This week, AOC said something that reflected a brainworm that’s become common on the far left (there’s an evergreen sentence if there ever was one!). Speaking at a fundraiser, she said this of Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate race in Michigan:
My first thought was: “She probably misspoke. She was riffing, she got out over her skis — she can’t really think that anybody can win anywhere? I mean: Could Dennis Kucinich win Mississippi? Could David Duke win Harlem? She probably just strayed from her prepared remarks, and her language got a tad sloppy.”
And then I read the next line:
Well okay! I was trying to give her a pass, but her notes apparently said something along the lines of “Repeat obviously incorrect point for emphasis.”
I don’t know why people struggle to understand the Abdul El-Sayed situation. He’s a weak candidate; he’s running a few points behind what you’d expect from a dime-a-dozen Democrat grown from pickle brine seeded with yeast. He’ll probably still win, because in this cycle, the red states are purple and the purple states are blue — Michigan currently has about a nine point Democratic lean. Winning a state that a Democrat should win by nine by, say, three — which is where El-Sayed is now — is not a good performance. A cynic might argue that AOC is framing things so that if El-Sayed stumbles over the line in Michigan, she can cite that as evidence that she’s a viable presidential candidate. I would never argue that, but a cynic might.
It’s strange to watch people struggle with the concept that a poor candidate can still win in a favorable environment. So, allow me to put it this way: Abdul El-Sayed is Trent Dilfer. Dilfer is the ex-NFL quarterback who won a Super Bowl in 2001 with the Baltimore Ravens despite being mediocre at best. His team was great — the Ravens featured a dominant defense led by Ray Lewis, a player so good that we mostly don’t talk about his proximity to a brutal double whoopsie-doodle. The fact that the Ravens won in spite of Dilfer, not because of him, is easily grasped by football fans, a demographic mostly known for beer consumption and a que sera sera attitude towards head injuries.
If anything, the comparison is unfair to Dilfer, who — I hasten to point out — is 100 times better at football than I am at anything. It’s obviously fucked up that a guy who couldn’t crack the starting lineup of his high school JV squad (me) can look at Dilfer’s career 70.2 passer rating and say “he wasn’t that good.” But it’s true that Dilfer specialized in reliability and being a good locker room guy, which unfortunately for him are euphemisms for “does not football well”. It’s also true that Dilfer is all over various “worst quarterback to win a Super Bowl” lists — in fact, it’s the only NFL category he dominates.
El-Sayed — like Dilfer — is a weak performer who happens to be in a favorable circumstance. If he wins, all it will prove is that he wasn’t quite terrible enough to bungle a task that was achievable for anyone competent. But it obviously doesn’t follow that if his campaign wins, it should be studied and copied so that other candidates can catch that “Bad but not historically bad” lightning in a bottle.
After the Ravens’ Super Bowl win, the league did not collectively say “That proves that Trent Dilfer can win a Super Bowl anywhere!” Even Dilfer’s own team did not conclude that — the Ravens let him go, he got a job as a backup in Seattle, and 23 quarterbacks that year put up a passer rating higher than Dilfer’s career average. If the Patriots had been one of the teams trying to catch the big D, he would have blocked a rookie named Tom Brady, which would have greatly altered the history of pro football and of American women’s sex dreams.
I don’t know how the crowd responded to AOC’s theory. I doubt anyone yelled “Well that obviously isn’t true” — it takes a lot of balls to heckle a fundraiser. But it is clearly not true that scraping out a narrow victory when you should have won easily validates your methods. Leftists push the idea that America is a secretly a far left country because they have to — to admit otherwise would be to admit that their views are a liability. But it’s silly to pretend not to understand a dynamic that football fans have no trouble grasping right away.
How to Measure the “Secret Leftist Majority” Theory
A key part of the DSA narrative is that the masses yearn for far-left candidates, but the Democratic establishment denies them those candidates. To me, this is an insane theory, along the lines of “dogs can talk but only want to talk about the ‘90s sitcom
As someone who knows how to run a pick six, I enjoyed this
I can only imagine the deep sigh from El-Sayed's people when they saw that quote. I'm going to give AOC the benefit of the doubt and assume her point was that a quasi-DSA candidate winning in a purple state shows the power of progressive politics. But I guarantee you, most Michiganders--fully aware that New Yorkers view Michigan as part of a vast, undifferentiated wasteland called the "Midwest"--will understand that quote as "if Abdul can get those racist hicks to put him in the Senate, the sky's the limit!"