House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D., Calif.) on Friday called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's (D., N.Y.) influence over her party a harbinger of President Donald Trump being re-elected.
Democratic Party primary voters polled by Business Insider were more likely to value Ocasio-Cortez's endorsement in deciding which presidential candidate than anyone except ex-presidents like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
"It goes to the core of where this Democrat Party is," McCarthy said on Fox Business. "They're no longer Democrats. This is a socialist Democratic party. Think for a moment. What [are] AOC's policies? I mean, they really are, and she calls herself a socialist Democrat. So it just shows how far left this Democrat Party has moved."
McCarthy said the coming election would be a fight between "socialism" and "freedom" and thus why he thought Trump would get four more years in the White House. Trump himself said yesterday at a social media summit at the White House that the election would be about whether the country wanted to head down the road of Venezuela.
Ocasio-Cortez recently said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) singled out and her fellow freshmen "women of color" for unfair criticism. Pelosi had recently dismissed the influence of Ocasio-Cortez and fellow left-wing Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) in a recent dust-up over a border bill.
"This is not a family fight. This is an internal war going on," McCarthy said. "You see it in every bill that they try to bring to the floor. Whatever bill comes out of committee, they have to take it further left. They have to offer more amendments to the socialists in their party, because they cannot pass anything."