The thing is, a brown female candidate needs a ridiculously successful campaign to win for now. It’s not impossible at all. AOC may very well be the one who gets people out to vote. But she’ll also mobilize conservative voters to go vote for their guy, because she’s been such a boogeyman in their media, she’s literally seen as the devil by now. Trump antics aside, I don’t think she’d win 2028, but she may win 2032 or 2036 provided the pendulum* swings back by then. Of course if enough people are pissed off by Trump, things change and she may actually have a shot in 2028 - by being part of the force pulling the pendulum back.

Of course, the reason democrats don’t want her to win has nothing to do with her being female or even her being controversial with conservatives, she’s just too far left for them.

* It’s been said that politics swings on a pendulum and it’s so true it’s not even funny. Especially in the US because of how polarized it is. After Bush, people wanted something different. Obama was a neoliberal so not even that left-wing all things considered, but he was far more progressive than anyone else in recent years**. More importantly, he was black, and this was an important milestone as far as racial equality is concerned. But here’s the problem: People have inertia. You go too far in one direction, the pendulum pulls back. And it pulled back hard. In the last few years leading up to the 2016, racism started getting more and more rampant online. Same for all other sorts of bigotry. “SJW” became an insult. People were openly saying that black people are only getting shot by police because they’re all criminals. Obama was to blame for everything wrong with the country. That’s why Trump 2016 happened. Not because the Clinton campaign was weak (which it was - she was legitimately a better choice for president than Trump, but she was also boring and uninspiring, plus her husband is just as likely a kiddy diddler as Trump, except somehow with Trump it doesn’t matter). It was because of the sheer hatred boiling in a whole lot of Americans. Hatred against black people, against women, against sexual minorities. For things to get better again, the pendulum needs to swing back in the other direction. This means enough people being disillusioned enough with neoliberalism and conservatism that a sufficiently progressive candidate can destroy the establishment in the democratic primary and for democrats as a whole to embrace a new strategy, around new people.

** Yeah, let’s be honest, Obama was a war criminal just as much as Bush. He had other redeeming qualities, but this was not one. While Bush’s admin created the war on terror out of thin air (yay WMDs), the Obama admin accelerated the pace of drone strikes. This is something Trump was able to use as ammo against the dems. Dems are war criminals, vote for me, I’ll bring the troops home and stop bombing the middle east. What did he do? Well he didn’t stop bombing the middle east for sure, he kept on accelerating the pace of drone strikes just like Obama. Who cared? Nobody who voted for him. They only cared about it when Obama did it, and that Clinton was going to continue doing it. Same tactic was used last election cycle with Israel. Trump had NO intention of stopping supplying Israel with weapons. But a lot of people ate it up and didn’t vote for Harris. Again, was Harris a perfect candidate? No. Was she a great candidate? Not really. But would she have been a million times better domestically than Trump? Absolutely. But the narrative was shifted to focus only in the one area where she was nearly as bad as Trump. Not worse, just almost as bad. Not Gaza beach resort bad, but “Israel has a right to exist so we’ll keep giving them weapons to genocide the Palestinians” bad. This got a lot of potential voters to stay home. And all the people who said don’t vote for Harris, she’s a genocide enabler? Well pretty much none of them care about Trump being a genocide enabler, and they literally don’t care that Trump’s starting a SECOND genocide. So this is where we are right now: Conservatives can do no wrong. Trump can do no wrong, he’ll literally be praised as a god, no matter what he does. Genocide 65 million people on American soil? Hero. Crash the American economy? Literal god. That’s just how far right the pendulum is. But the harder right it goes, the harder left it’ll have to swing back eventually. I just hope it’s soon, because millions of lives are at stake. And when it does go all the way left, AOC is about the best candidate that the dems have right now.

Right now my biggest hope for the pendulum swinging back left is Mamdani. If he can actually win the election, deliver on his promises, and noticeably improve the living conditions of New Yorkers - this is the left’s best fighting chance right now. To build momentum out of it, news of improvements need to be broadcast everywhere in the US. It’ll take a whole lot of propaganda - and by propaganda I mean people just seeing the truth that’s being hidden from them by their existing propaganda networks. If Mamdani is successful and momentum is built, AOC has a real winning chance. Why Mamdani? Because he’s the most high profile socialist with a chance to do something real right now. In one of the most high profile cities, with a population of millions… that is being used by the right to criticize the left (fully ignoring that the problems in NYC are damn near all caused by capitalism).