a heretical path to the House that made her persona non grata within the Dem caucus – has proven remarkably adept at navigating them. She has forged deep relationships with CBC members (among many other alliances she’s cultivated across the progressive movement) and helped Hakeem Jeffries head off a DSA primary challenge. 

At a rally in Lansing this weekend, AOC declined to endorse or appear on stage with one of the co-headliners: Bernie-backed MI-07 candidate Will Lawrence, who has a ton of progressive support, but is also facing blowback for a 2024 comment lamenting that the Black political establishment “defangs the white left.”

This intentionality – moves like “snubbing” Lawrence or Graham Platner or Saikat Chakrabarti – tends to infuriate certain (cacophonous) wings of the online left, but it’s essential to her long-term success.

Militant leftist posters do not represent a significant portion of the Dem electorate, IRL. Black voters in the South, on the other hand, very much do. And Bernie’s inability to make inroads with them was his ultimate undoing in both 2016 and 2020.

Remember that famous upset over Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary I mentioned earlier? It really was a stunner, and a BFD. But that same night, she won Mississippi by 66 points, and netted +22 delegates across the two races. (RIGGED!!)

It’s too early to know how much AOC could alter this calculus – woke socialism is gonna repel some older Black Dems no matter how much rizz you have – but even marginal improvements could prove highly consequential.

It’s basically Sicko Christmas Eve… 

Tomorrow (!) and Friday, the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee (RBC) will work to set the all-important 2028 primary calendar, which I’ve been writing about for a year.

Sadly, new reporting from NYT’s Shane Goldmacher has rained on my nerd-parade, so to speak: SC & NV have apparently emerged as the two frontrunners to hold the first contest, and are now locked in a bitter fight that has “pitted Black and Latino party leaders against each other.” So that’s sub-ideal.

A separate just-out dispatch from Puck’s Peter Hamby calls SC the late favorite, while affirming that NV appears the other main contender – and adding a whole lot of color to the behind-the-scenes calendrama.

Maybe I’m crazy, but my gut says NH will ultimately prevail. The unfortunate reality is that state law requires them to go first, they have a Republican Governor & Secretary of State who have made clear it’s not changing, and it’s just gonna be an(other) absolute clusterfuck if they’re not placed at the front of the calendar. 

So Shane and Peter’s excellent reporting aside, I stubbornly stand by my prediction from many months ago of NH (Late Jan.)→ NV (Feb. 1)→ SC (early-mid Feb.)→ MI (Feb. 22)→ GA (Late Feb.)

I could see VA, NM, or even DE earning the 5th spot over GA, just because Dems have full control over the process in those states, whereas they’d likely need to win the GA Secretary of State election in November to actually move up the primary there.

Anyways, this is all in flux; the RBC had hoped to hammer out the schedule this week and have the full DNC ratify it at their Aug. 13-15 Summer Meeting in Austin, but that timeline may get pushed back. I’ll keep you posted; much more analysis to come whenever we get a calendar.