The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●NC-03: Expect plenty more like this over the next million years: a Republican ad that tries to turn New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into a scary socialist bogeyman (bogeywoman?). Michele Nix, a vice-chair of the North Carolina GOP and one of 17 Republicans desperately trying to distinguish themselves in the special election primary for the state's 3rd Congressional District, has launched a spot in which she snipes that AOC "has the media" and "has the followers," but "bless her heart, she has some terrible ideas."
For those of you unfamiliar, "bless your heart" is ordinarily a passive-aggressive Southern insult designed to cloak contempt beneath a veneer of gentility. It's goofy to use here, though, because Nix is open in her hostility: "Guaranteeing government jobs for some, while killing small-town jobs for others" is what Ocasio-Cortez's platform amounts to, she gripes. "Her 'green deal' is a bad deal for North Carolina." Nix concludes, "I'll stand up to socialism. Congress needs a good strong dose of conservative, mature common sense"—which sounds like a jab at the 29-year-old congresswoman's age.
This isn't the first GOP advertisement this year to reference AOC—Republican D. Raja, who's running in an April 2 special election for the Pennsylvania state Senate, splashed her photo on-screen alongside those of Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders—but it's the first we've seen that makes her the centerpiece. We'll soon see if it works—and whether Nix's rivals try to imitate her.