Ocasio-Cortez: ‘In any other country Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has highlighted the ideological differences between herself and former Vice President Joe Biden, telling New York magazine that she and the presidential candidate would not be members of the same political party in other countries.

“In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are,” Ocasio-Cortez told the publication in a profile piece on her published on Monday.

She added that she thought the Democratic Party is overly deferent to its most conservative members.

“For so long, when I first got in, people were like, ‘Oh, are you going to basically be a tea party of the left?’ And what people don’t realize is that there is a tea party of the left, but it’s on the right edges, the most conservative parts of the Democratic Party,” she said.

“So the Democratic Party has a role to play in this problem, and it’s like we’re not allowed to talk about it. We’re not allowed to talk about anything wrong the Democratic Party does,” she added.

The New York representative also said she believed the Congressional Progressive Caucus should abandon its practice of not requiring applications, unlike other caucuses within the party. 

“They let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive. There’s no standard,” she told the publication.

Ocasio-Cortez, who has joined fellow progressive freshman Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in his bid for the Democratic nomination for president, has previously expressed doubts about Biden’s viability as a candidate in the general election.

“If you pick the perfect candidate like Joe Biden to win that guy in the diner, the cost will make you lose because you will depress turnout as well,” she told Vogue in June. “And that’s exactly what happened to 2016. We picked the logically fitting candidate, but that candidate did not inspire the turnout that we needed.”

Biden, meanwhile, said in December that Ocasio-Cortez, who triumphed in a 2018 primary over longtime incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), was not an accurate measure of the direction of the party.

“You all thought that what happened was the party moved extremely to the left after Hillary. AOC was a new party, She’s a bright, wonderful person. But where’s the party?” Biden said in a December interview with Axios’s Mike Allen.