There are 4 clowns challenging AOC's reelection as Democrats, including right wing, anti-Choice, viciously homophobic coke freak Fernando Cabrera. He's a typical "ex"-Republican. There're also 8 Republicans running, one of whom, Antoine Tucker, was a coke dealer who may have been supplying Cabrera, widely considered NYC' absolutely worst City Councilman. None of these vanity candidates poses any real danger to AOC's reelection.AOC is close to 6 million Twitter followers, not just more than any other member of Congress, but more than the entire Republican leadership team combined. @SpeakerPelosi has 3.4 million followers, while @LeaderHoyer has 122,800 followers. Two of the presidential candidates have more followers than AOC:
• Bernie: 10 million• Elizabeth: 5.5 million• Cory Booker- 4.4 million• Status Quo Joe: 4 million• Mayo Pete: 1.6 million• Yang: 1 million• Kamala: 977,400
But the stat political professionals want to see, of course, is money. Who's bringing in the most money from contributors? AOC is. Last quarter she brought in more money than any other Democratic member of the House-- $1.4 million, almost all of it ($1.1 million) in small contributions (under $200). The next two biggest recipients of campaign contributions were Adam Schiff (1.26 million) and Pelosi (1.1 million). AOC's campaign war-chests is now $1,909,866, more than any freshmen other than Josh Harder (CA- $2,001,018) and Katie Porter (CA- $1,991,004), each of whom is in a swing district being heavily targeted by the NRCC.Why is this notable? Let's look at a tweet storm from AOC a couple days ago:
I intentionally built my campaign to rely on small-dollar grassroots support without any corporate money because I felt that’s the best way to be accountable to everyday people.It has impacted how I work in Congress in powerful ways-- ways I couldn’t fully appreciate until I got here.There is, of course, much more time for me to be fully present at my job.In Congress, this is a luxury. Since I don’t spend hours each day asking for money, I spend a lot more time legislating, studying, & preparing/sitting in hearings.This has cumulative effects over time.Instead, your support allows me to spend hours each day studying issues & exposing abuse of power.So while Fox continues to laugh that I’m "just a bartender," I’ve spent the whole year studying Big PhRMA, private equity, military contractors, and Mark Zuckerberg’s shady deals.Our political system’s reliance on huge sums of money has many negative impacts, but one of the largest is that it takes lawmakers’ time away from lawmaking.That’s a feature, not a flaw-- the less time lawmakers have, the more special interests can slip in harmful provisions.
She ends with a gratuitously nice smile towards her colleagues: "None of this is a critique on lawmakers who dial for dollars-- they don’t want to be doing it in the first place. But to change this system, we must push hard to change the corrupting role of money in politics. And yes, those forces exist among all parties." Actually, some of them do want to do it and actually love it. A crooked conservative like Josh Gottheimer has $6,397,771 in his campaign war chest. I think that's more than anyone other than Adam Schiff $6,794,307) and Raja Krishnamoorthi ($6,349,992), each of whom is saving up for a Senate campaign.Pelosi and Hoyer and the DCCC keep the freshmen out of their hair-=- and away from policy-- by encouraging them, to put it mildly-- to spend all their time dialing for dollars. The process turns dialers more conservative and more sympathetic to rich people and it doesn't give them time to work on issues the way AOC describes herself doing. Look at some of the other high-raising freshmen. Ever hear of any of these actually doing anything to merit being in Congress? Of course not; they're on the phone all day begging rich people for contributions... as are virtually all of their colleagues.
Chrissy Houlahan (PA)- $1,841,041Elissa Slotkin (MI)- $1,729,528Mikie Sherrill (NJ)- $1,683,939Max Rose (NY)- $1,666,201Haley Stevens (MI)- $1,608,391Harley Rouda (CA)- $1,530,320Antonio Delgado (NY)- $1,525,203