Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rushed forward recently to try and give an excuse for Biden’s plummeting poll numbers by pinning them on his overall neglect of issues relevant to younger Americans.
Biden’s popularity numbers have been falling drastically time and time again. Back in February, for example, a whopping 41% of people polled by an Ipsos/Reuters poll showed approval of the president, while the respondents showed a 56% disapproval rate. This information, broken down one step further, showed that only 14% of Republicans gave approval, 34% of Independents showed approval, and around 71% of all Democrats polled issued their approval.
In statements issued to Fox Business this past Friday, AOC seemed to suggest that Biden should try to be far more aggressive in his actions to try and push his own agenda.
“I think we have to ask ourselves: What, realistically, are we accomplishing as a team and as a collective between our families? And I think that the president has an extraordinary amount of options at his disposal that he has not yet exercised, and his ability to do that is going to be critical,” claimed AOC. “I will say right now, folks may think that these are kind of independent voters that are contributing to his polling and whatnot.”
The “Squad” member also tried to press on Biden the need to cancel out student loan debt of up to $50,000 per person, which as of yet has not been tried.
“It’s actually young people who have not really been served,” explained AOC. “And their priorities were in BBB, which Sen. Manchin has essentially stalled. And yet, you know, student loan debt and significant forgiveness of student loans, what the president can do to serve them.”
AOC when on to state that “it actually doesn’t take an act of Congress to forgive student loan debt.”
Outside of this interview with Fox Business, AOC has sounded the call concerning the Democratic Party’s potential to not just lose the independent voters, but to lose a large chunk of its own voter base as well.
In a segment within New York Magazine, the lawmakers stated that “senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times” want to do things in a “buddy-buddy and backslapping” political system in which “we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out”
“I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that,” she exclaimed. “We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen.”
She wants Biden to be far, far more aggressive with his power of executive action.
“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she stated. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”