Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat-New York) at a House oversight and government reform committee hearing in March at the Capitol. Photo / Graeme Sloan, for The Washington Post
Earlier this year, United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received an unlikely request.
A former colleague who once excoriated her brand of left-wing politics wanted her assistance.
The New York Democrat was happy to help.
She sent out an autumn fundraising email calling centrist candidate Abigail Spanberger “a brawler for the working class”.
It put her stamp of approval on a former congresswoman who once fumed after a disappointing 2020 election season that she didn’t want Democrats to “use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again”.
Their mutual embrace - unthinkable just a few years ago - shows the influence the democratic socialist has amassed in a party that once saw her more as hostile actor than helpful supporter.
The same early November night that Spanberger romped to victory in the Virginia governor’s race, Ocasio-Cortez squeezed her fellow democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in a tight hug after he was elected mayor of New York.
It put an exclamation point on an election season in which she was in high demand across the party spectrum.
At his victory party, she made her way from news camera to news camera, telling the establishment Democrats watching that his win - boosted by her early endorsement - had put them on notice.
“The Democratic Party cannot last much longer by denying the future,” she told CNN from the celebration in Brooklyn.
Once dismissed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a social media phenomenon with no real power on Capitol Hill, Ocasio-Cortez, 36, has become one of the most significant Democrats in a party shaken to its core by another Donald Trump victory and searching for a winning identity.
A leadership vacuum has opened the door to new standard-bearers, and a furious base is hungry for politicians who show more fight.
This dynamic has created an opportunity for Ocasio-Cortez, a rebellious outsider who has learned to play the inside game.
Seven years after catapulting onto the national scene with a seismic primary upset, Ocasio-Cortez remains a polarising figure nationally, with more Americans holding an unfavourable view of her than a favourable one, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in September.
But some things have changed.
Establishment Democrats who once shunned her are eager to work with her.
Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont), the two-time presidential candidate who is now in his 80s and unlikely to run again, is promoting her at every turn.
And she has built a massive war chest and loyal small-dollar fundraising base that rival those of anyone in the party.
Now Ocasio-Cortez is at a crossroads, facing decisions about what to do with the movement she has built and the relationships she has developed.
She is seriously weighing a Senate or presidential run in 2028, according to three people familiar with her plans, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.
The former path could pit her against Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer, while the latter would make her an entrant in what many expect to be a crowded and wide-open Democratic primary.
“I know I’m being asked about New York - that is years from now,” Ocasio-Cortez recently told reporters, referring to the possibility of a Senate run.
“I have to remind my own constituents, because they think that this election is this year.”
This portrait of her political trajectory is based on interviews with more than a dozen Democratic operatives, lawmakers and activists.
Ocasio-Cortez, who declined an interview request for this article, feels an obligation to the populist, liberal movement she has championed to have a voice in the next presidential election, according to the three people familiar with her thinking.
“I think in their most ambitious moments they say: The progressive movement, is it going to survive if there’s no one leading it in a presidential race?” one of the people said of Ocasio-Cortez and her team.
But Ocasio-Cortez would not make a symbolic run, according to a person who has spoken to her, and she does not believe she needs to be the progressive standard-bearer in the race provided another person steps up to fill that role.
“If she runs, she wants to win,” that person said.
Not all Democrats welcome the prospect of an AOC presidential run, especially so soon after Kamala Harris, whom Republicans painted as a radical San Francisco liberal, lost to Trump.
Republicans have attacked Ocasio-Cortez as an extremist for years.
Trump has insulted the Latina congresswoman - calling her “one of the ‘dumbest’ people in Congress” and suggesting she and other members of the House’s “Squad” of liberal women of colour “go back” to where they came from - while right-wing influencers have gone after her in sexist terms.
Democrats reject these attacks but some fear they’ve damaged her. Others believe the party must tack to the centre on social issues and crime to win presidential elections - not run one of its most liberal figures.
“I think the right-wing’s done such a number on her that I think she’ll have a difficult time,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, a former union leader and Sanders’ ally. “I hope she runs for the Senate.”
Many grassroots liberals are angry at Schumer’s handling of his caucus in the Trump era, and in April a Siena College poll of registered voters in New York state found that Ocasio-Cortez had the best favourability rating among eight elected officials.
Several House members have called for Schumer to step aside - although Ocasio-Cortez has not joined them.
“This problem is bigger than one person,” she said of Senate Democrats voting with Republicans to fund the Government this month.
“It actually is bigger than the minority leader in the Senate.”
When Ocasio-Cortez began running for Congress in 2017, her pollster, Celinda Lake, approached her to suggest she push back on attacks stating that she was simply a bartender and unqualified for the job.
Perhaps she could highlight other aspects of her resume, Lake suggested. After graduating from Boston University with honours, she worked on Sanders’ 2016 campaign and launched a book publishing company.
“Celinda, I don’t want to correct that,” Ocasio-Cortez responded immediately, Lake recalled. “I want to represent the bartenders and waitresses of this district.”
That pitch resonated with voters in a deep-blue district spanning the Bronx and Queens, and she entered the House in 2019 at 29 after defeating a sitting congressman, Democrat Joseph Crowley.
Ocasio-Cortez assembled a pugilistic team that had plans to systematically dislodge more Democratic leaders.
“Crowley was intended to be the start, not the finish,” said Corbin Trent, who served as Ocasio-Cortez’s communications director in those early days.
Pelosi, then the Speaker, extended a chilly welcome to the rookie congresswoman, who participated in a sit-in at her office over climate change during her first week in Washington.
The California Democrat said a “glass of water” could win in districts as blue as Ocasio-Cortez’s and dismissed her “Green New Deal” climate proposal as the “Green Dream”.
Ocasio-Cortez faced “social isolation and pressure” from other Democrats who disliked her approach, according to one person who worked for her at the time.
“She represented that you could lose your job,” the person said.
In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez distanced herself from members of her team who had clashed with other Democrats, as Trent and her chief of staff left her office.
She told people around her that her fellow members had the wrong impression of her as a firebrand who was after their jobs, Trent said.
“I think they saw her as someone who took on every issue like a dragon that she needed to slay,” said former Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard.
“What they didn’t realise about her is that she’s actually a very nimble political athlete.”
In 2020, she endorsed a handful of liberal candidates challenging moderate House Democrats, which was controversial in the caucus but represented a smaller break with party leadership than her earlier team had hoped for.
House Democrats, including Spanberger, faced a torrent of GOP-funded ads that year tying them to “socialist AOC”, heightening tensions in the party.
By 2021, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) gave her a leadership role on the House oversight committee, seeing an eager student of the legislative process and an effective communicator.
Ocasio-Cortez built an alliance with Joe Biden when he became president that year. When Harris replaced Biden on the presidential ticket last year, Ocasio-Cortez spoke glowingly of her in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
“One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in her is the desire to listen to everybody,” said Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan), who recalled the congresswoman taking seriously her position that labour unions needed to sign on to the “Green New Deal” before she could support it.
Still, the relationship between Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic caucus can be fraught.
She only began paying dues to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which helps swing-district Democrats get elected, in 2024.
She lost her bid to lead the oversight committee’s Democrats shortly after Trump’s win, a sign that most of her colleagues were not moved by her argument against seniority.
And in June, she raised eyebrows by floating impeachment of Trump for his strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities - rhetoric many Democrats fear will only rile up his base.
“She came into the Congress having defeated a popular member of the Congress and was treated like an outsider, and people felt threatened by her and I still think people do feel threatened by her,” added Dingell, who helps lead House Democrats’ messaging.
Outside the halls of Congress, she has drawn scepticism from centrist Democrats who feel she has defended positions in the past - such as defunding the police - that cost the party politically.
“She has gone left on everything,” said Lanae Erickson, a senior vice-president at the centrist Third Way think-tank. “I don’t think that she would win a [presidential] general election because of a lot of the positions that she’s already taken.”
She’s also received blowback from some committed supporters on the left as she’s made inroads with traditional Democrats.
The national chapter of the democratic socialists un-endorsed her in 2024 over what it described as an insufficient response to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
And Trent, her former spokesman, left Ocasio-Cortez’s world disappointed in her unwillingness to blow up the Democratic Party.
“It turns out what you had was a team player - not a leader,” he said.
Ocasio-Cortez concedes she has a “weird” relationship with Democrats as a “dissenter” who doesn’t believe in a two-party system.
“But I also understand that the Democratic Party is a coalition and if we want the party to change, the balance of the coalition has to change,” she told journalist Maria Hinojosa earlier this year.
It’s a sentiment she shares with Sanders, another democratic socialist who made his way from the fringes to the centre of the Democratic Party.
A day into the longest government shutdown in US history, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders walked out of the Vermont senator’s office and informed their staffs they wanted to shoot a video.
They had just spent an hour discussing scheduled increases in premiums for people who buy health insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and they wanted to explain why they voted against funding the Government over the issue.
In one take, the pair argued that tens of thousands of Americans would die each year because of the premium increases.
“Republicans want us to rubber-stamp that,” Ocasio Cortez said. “We’re saying no, we need to stand up for the American people.”
Sanders has forged the closest political partnership of his life with Ocasio-Cortez, according to people close to him, as both straddle a fine line between supporting and critiquing the Democratic Party.
A lone wolf who had only one senator’s endorsement when he ran for president in 2016, Sanders talks on the phone and meets with Ocasio-Cortez regularly, and he shows a warmth and trust with her that is rare, associates said.
Sanders invited Ocasio-Cortez to join his 20-state “oligarchy” speaking tour after the 2024 election, and the pair drew large crowds in red and blue states as they called for higher taxes on wealthy Americans.
Several top Sanders aides now work for Ocasio-Cortez, including his former political director, increasing the overlap between the two lawmakers.
Still, the 84-year-old Sanders rejects the notion that Ocasio-Cortez could be an “heir” who will inherit the movement he built over two presidential runs. “He thinks that is bull****,” said one person close to the senator.
“If there was an heir he would be done and he’s not done, so that’s part of it. And part of it is he thinks she should be leading her own path - and she is.”
Sanders brushed off the question of her political future at a joint CNN town hall last month. “You have a country that is falling apart,” he said, ticking off crises in healthcare, housing, education and wealth inequality. “Nobody cares.”
The pair spent considerable political capital boosting Mamdani, whom Ocasio-Cortez endorsed in June. She’s advised Mamdani on how to handle his overnight fame, death threats and the intense media scrutiny he faces, people familiar with the discussions said.
“I’m talking to you, Donald Trump,” Ocasio-Cortez said at an October rally, flanked by the two fellow democratic socialists. “There has been a day before his presidency and there will be a day after. And it belongs to us.”
As she weighs her future with a small group of confidants, Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t visited early nominating states and schmoozed with local power brokers like other presidential aspirants.
“Even if you have a huge national profile, you’ve got to get to the early states,” said Mark Longabaugh, a strategist who worked on Sanders’ presidential campaign. “I don’t see her making those moves.”
But public polls show high favourability ratings among Democrats.
When California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, conducted tests to see who the most effective Democratic messengers were during his push to garner support for a ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map, Ocasio-Cortez’s popularity was on par with Newsom’s, according to a person familiar with the data.
She has a much steeper hill to climb outside of the Democratic Party.
In the Post-Ipsos poll, just 24% of independents said they held a favourable view of her and 31% of all Americans said they had no opinion of her.
Her core message of raising taxes on the rich to make life more affordable for everyday Americans is an economic one.
She also is firm in her defence of some social principles that most Americans disagree with, including supporting transgender girls’ right to compete in girls’ sports.
A Senate run would not be a surefire winner, either. She would need to build her profile in rural areas of her state and could be up against a longtime fixture of Democratic politics in Schumer.
The congresswoman has a comfortable perch in the House, where she enjoys a larger platform than her colleagues.
She has nearly 10 million followers on Instagram and four million on TikTok and has raised nearly US$20 million ($35.6m) this year alone, making her the best fundraiser in the chamber.
Her online fundraising prowess means she does not have to do a minute of “call time” to donors that her colleagues spend hours each day on.
She secured a seat on the energy and commerce committee this year, where she’s been key to crafting Democrats’ Medicaid strategy.
She could decide to stay in the House, depending on what happens over the next two years.
Republicans are also closely watching her next moves. Vice-President JD Vance has called the prospect of her becoming president “the stuff of nightmares”.
After Trump railed against her for floating impeachment, she responded caustically on social media.
“I’m a Bronx girl,” she wrote. “You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast.”
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