Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the 29-year-old socialist who became a media darling over the summer after beating a 10-term New York incumbent in the Democratic primary — is headed to the U.S. House of Representatives with a resounding victory in Tuesday's general election, Yahoo News reported.
Ocasio-Cortez easily won New York’s 14th Congressional District over Republican Anthony Pappas with nearly 79 percent of the vote, the New York Times reported. She's the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Yahoo News said.
Pappas was a longshot to begin with, but Yahoo News said he lost local Republican support in late October after admitting his wife had accused him of domestic violence and had taken out a restraining order.
Ocasio-Cortez ran on a Democratic socialist platform that includes government-funded college, health care, and employment, not to mention abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Amid her campaign — which she filled with embarrassing gaffes and a glaring lack of governmental knowledge — she consistently failed to demonstrate how her socialist agenda would be funded.
She also said she would like to abolish the electoral college, calling it “a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic,” as well as "pack the Supreme Court" — presumably with progressive justices — and fight climate change like America and its allies fought Nazi Germany.
And despite Democrats like U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey telling The Hill that Ocasio-Cortez "doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about," Democrats in general actually view socialism more positively than capitalism, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Dave Urbanski
Sr. Editor, News