… In the election aftermath, Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) famously sparred over the party’s direction. Note that Spanberger outperformed Joe Biden in her District by just 1 percentage point, while Ocasio-Cortez ran 1.7 points behind the president. …
This is neither to praise, nor condemn, either congresswoman, nor to suggest Biden determined the number of votes each got. It is to argue that, despite all the effort and expense to which each went, attempting to cultivate their own, quite different, personal brands, the underlying partisan disposition of voters led Biden and Ocasio-Cortez to do about equally well in New York’s 14th District, while Biden and Spanberger also matched each other closely in Virginia’s 7th.
In other words, the party brand proved far more important than the personal brand each worked so diligently to develop. CONTINUED
Mark Mellman (Mellman Group), The Hill