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Nate Silver: Republicans Hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Because of Her Race, Gender

Nate Silver / Getty
December 12, 2018

FiveThirtyEight editor in chief Nate Silver said Tuesday that Republicans do not like Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  (D., N.Y.) because she is Latina and female.

CNN political analyst Joshua Green noted on Twitter that as he was attending a Republican gathering at the Trump International Hotel, the politician being talked about most "wasn't Trump, Pelosi or Schumer," but Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist who in November became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress

"There are lots of reasons Ocasio-Cortez drives certain Republicans crazy, foremost among them her race and gender," Silver responded.

"But it's also that she's quintessentially a New Yorker and DC political culture is formal and prudish when NYC mostly isn't those things," he continued. "Put differently, New Yorkers are very good at trolling, and Washington has extreme troll-vulnerability. It's always made for a mismatch but more pronounced now that we're in the Golden Age of Trolling. We may need to move the capital back to Philly to keep it a fair fight."

The polling guru's tweet comes after Ocasio-Cortez threatened to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. on Friday after the president's son posted an anti-Ocasio-Cortez meme on Instagram.

"Please, keep it coming Jr. – it's definitely a 'very, very large brain' idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month. Have fun!" she tweeted at Trump. After receiving criticism, Ocasio-Cortez later insisted in a second tweet that she was not actually threatening a subpoena.