Newly single AOC reveals if being a Republican is a dating dealbreaker

AOC got asked a fairly harmless question about her love life and the answer somehow became a news story, which tells you more about the state of political media than it does about her dating pool. But it's worth pausing on the reflex anyway, because it's revealing. For a party that spent the last decade lecturing the country about tolerance, openness, and not judging people by their tribe, an awful lot of its most prominent voices seem perfectly comfortable saying, out loud, that half the country is romantically off-limits.

Maybe she didn't mean it that way. Maybe it was a joke, a soundbite, a nothing moment blown up because her name draws clicks. Fine. But the fact that this is even a normal thing to ask a sitting member of Congress, and that the answer is treated as some kind of political litmus test, says something about how tribal our culture has gotten. Dating a Republican used to be a Thanksgiving joke. Now it's a purity test with a headline attached.

We'd just point out the double standard, because it's obvious. If a Republican said he'd never date a Democrat, that would be Exhibit A in a thousand op-eds about closed-mindedness and the danger of political sorting. When it comes from the left's favorite congresswoman, it's a cute lifestyle piece. Politics shouldn't decide who you love, and it definitely shouldn't decide who counts as a story.