During a livestream with the left-wing group Protect the Vote Arizona, Ocasio-Cortez argued that GOP strongholds are not genuinely conservative jurisdictions but artificially “red” because of restrictions on the ballot. According to the Daily Caller, she claimed, “One thing that a lot of people do know, in the voting rights space, is that a lot of red states aren’t just necessarily red or Republican, they are voter suppressed. And so, it’s less that there are more Republicans than there are Democrats, and it’s more that the rights, the voting rights of communities that have historically voted for Democrats have been slowly eroded over time and it’s been an uneven playing field,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed in a livestream with Protect the Vote Arizona.
She went on to frame the issue explicitly through the lens of identity politics, insisting that Hispanic voters in particular are being targeted. “And so, for our community, it’s more important than ever, the role that Latinos play in elections is getting bigger and more decisive, and it is only going to become more decisive as time goes on,” she said, casting Latinos as a bloc whose political power is being deliberately constrained.
May 09, 2026
Ocasio-Cortez further asserted that Latinos have a special duty to defend not only their own access to the ballot but that of other favored constituencies on the left. “And so we have a responsibility to protect our role in this democracy, to protect the roles and rights of others in our democracy, and that’s how we care for one another, is making sure that we protect our voting rights and that we protect our say, especially in a moment like this. What is encouraging about it, is that, if we weren’t powerful, they wouldn’t be trying to do this.”
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Her reference to “they” was clearly aimed at Republicans, whom she routinely portrays as hostile to minority participation in elections. Yet GOP lawmakers and voters have consistently argued that their concern is not with lawful citizens casting ballots, but with preventing noncitizens and other ineligible individuals from diluting the votes of Americans through fraud or lax verification.
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Republicans have especially highlighted the risk that illegal migrants — many of whom come from Latin America — could end up on voter rolls in jurisdictions with weak safeguards, a prospect that undermines the basic principle that only citizens should decide the country’s political future. Calling such protections “voter suppression” is no more accurate than claiming that Mexico is suppressing American voters by refusing to let U.S. citizens participate in its presidential elections.
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The broader data on participation also undercuts the narrative of a systematically silenced electorate. The 2020 and 2024 presidential contests were among the highest-turnout elections in more than a century, suggesting that Americans are hardly being locked out of the democratic process on a mass scale.
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Pew Research Center, which is no conservative outfit, has documented just how robust recent participation has been. “The 66% turnout rate in 2020 was the highest since 1908, and 2024’s rate of 64% was the second highest, tied with 1960. The last two midterm elections also featured unusually high turnout levels, with rates not seen since the 1960s,” writes Pew.
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Pew’s analysis also shows that the Republican Party, far from trying to shrink the electorate, has been successfully mobilizing voters who previously stayed home. Pew notes that the 2024 Trump campaign likely targeted voters who did not show up to the polls in 2020, and those infrequent voters favored President Donald Trump over former Vice President Kamala Harris by a margin of 54%-42%.
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The data further reveal that nonvoters in 2020 leaned toward former President Joe Biden over Trump, a reminder that low turnout has not always benefited Republicans. Americans who did not vote in 2018, 2020, and 2022 leaned Republican, according to Pew, indicating that when these citizens are engaged, they often break to the right — a reality that undercuts the left’s insistence that higher turnout automatically favors Democrats.
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Progressives have long clung to the belief that a vast, untapped left-wing majority is waiting to be awakened if only “barriers” to voting are removed. Semafor’s David Weigel notes that independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ upset win in the 2016 Michigan Democratic presidential primary “inspired some hallucinations about a huge left wing electorate out there for the taking.”
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Reality has not been kind to that fantasy, even when turnout surges. But, says Weigel, “Four years later, turnout was higher, [Sanders] almost matched his 2016 numbers, and he lost every [Michigan] county to Biden.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s latest claims fit neatly into a broader progressive strategy: delegitimize Republican victories by blaming them on “suppression,” while ignoring evidence that Americans are voting in record numbers and that many new or infrequent voters are choosing conservative candidates. As Democrats continue to lose ground with working-class and Hispanic voters, especially in states they once assumed would trend blue, the insistence that red states are only red because of nefarious GOP tactics looks less like a defense of democracy and more like an excuse for their own political failures.
