A Democratic congressman from New York has blamed the “far left” for Donald Trump’s presidential victory.
Congressman Ritchie Torres, who won his incumbent seat in New York’s 15th congressional district on Tuesday with 76.6 percent of the vote, took to X (formerly Twitter) on November 6 to share his thoughts on Trump’s win.
Torres wrote: “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx.'”
He continued: “There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.”
Torres is an outspoken critic of “the squad,” a group of Democratic representatives known for holding views to the left of the party, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.
Various exit polls found a surge in support for Trump among Hispanic voters. Edison Research figures reported that Trump won 46 percent of the Hispanic vote, up from 32 percent in 2020, Reuters reported. The same poll found that 13 percent of Black voters supported Trump, up 1 percent from the previous election.
Working class voters also continued to support Trump — he won 66 percent of the working vote, outperforming Democrats despite dropping one point among this group 2020, the Edison poll found.
An NBC exit poll found that among Asian American voters, 54 percent chose Harris, while 38 percent voted for Trump. The Edison poll found that 21 percent of Jewish voters picked Trump (the same survey did not measure the Jewish vote in 2020, The Forward reported).
Squad members Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Greg Cesear, and Summer Lee all won back their incumbent seats on November 5, despite their states voting for Donald Trump overall.
However, two members of The Squad, Cory Bush and Jamaal Bowman, lost their primaries to Democratic challengers who disagreed with them on Middle Eastern policy.
Since the news of Trump’s win, progressives across the board have put forth their theories on why Kamala Harris and the Democratic party failed to mobilize voters.
Former Democrats Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders have also weighed in, blaming the lack of a presidential primary and a failure to address the concerns of working-class people respectively.
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