Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) pinned President Joe Biden’s dropping poll numbers on his neglect of issues relevant to young Americans.
As The Daily Wire recently reported, Biden’s popularity has plummeted over and over again. In February, for instance, a mere 41% of respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos poll approved of Biden, while 56% disapproved. Broken down by political affiliation, only 14% of Republicans approved, 34% of Independents approved, and 71% of Democrats approved.
In comments made to Fox Business on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that Biden ought to take more aggressive actions to forward his agenda.
“I think we have to ask ourselves: What, realistically, are we accomplishing as a team and as a collective between our families? And I think that the president has an extraordinary amount of options at his disposal that he has not yet exercised, and his ability to do that is going to be critical,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I will say right now, folks may think that these are kind of independent voters that are contributing to his polling and whatnot.”
The “Squad” member also pressed Biden to cancel student loan debt of up to $50,000 per borrower — a move he has not yet attempted.
“It’s actually young people who have not really been served,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And their priorities were in BBB, which Sen. Manchin has essentially stalled. And yet, you know, student loan debt and significant forgiveness of student loans, what the president can do to serve them.”
Ocasio-Cortez claimed that “it actually doesn’t take an act of Congress to forgive student loan debt.”
Beyond her interview with Fox Business, Ocasio-Cortez has sounded the alarm about the Democratic Party’s potential to not only lose independent voters, but also to lose its own base.
In a discussion with New York Magazine, the lawmaker said that “senior members of Congress, who have been around in different political times” want to work in a “buddy-buddy and backslapping” political system where “we’ll cut a deal and go into a room with some bourbon and some smoke and you’ll come out and work something out.”
“I think there’s a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that,” she claimed. “We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters. This is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, who are feeling that they worked overtime to get this president elected and aren’t necessarily being seen.”
In response, Ocasio-Cortez wants Biden to take more aggressive executive actions.
“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”