This past year has, hopefully, been full of lessons for the Democratic Party. While Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum have provided blueprints for how to turn out voters in red states, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also shown an important skill for before and after an election: how to not take the bait from extremely online, bad-faith trolls.

Earlier this year, for example, Charlie Kirk, a millennial famous for having the same opinions as wealthy retirees, demanded that Ocasio-Cortez debate him about socialism. He went so far as to offer a charity donation in exchange, and when she still didn't consent, he started railing that she was taking money from worthy causes. Ocasio-Cortez likened it to cat-calling. And she wasn't wrong. Kirk would just use whatever platform she gave him for attention and publicity, which is what he needs to survive/make a paycheck.

Since she gives conservatives so little to work with, they're stuck trying either to make her popular ideas sound scary or to invent scandal. Like when she said, accurately, that Election Day should be a national holiday.

Ocasio-Cortez is also big on talking directly to followers via live streams on Instagram, and this has given her critics their newest scrap to froth over. During one of these streams, she stressed the importance of Democrats taking back control of the Senate, the House, and the White House, which in her rush she referred to as "the three chambers of Congress." It's the verbal equivalent of a typo: an obvious slip-up in an unscripted, unrehearsed moment, and one that doesn't even muddy the meaning of what Ocasio-Cortez was saying.

It's not much. But her critics are desperate for something. So they ran with it, unironically declaring it was evidence that she's mentally unfit for office and claiming (accurately and with no self-awareness) that the Electoral College was meant to keep popular figures like her out of power.

We can probably expect to hear this talking point now for as long as Ocasio-Cortez stays in the public eye. It's the same strategy Obama's critics used when he said "all 57 states" instead of "all 57 states and territories." In this case, it should be clear to anyone that Ocasio-Cortez wasn't talking about the three branches of federal government since voters don't choose who sits on the damn Supreme Court.

There's not necessarily one right way to handle these attacks, but Ocasio-Cortez understands that it doesn't do any good to engage trolls on the terms they're trying to establish. Instead of falling for obvious responses, she comes back to her central messages. Yes, it's deflection. But that's because there's nothing of substance to engage with. She's dealing with professional trolls, and dealing with them earnestly is exactly what they want.