Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants you to know she is absolutely fed up with being called crazy.
“We must remember in a time such as this, we are not the crazy ones, New York City,” AOC shrieked to a crowd of progressives rallying for Zohran Mamdani.
“We are not the outlandish ones, New York City. They want us to think we are crazy. We are sane.”
Maybe it’s your “I’m not crazy, I’m sane” T-shirt that is making me think you might just be a little crazy.
The vast majority of voters agree.
In fact, there’s new evidence to show it.
According to a new report put out by Democrats who want the party to shed the harsh language of the extreme left, it’s AOC and Mamdani’s particular kind of crazy that is dragging them down with voters.
Through surveys and focus groups contacting hundreds of voters over a six-month period this year, the political research group known as Welcome found that the percentage of voters who say the Democratic Party is “out of touch” rose from 51% in 2013 to 70% today.
Voters aren’t manifesting this.
They say Democrats are too extreme because of a host of issues where they have embraced the far left’s positions — supporting open borders, soft crime penalties, and aggressive trans ideology.
It isn’t just your imagination.
It’s something you can measure in Congress.
As political reporter Dave Weigel wrote summarizing the “Deciding to Win” study at Semafor, in the past 11 years “the share of congressional Democratic co-sponsors of a bill to study reparations for the descendents of slaves rose from 1% to 57%.
Support for assault weapons ban legislation grew from 41% to 88%; support for giving federal prisoners full voting rights grew from 4% to 41%; and support for legislation that would wipe out state abortion limits went from two-thirds of the Democratic caucus to 98%.”
Many of these ideas seem crazy to the average voter — which is why Democrats face big challenges in finding their way back to being a majority party.
We’ve heard this type of advice before.
After the 2024 election, many Democratic partisans rushed to the cable news airwaves and oped pages of legacy media to chide the party for catering too much to the left’s views on race, gender, climate, crime and the border.
They had listened too much to the products of a monopartisan college-educated cohort of young progressives and wealthy aging coastal elites, not the middle- and working-class who are the core of the country.
When you’re hemorrhaging support among those non-college white, black, and Hispanic voters you could once count on to vote Democrat, you’d think they’d tack back toward the middle — at least rhetorically.
Democrat Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania warned last month that Democrats have “forgotten why we lost in 2024.”
“Some people think now we have to double down on those things or we must become more progressive or more extreme,” Fetterman told CNN.
“That’s absolutely not true.”
But the calls for moderation fell on deaf ears.
Instead, Democrats are listening to their worst instincts.
If those worst instincts have a face, it’s leftist podcaster Jennifer Welch, who demands the party double down on the most extreme rhetoric — or else.
“Listen up, Democratic establishment,” Welch said.
“You can either jump on board with this s–t, or we’re coming after you in the same way that we come after MAGA. Period.”
In this case, “this s–t” was an aging female No Kings protester shouting at a young conservative interviewer that she was glad campus activist Charlie Kirk was dead.
The bloodthirsty partisan rage that fuels Democrats is one reason they’re sticking behind Jay Jones in Virginia, the attorney general candidate who texted how he wished he could shoot a Republican legislative colleague in the head, and hoped his young children would die.
That type of full-octane, baying-for-death insanity isn’t rude; it isn’t beyond the pale — it’s what today’s Democratic base wants from their politicians.
If there are consequences for Jones in next week’s Virginia elections, maybe some smart Democrats will realize they’ve gone too far trying to please the fantasies of crazed wine moms and campus know-nothings.
But that still won’t solve their problems.
Because it’s not just the Democratic rhetoric that’s crazy.
It’s their free-stuff, open-border, no-cash-bail, everyone-gets-a-unicorn policies, too.
“Socialism is a wonderful idea,” wrote the great Thomas Sowell.
“It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous.”
That’s the bigger problem, for Democrats and for the country they could soon run again.
They want to make their crazy a reality.
Ben Domenech is editor at large of The Spectator and a Fox News contributor.