AOC says 'stakes are too high' to not support Biden as Democratic nominee

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told "The View" on Wednesday that it's "really important" for Democrats to rally behind former Vice President Joe Biden in November as the "stakes are too high" with President Trump up for reelection.

Her interview came a day after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., endorsed Biden. Ocasio-Cortez previously criticized Biden for not being progressive enough and threw her weight behind Sanders, perhaps the most progressive major candidate, during the primaries.

"View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked: "Are you going to be able to do the same thing given the fact that everyone's initial thought is to get you-know-who out of the White House and get some semblance of intelligence back in. Do you think it's time to have a conversation with Joe?"

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"Yeah, absolutely," Ocasio-Cortez replied. "I think right now just the stakes are too high when it comes to another four years of Trump. My community especially has been so impacted and for a lot of communities this is an issue of life and death."

She added: "We've had kids in cages, we've had a pandemic response that happened way too late that has cost us lives. We have people that don't have access to critical care that they need. I think it's really important that we rally behind our Democratic nominee in November."

"View" co-host Joy Behar followed up with a question about people potentially voting for a third-party candidate, a reference to Sanders supporters who bristled at the idea of voting for Biden.

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"That would be a catastrophe in my opinion," she said. "What do you say to those people?" She also asked whether Biden did enough on health care and student debt forgiveness to win over Sanders supporters.

Ocasio-Cortez suggested Biden didn't do enough on health care but she was optimistic about achieving unity.

"I think what's really important is that we do realize that at the end of the day, one of these two candidates are going to be elected president of the United States. It's either going to be Joe Biden or it's going to be Donald Trump. And I think it's important to communicate some empathy. I know for a lot of people, this was not the outcome that they may have wanted and this was not the choice that they wanted to make," she said.

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"What I also think is really important is that the way to, I think, move in a unifying direction — as I said before is that unity isn't a feeling, it's a process. And I think that Biden can go further. I think that it's — it's not necessarily enough, lowering Medicare to 60 by five years, is still more conservative than what Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016," she added.

"Hillary was talking about lowering it to 50 four years ago, and so I think that there's certainly room. I think that there's going to be room on issues like immigration, Puerto Rico, health care, climate change, and I think that it's healthy to do that, and I think what we shouldn't do is recreate this dynamic where we are kind of finger-wagging and nagging people into voting because it's not a way of generating enthusiasm.

"I think one thing that we can do is improve the policies that we have as a party, to tell young people, to tell all sorts of people, 'We see you and we have a plan for you, and we're going to create hope for all sorts of communities in the United States.'"