Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) turned to Instagram to hear from split-ticket voters following last week’s election. She posted a question box on her story, asking, “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why.”
She received a wide range of responses from her 8.1 million followers and others, with reasons spanning from a shared perception of Trump and Ocasio-Cortez’s “care for the working class” to concerns about the war in Gaza.
“I’m LISTENING,” she wrote. “Sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt! Even if it makes you want to barf.”
“I support you and did this. Felt like I didn’t have a choice after Biden’s administration,” one user said.
“You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways,” another wrote.
“This is why I say that we should be signing up to knock on doors and be on the phones,” Ocasio-Cortez said in another story in response to someone who stated that: “If you’re only tuning in to [mass media], you will think that most people fall along this spectrum, and a lot of people don’t.”
Ocasio-Cortez emphasized that door knocking and phone banking aren’t “junior tasks” for politicians to outgrow. She also posted stories asking where left-leaning and Trump-supporting voters get their news, sharing several responses.
For just the second time in U.S. history, a major political party put forward a woman as its presidential nominee, and once again, she was not elected. Democrat Kamala Harris’s defeat to Republican Donald Trump on Tuesday mirrored Hillary Clinton’s loss to him in 2016.
Multiple factors played into Harris’s outcome, with an Edison Research exit poll highlighting that economic worries and financial struggles were key influences for many voters.
Thirteen of the 193 United Nations member states are led by women, with the number of female leaders worldwide steadily rising since 1990. In the U.S., women make up 51% of the population, and people of color account for 42%, yet women still lag behind men in pay, government roles, and leadership positions.
