Donald Trump supporters surprisingly revealed how popular Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is actually very similar to the new president-elect.
Ocasio-Cortez, 35, reached out to her supporters on Instagram Sunday, asking if any of her followers had voted for both her and 78-year-old Trump and why.
‘This is not a place of judgment. I’m not gonna like put your stuff on blast or anything like that or dunk on it… I actually want to learn from you,’ she said.
She appeared genuinely surprised by the number of answers she got in response to the question, and posted them to her followers.
Some of followers admitted they voted for Trump because they believed that he actually cared about the working class and would bring change to the country as an anti-establishment figure.
‘I feel like Trump and you are both real,’ wrote one follower simply.
‘I feel that you both are outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less establishment,’ wrote another one of her followers.
‘Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie,’ wrote another. I don’t trust either party establishment politicians.’
Trump earned 33 percent of voters in Ocasio-Cortez’s district, a shocking jump of eleven points from the 2020 presidential election.
Ocasio-Cortez noted that part of Trump’s success in New York was that he was holding campaign rallies in the state. Harris and Democrats, she explained, were only campaigning in swing states.
‘He had an actively presidential campaign here, that is one piece of it,’ she said.
Other followers of Ocasio-Cortez said they voted for Trump because they trusted him to end the war in Gaza or were horribly disappointed with the Biden administration’s performance on the economy.
‘He speaks of war as something that is bad,’ one voter said about Trump. ‘Democrats became the party that supports war.’
When some of followers protested the information she was sharing, Ocasio-Cortez indicated that the information was exasperating, but necessary.
‘Sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt!’ she said. ‘Even if it makes you want to barf.
Ocasio-Cortez said the results were proof that political activists should spend time knocking on doors and speaking on the phones with voters, to learn about their concerns instead of just spending time on social media.
She expressed surprise that family members of undocumented people were voting for Trump because of disillusion with the Democratic party.
‘Another area that I thought was really interesting was hearing a lot from undocumented people,’ she said. ‘And more importantly, families of undocumented people who do vote saying that there’s been no relief from Democrats or anybody else on immigration path to citizenship for 10, 20, 30 years.’
She said that Democrats lack of action and the influx of asylum seekers had generated a lot of ‘resentment.’
‘I don’t think a lot of undocumented people realize that Trump views them as criminals too,’ she said, although she admitted that ‘a lot of people don’t see it that way.’
Other supporters said they supported Trump, ‘because he reached out to Muslims.’
Ocasio-Cortez concluded that most people who got their news on social media ended up supporting Trump while those who read about the news in newspapers were more left-leaning.