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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will vote for presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the November election, she reaffirmed in a video appearance on Instagram.
Speaking to rapper Fat Joe in an Instagram Live FB, +1.56% discussion Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez, who represents sections of Queens and the Bronx, was asked bluntly whom she planned to support between the general election candidates.
“In November, I’m going to be voting for Joe Biden — that’s what I’m going to be doing,” the progressive Democrat responded.
Key Words (April 15):AOC all but endorses Joe Biden for president: ‘It’s incredibly important that we support the Democratic nominee’
Fat Joe had told the highly visible Bernie Sanders backer that there were “three things you can do: You can vote for Trump, you can vote for Biden or you can not vote at all. Who you going to vote for?”
The “Lean Back” rapper asked AOC, as the congresswoman is widely known, if this was the first time she was revealing to the public what she planned to do when she filled out her ballot.
“I mean, I’ve been saying this whole time that we got to support the Democratic nominee,” she said, adding, “This is the time where I’m saying it declaratively like this.”
As for when she will make a formal endorsement, that remains unclear.
The congresswoman is in discussions with the Biden campaign, seeking areas of common ground with the former vice president in an effort to unify the party to win back the White House.
Ocasio-Cortez told Politico last week that her aides were “having conversations with Biden’s team” in order to “figure out what some of these policy conversations will [be] looking like” as the general election takes shape.
The comments came a week after Sanders, the Vermont independent, announced his endorsement of Biden during a live video discussion with the former vice president.
Biden’s campaign has been making active efforts to reach out to the progressive wing of the party, in some cases directly working with Sanders’s closest allies on the campaign, in an effort to avoid a “Never Biden” movement.
In the two weeks leading up to the democratic socialist’s announcement that he was withdrawing from the race, Biden and his allies were in quiet contact with Sanders’s team, trying to find agreement on policy in an effort to unite the party, according to the New York Times.
AOC has long been a critic of Biden, once saying that the two would be in different political parties on any other country’s political spectrum. She softened her tone as Biden began to run away with the race for the nomination.
As a guest recently on ABC’s DIS, +0.01% “The View,” Ocasio-Cortez said she was “absolutely” supporting the Democratic nominee in November, regardless of whether it was Sanders.
“For a lot of communities, this is an issue of life or death,” she said on the ABC daytime program. “We’ve had kids in cages, we’ve had a pandemic response that happened way too late, that has cost us lives, we have people that don’t have access to critical care that they need. I think it’s really important that we rally behind our Democratic nominee in November,” she said.
Of any impulse to vote for a third-party candidate among her fellow Sanders backers viewing Biden as a less than optimal choice, Ocasio-Cortez said this: “I think what’s really important is that we do realize that, at the end of the day, one of these two candidates are going to be elected president of the United States. It’s either going to be Joe Biden or it’s going to be Donald Trump.”
