Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) may be downplaying her 2028 ambitions, but she has left little doubt that she doesn’t plan to remain in the House indefinitely.
Since Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez has triangulated against fellow Democratic Socialists of America members who remained bedeviled by the excesses of “peak woke,” distanced herself from her own 2020 positions, and advertised her family planning in a way that instantly divided conservatives online.
The congresswoman’s only possible misstep was using a progressive buzzword to imply a second iteration of wokeness is coming, possibly under the leadership of her political faction.
But Ocasio-Cortez declined to endorse state Rep. Francesca Hong, the Democratic front-runner in the Wisconsin governor’s race, even as she defended her fellow socialist’s evolution on the issues.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has also begged off, similarly saying he hasn’t been involved in many gubernatorial races.
Socialists believe they can win back the working-class voters Democrats lost to President Donald Trump over the past decade by shedding their cultural radicalism and focusing on the economy.
But the DSA platform is anti-borders and anti-police, while many of the socialists younger than Sanders, including Ocasio-Cortez, have extensive track records trafficking in woke tropes earlier in this decade. Socialists running as Democrats have yet to demonstrate they can actually win working-class voters without redefining what it means to be working class. Talking about whiteness and canceling Thanksgiving won’t help.
Many of these Democrats who are now campaigning outside deep-blue congressional districts are abandoning or modifying their old positions on issues such as defunding the police.
“My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate,” Ocasio-Cortez said on ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, adding that Hong has “moved away from” her past radical views. “And I have a local city councilman who has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ and I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
“Of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today,” she said of 2020 and defund the police.
It wasn’t a Sister Souljah moment, exactly, and the Clinton-era “in-flight magazine of Air Force One” published a piece rebuking Ocasio-Cortez.
But it did differentiate Ocasio-Cortez from unreformed wokesters in the DSA and gave her more of an explanation for her own changing rhetoric than former Vice President Kamala Harris ever mustered in her losing 2024 presidential campaign.
Whether voters find this convincing could go a long way toward deciding how the 2028 elections go.
At 36, Ocasio-Cortez is better equipped to carry the socialist banner in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries than Sanders, who is older than octogenarians Trump and former President Joe Biden, or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is constitutionally ineligible to run because he was born outside the United States.
“I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” Ocasio-Cortez told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl when asked about running for president in 2028, adding that she was “very humbled” by the “tremendous amount of support” she has received. Karl noted a poll that showed her leading in New Hampshire.
Ocasio-Cortez could also run for Senate, possibly setting up the latest fight between socialists and the Democratic establishment by mounting a primary challenge against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) if the incumbent seeks reelection in 2028.
While Ocasio-Cortez has not been as supportive of left-wing primary challenges to Democratic incumbents as Mamdani, she won her own House seat by taking out a sitting member of the Democrats’ House leadership team in a 2018 primary.
In addition to her comments about wokeness and the midterm elections, Ocasio-Cortez drove the online discourse about fertility and childbirth by publicly beginning the process of freezing her eggs. “Don’t be weird about this, even though I know all of you will be,” she said in a video as she injected herself with the necessary first shot. Whatever this means for her private life, the resulting discussion revealed fissures in the GOP coalition. Both the pro-life movement and female voters, including some who are conservative, have at various points expressed frustration with Trump 2.0, with divisions evident over in vitro fertilization treatments.
If she wanted to pick a fight with Vice President JD Vance, who needs to reassure both women and anti-abortion groups ahead of 2028, she could scarcely have picked a better topic for doing so.
But Ocasio-Cortez may be distancing herself from wokeness less than it first appears. Her objection seems to be that too much was said out loud.
“I think that during this time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” she said, referring to the parameters of mainstream political debate. “We were shut down, there was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of these shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.”
Even granting some of these ideas were aspirational, Ocasio-Cortez’s next line suggests the aspirations haven’t changed much.
ABDUL EL SAYED SUPPORTED STRICT COVID-19 LOCKDOWNS AND SCHOOL CLOSURES
“I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful,” she said.
Whether voters agree remains to be seen.