Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) warned against nominating “far-left” Democrats like socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this week, saying that candidates like her “have not been in a place where the math is unforgiving to” their political views.
McCaskill made the remarks while appearing on a Thursday podcast with The New York Times where she blamed her loss on “irritating” pro-abortion activists and also warned against nominating far-left Democrats.
“What’s her name, [the one] everybody’s fascinated with from New York?” McCaskill asked. “I hope she listens to people who defeated Republicans because it’s the people who defeated Republicans in this election that we need to be emulating. Not the people who defeated Democrats in primaries” in deep blue districts.
“They’re so passionate about their beliefs they feel if everyone would just be more pure, more people would come to the cause, and many of them have not been in a place where the math is unforgiving to that concept,” McCaskill continued. “And so, I just want to make sure that we don’t make a mistake and go so far to the left in nominating a candidate that we lose all those white working-class voters that have been a huge part of our party decades ago.”
McCaskill cautioned that if Democrats go too far to the left, they will not be successful in 2020, warning that far-left Democrats “turn off people and make election victories impossible.”
“We have an opportunity in 2020 as long as we don’t go so far-left off the side of the earth that we alienate those people that, when they hear the word ‘free college,’ they hear that phrase, they think, ‘Oh, look, they’re giving away something to other people besides me again. I had to earn mine. Why aren’t they having to earn theirs?'” McCaskill warned. “That thing is real. Sometimes, going too far, we turn off people and make election victories impossible.”
McCaskill then offered an example, recalling a moment at a gas station after President Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
“There was a good ‘ole boy over by the gas pumps, and he said, ‘Hey you, hey you,’ which in Missouri is ‘Senator, Senator,'” McCaskill explained. “So I walked over and I said, ‘What can I do for you, sir?’ and he started shaking his finger in my face.”
“He said, ‘I voted for you before and I may vote for you again, but I want you to know why I didn’t vote for her,’ Hillary Clinton,” McCaskill continued. “‘I knew she cared about women, I knew she cared about Muslims, I knew she cared about Mexicans, I knew she cared about homosexuals, I knew she really cared a lot about black people, but I was pretty sure she didn’t give a s**t about me.'”