(CNN) To warm up the crowd before President Donald Trump took the stage for a campaign rally in Michigan on Thursday night, his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., laid into the proposed "Green New Deal" as typical of the pie-in-the-sky, price-is-no-concern vision Democrats have for the future of the country.

AOC, in case you have been hiding under a pile of coats for the past year or so, is Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. And the crowd's reaction on Thursday confirms something that's become increasingly clear over these past few months: AOC is the new Republican bogeyman (or bogeywoman) of choice.

What do I mean? Well, remember when you were a kid and your parents would scare you into staying in your bed by telling you that if you got up again the bogeyman would get you? (OK, maybe that was just me. But you get the idea.) A bogeyman is a thing that goes bump in the night, the goblin underneath your bed, the Headless Horseman to your Ichabod Crane taking a walk on a lonely dirt road.

In politics, a bogeyman is used to scare people too. To scare them into giving money, to turn out and vote, to stay involved in the political process -- for fear that, if they don't, the bogeyman (or woman) will seize power and make their lives miserable. Republicans have used a number of Democratic bogeymen over the years, from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy to Bill and Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. The key for a successful Democratic bogeyman is that (a) the person is well-known to the GOP base and (b) the person makes Republicans angry or scared or ideally both.

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