Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to Instagram Wednesday to blame Vice President Kamala Harris’s election loss on “sexism and racism.”
In an evening live stream obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the “Squad” member also highlighted how much pressure Harris was under to “deliver the country from an enormous fascist threat” in just a few months of campaigning:
“I think it’s important to also state here that Kamala Harris was given an assignment that no other person in American history was given: To construct a presidential campaign in 90 to 100 days with absolutely no expectation … to that assignment,” Ocasio-Cortez said during the Instagram Live, “and have to deliver the country from an enormous fascist threat that had already been campaigning and priming the pump for essentially eight years.”
She then shifted the blame to the fact that Harris is a woman and a minority, and said she also receives racist and sexist backlash:
Misogyny is very very real in this country. As another widely known woman of color in office, you know, I knew that sexism and racism were real, but it was not until I got subjected to a national stage that I actually was shocked at how bad it is. You know, you grow up with it, but there is something about being on the receiving line or just nationally exposed to millions of eyeballs at once that you feel that fire hose and you actually understand how deeply ingrained it is.
And it is not partisan… it transcends politics. And that’s a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. That misogyny can exist in left spaces, in right spaces, in center spaces.
She then claimed that if Harris were a man, “we may have a different result today.”
Former Barack Obama adviser and CNN contributor David Axelrod voiced a similar sentiment to a post-election panel on the network.
“There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country, and anybody who thinks that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong,” he argued.
Axelrod added that while bigotry was a factor in President-elect Donald Trump’s win, his campaign was just better than Harris’s.
“I think they ran, honestly, strategically his campaign,” the commentator explained. “And I’ve said it many times: They ran a very smart campaign.”
Fox News analyst Juan Williams also said that male voters declined to support Harris because of her race and sex:
“I’m not sold on this idea that ‘Oh, it was the cost of eggs.’ I worry that it was ‘I’m not voting for this woman’ or ‘I’m not voting for this black woman,’” he told a post-election panel.
Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiment has been echoing across social media since Harris was defeated by the former president.
Majority Report co-host Emma Vigeland wrote on X that a “large part” of the vice president’s loss was due to the “misogynistic” Trump campaign:
Washington Post contributor and former ESPN sports writer Mike Wise said that racism, misogyny, sexism, xenophobia, and “global warming won”:
