Within six hours, according to C-SPAN's Jeremy Art, it became the most retweeted post ever sent by the network. Within the tweet's first 24 hours, it has been retweeted more than 95,000 times and has more than 220,000 likes.
The video itself, which runs just short of 10 minutes, has been viewed almost 12 million times, which, again according to Art, makes it the sixth most-watched C-SPAN video ever. And it is the most-watched C-SPAN House clip ever, although it posted just 24 hours ago.
Ocasio-Cortez's take-down of Yoho for sexism after he called her a "f**king bitch" following the encounter, according to a reporter from The Hill, clearly struck a chord.
This is not an accident or an anomaly. Ocasio-Cortez, despite being in her first term, has the most Twitter followers (7.8 million) of any member of the House. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has 4.9 million followers; House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has 924,500.) Ocasio-Cortez has 1.4 million followers on Facebook. (She said in 2019 that she had stopped personally posting on the site.) She has 5.2 million followers on Instagram. Hell, she's on "Animal Crossing!"
Those numbers are mind-boggling. Especially when you consider that 25 months ago, very few people outside of the Queens and Bronx district she was running to represent had ever even heard her name.
It's no exaggeration to say that, aside from former President Barack Obama (120.8 million Twitter followers), there is no current member of the Democratic Party with more ability to influence the national conversation than AOC. Not even Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee (7.2 million Twitter followers). Not Pelosi. Not Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (2.4 million).
Now, influencing the national conversation isn't the same thing as being able to dictate the legislative agenda of the House or the Senate. Pelosi, who has at times bristled at talk of AOC's outsized influence, has repeatedly made that point in interviews.
"All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world," Pelosi told The New York Times' Maureen Dowd in July 2019 of Ocasio-Cortez and the three other members of the so-called "Squad." "But they didn't have any following. They're four people and that's how many votes they got."
A few months prior, Pelosi had been even more blunt about AOC and the Squad. "While there are people who have a large number of Twitter followers, what's important is that we have large numbers of votes on the floor of the House," she told USA Today.
While Pelosi is technically right -- the Speaker has oodles more ability to impact what becomes a law than AOC -- she is also misunderestimating (ahem) the power that AOC's social media might carries.
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It has become de rigeur these days to insist that "Twitter isn't real life." (I have said it
