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As Dem Voters Seek a 'Fight' With the Superrich, AOC is Now Their Favorite Candidate: Poll
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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I kinda hope they don't run AOC. Can we just get all of the progressiveness without a brown woman? It's sad but a ton of people won't vote for her just because she's a woman, and not white. It's a sad mark of America but that's just what it is.
I appreciate that you believe you are right and have good intentions, but I think I can cheer you up. Look at the kerfuffle over Bad Bunny. The guy is seriously, overwhelmingly popular. The show was watched and enjoyed by the majority. And he's not white, by your definition.
Also, think about Barack Obama for a second. If he ran again, he'd win easily, even with all the flaws we saw in his government. Sheer fucking charisma. A lot of Trump voters formerly voted for Obama.
AOC is young, progressive, and genuinely popular. She can talk like a normal person, unlike Trump or Hillary or Kamala. You watch her, and she seems cool, and she seems smart, and she believes in something, and she's not a hundred years old.
A lot of people respond well to these simple, positive qualities in a politician. Look at Zohran Mamdani. He had all those qualities, and good policy promises in his campaign, and very little bullshit. If she can add those two things, and stay consistent in her message, she's going to win the primary.
Her ethnicity is kind of irrelevant to all that. She is the best candidate for the Dems in 28.
And then me and all the other lefties can complain every time she compromises with the corpo bastards who actually run the country, while she hopefully manages to make the place even a little bit better than it has been. Just achieving small positive change would be a beautiful thing in these times.
We already elected a black man. It's true that two women have failed, but I'm not convinced their gender had anything to do with it. Both were terrible candidates running ridiculously bad campaigns.
This. In fact, many people were driven out to vote for Hillary because she was a woman, despite being a pretty terrible candidate. Let's not forget, she won the popular vote by several million/several percent.
The sword cuts both ways, so I would rather put gender and ethnicity by side and look at their actual policies.
If you tap the working people by offering them meaningful policy to improve their lives even racists will be happy to vote that.
Except for when racists are rallied into opposing things they would directly benefit from because non-white people would also benefit. Anything which erodes their racial caste becomes a material threat to their racial consciousness, and they fight it.
That's how you end up with some poor whites pushing to gut SNAP and WIC.
It doesn't work on big enough scale to matter. There is a reason that candidates that run popular policies always pull in racist voters, just like Bernie Sanders did with Fox News viewers and then Trump voters and at this point multiple congress and senate seats have been won by non-white people despite all the racism. Also, it's easy to counter. It's a class issue, not a race issue. And polling shows that not only it's a good policy, but also works as a counter messaging strategy.
Good economic policy beats most social conditioning over time. For the same reason Trump had to stop saying that affordability was a hoax, because even his cult members couldn't deny that when they are daily confronted by those prices. Americans love to get self-owned for party participation trophy, but everything has a breaking point.
It has worked on a big enough scale to matter, it's how so many government programs have been gutted over the past few decades. They're always screeching about "fraud" and "abuse" which basically just means "non-white people getting benefits."
There's definitely a limit to how far race consciousness can suppress class consciousness, but it definitely works on a big scale.
It works in a vaccum where economic policy is the same due to uniparty, but again that doesn't work when put up against popular policies.
A lot of government assistance programs were popular, and they were eroded anyway because their popularity wasn't sustained through outreach and propaganda. Democrats wouldn't stand up for government assistance programs because they didn't really like them either, so the only thing people heard was how bad it was. There needs to be a concerted effort to educate the masses.
Policies aren't popular on their own. They still have to be made popular and kept popular, by activists and politicians and parties.
They remain popular. They were cut not because they lost popularity, but because nobody were willing to improve them and that then allowed racists to win and cut them. Most openly racist modern politician Trump campaigned on keeping all the social safety net programs because they were popular and are still popular, if someone would have campainged on expanding them they would have won instead.
US has presidential term limits because racists were incapable of winning against popular policies back in the day.
And yet, people voted for candidates who pledged to cut them. That has to be reckoned with.
There's definitely a problem with Democrats being unwilling to improve these programs, because ultimately the Democratic leadership hates government programs too, but there's also the problem with people voting to take government benefits away form undesirables. Again, policies aren't popular on their own, they need to be promoted and advanced. We have a role to play.
People say that because Hillary and Kamala had zero charisma and policy to the right of the dem voter base, and performed as such.
AOC might be a little further left than some Dem voters, but she's still closer to them than whoever runs under an R will be.
But before Obama won everyone said you had to be full white and just half white, and he absolutely stomped 08 because of charisma and a policy platform a little to the left of the Dem voter base at the time.
It goes beyond that, there's a lot of reasons someone like AOC could easily become the next president, the thing is absolutely none of those people have anywhere near the name recognition as AOC.
They'd have a chance, but no one has as good of a chance as her, and that won't change before 2028.