Would things in America be worse under President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
I feel pulled in my gut to say yes, not so much because I lean right but because I’m a pessimist through and through. Eeyore’s credo: No matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. And probably will.
But it’s hard to justify that position logically. If you’d asked me six months ago to forecast how an AOC administration might play out, I’d have predicted a self-inflicted economic calamity followed by capital fleeing the United States; a morally obtuse foreign policy that’s soft on some of the world’s baddest bad guys; and a federal government run by moronic Jacobins keen to wield state power against their cultural enemies.
We have all of that right now under Donald Trump, though, plus the occasional disappearance of undesirables into foreign gulags—or into thin air. By the time he leaves office, even Eeyores will believe that there’s nowhere to go but up.
What got me thinking about a prospective Ocasio-Cortez presidency is that the odds of one are rising.
Don’t look now but according to one poll she’s become the most popular figure in her party, trailing only the universally known Kamala Harris in a hypothetical 2028 primary. A progressive survey published earlier this month found her ahead of Chuck Schumer in a potential Senate primary in New York by almost 20 points. During the first three months of this year she raised just shy of $10 million, more than doubling the next-best quarter she’s ever had. Nearly two-thirds of that haul came from first-time donors.
Last week statistician Nate Silver and podcaster Galen Druke handicapped the developing 2028 Democratic field and agreed that Ocasio-Cortez is the early frontrunner. On Monday The Hill published its own list and likewise placed AOC at the head of the class. Her friend, former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, was asked last month about the possibility of her running for president in the next cycle and didn’t rule it out. She might do it if there’s a “void” in the race, he told Politico.
Well, Bernie Sanders is the only politician in the country who matches her stature among progressives, and he won’t run again, as he’ll be 87 on Election Day 2028. So, yeah, the “void” will be there in case she’s inclined to fill it.
Ocasio-Cortez has no business being president, but Americans have gotten quite comfortable with nominating people who have no business being president. The question is whether Silver and Druke are right that she’s now the person to beat in the Democratic primary.
God help us, but I’m coming around to thinking that she is.
Learning lessons.
The case against nominating AOC is simple. Based on last November’s result, she’s a poor choice demographically and ideologically to beat a Trumpified GOP.
Americans may be more receptive to a young candidate after 12 years of dismal geriatric leadership, but Ocasio-Cortez will be really young, less than a month removed from her 39th birthday when the electorate votes in 2028. That would make her the youngest person ever elected president by a margin of several years. (JFK was 43 when he was elected.) If you worry about the head of state being out of his or her depth in the job, which many of us do and more of us should, then age and experience matter.
Her race and sex will also count against her in the primary, although Democrats would rather chew glass than admit it. It can’t have gone unnoticed that the two women they’ve nominated since 2016 lost to Trump while the lone man they nominated defeated him—never mind that that’s unfair to Harris, who surely fared better at the polls than a diminished Joe Biden would have. Many liberals who like AOC will nonetheless think twice about supporting her in a primary for fear that a woman, especially a woman of color, can’t win a general election against a nostalgic “American greatness” party.
Ocasio-Cortez’s real liability is ideology, though. I thought we—or at least all of us to her right, which is nearly everyone—agreed that Democrats suffered terribly among voters last fall for their perceived radicalism on cultural issues. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” is how the most celebrated ad of the campaign framed the contrast between the two sides. Pronouns, open borders, “defund the police,” “Latinx”: The woker and weirder progressives got, the more their erstwhile working-class base seemed to drift toward law-and-order strongman Trump.
Imagine absorbing a lesson like that and concluding that the trick in 2028 is to nominate the most notorious progressive in Congress, the poster girl among Republicans for left-wing radicalism among the rising, less white younger generation of Americans. Trump won a second term because he scared the electoral horses less than Harris did. Why would Democrats turn around and nominate someone even scarier?
AOC is also an unusually bad match-up with the right for her party on one of the decisive issues of the last campaign. She’s been conspicuously soft on illegal immigration throughout her career, even by the low standards of her party; in February she drew attention for trying to educate immigrants about their rights, which Republicans regarded as an attempt to obstruct law enforcement. Her solution to the problem of “the undocumented” is to legalize them, not deport them, making her an odd fit for a party that’s looking for ways to reassure swing voters that it can be trusted to secure the border.
She might be a bad matchup on one of the decisive issues of the next campaign too. No one knows yet how much wreckage will be left by the tariff bomb Trump dropped on the U.S. economy, but it’ll be considerable and will inevitably cause a backlash among Democratic voters that drives them toward supporting free trade even more than they already do. Ocasio-Cortez is unlikely to share that enthusiasm, as progressives’ relationship with labor requires them to be more protectionist-curious than the average neoliberal is. (Uncharacteristically, but not coincidentally, she hasn’t had much to say about the president’s new trade war.) If 2028 is all about nuking the Trump tariffs, she may struggle to make that argument as effectively as her opponents.
Even if she falls short in a Democratic presidential primary, her campaign could do the same sort of damage to the winner that Sanders’ campaign did to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Her left-populist message will force the eventual nominee to pander to progressive voters on issues like the Green New Deal, enough so to hand the GOP talking points about Democratic radicalism in the general election yet probably not enough to appease AOC’s disgruntled left-wing supporters. If she were a fringe candidate with no national profile, her opponent could choose to ignore them and her, but she isn’t. She’ll win many millions of votes. In defeat, her candidacy would guarantee influence for the left over the nominee’s agenda, making the party’s effort to claw back swing voters from Trump that much harder.
But how likely is it that she’d be defeated?
A frontrunner in the making.
Ocasio-Cortez has lots of advantages in a primary. Some are tangible, but the more important ones are less so.
The tangible: As noted, she has her own grassroots money machine. She’s enjoyed a remarkable degree of name recognition among Americans from her earliest days in Congress. And as Druke pointed out to Silver, because she’s a progressive icon and sure to inherit a chunk of Sanders’ base, she’d likely have a floor in Democratic polling of no less than 20 percent. No one else except Harris would command so much support so early, and I suspect the former VP’s backers would prove much softer than AOC’s.
Ocasio-Cortez is also an unusually good matchup for Democrats with Trump’s party in certain ways. She’s long criticized her colleagues in Congress for insider trading, for instance, a subject that gained new salience last week, and she and Sanders are drawing big crowds out West for their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. It’s anyone’s guess how numb American voters will be to Trumpist corruption and the Elon-ization of the federal bureaucracy come 2028, but if there’s a backlash afoot, a left-populist message preaching good government will play well in a Democratic primary.
That’s another way in which AOC has a leg up on her competition—she’s an authentic populist class warrior in a party crawling with limousine-liberal pretenders. Whether and how much that might lure back some of the blue-collar voters who swung behind Trump in the last election is unclear but Democrats desperately need to reconnect with them, and authenticity always helps. If you watch Ocasio-Cortez’s convention speeches in 2020 and 2024, in fact, you’ll notice a striking evolution from mouthing “woke” shibboleths to celebrating the working class. It may be too late for her to shed her cultural baggage, but she’s moving in the right direction for a politician aiming to play to a wider national electorate.
Even her age and race may not be as burdensome as they first appear, as Americans have developed a funny habit this century of electing presidents who seem to represent the antithesis of their predecessors. Barack Obama was a young, racially pioneering break from the tired old WASP Bush dynasty; Donald Trump was an avatar of cultural nostalgia and white identity politics after the first African American president; Joe Biden was a Beltway dinosaur promising a reversion to establishment “normalcy” after the populist roller coaster of the (first) Trump years.
If the trend holds and Americans go to the polls in 2028 eager to repudiate an 82-year-old fascist alpha male, who would symbolize it more potently than a not-yet-40 Latina socialist? Depending on how bad the fallout from tariff-palooza gets, AOC might even get to position herself as the FDR to Trump’s Herbert Hoover.
She and Trump have things in common too, though, which brings us to those intangibles I mentioned. Ocasio-Cortez shares a trait with nearly every two-term president of my lifetime: She has star power.
“Simply the most exciting figure in Democratic politics,” The Hill declared in dubbing her the early favorite in 2028. That’s true, and not just because there’s so little competition nowadays in a party that conspicuously wants for excitement. The essence of charisma is inscrutable—youth, charm, boldness, eloquence, and confidence in one’s vision all contribute—but AOC is undeniably charismatic, as the gigantic following she’s gained online since entering politics will confirm. If she ran for president, the media wouldn’t be able to get enough of her.
Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were national celebrities before they ran for office. Bill Clinton was likened to Camelot-era John F. Kennedy thanks to his age, looks, and rhetorical skill. Barack Obama was welcomed as a sort of living redemption for American race relations and praised as a generational talent on the stump. All had obvious star power, all won two terms. Of the presidents who have served eight years since Watergate, only George W. Bush lacked the same celebrity charisma—and even he was royalty of a sort, son of and heir to a president.
Americans like their leaders to be stars, as stars are galvanizing. Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have spent the last few months galvanizing many disgruntled Democrats at their “Fighting Oligarchy” events, and they’ve done so at a moment when figures across the social spectrum—including some of their own colleagues in Congress—have been cowed into silence by fear of what Trump and his toadies might do if they speak out. Decide for yourself how charming and eloquent she is, but the requisite youth, boldness, and (above all) confidence in one’s vision are all there.
Identity crisis.
Something else is there. Democrats aren’t just looking for a leader, Axios noted, they’re looking for a “new identity.” Can any 2028 candidate give that to them except Ocasio-Cortez?
The two-termers I mentioned earlier had that in common as well. Reagan imprinted conservatism on the American right, then Trump imprinted postliberalism on it. Clinton led the “New Democrats” to victory after 12 years of Republican landslides by pivoting to the center. Obama embodied a racially diverse “coalition of the ascendant” that supposedly portended a durable Democratic majority. And while Bush didn’t enter office with a strong political identity, he had one foisted on him by 9/11.
There’s an “identity” vacuum among Democrats right now. Who’s going to fill it, Josh Shapiro? Could you describe Shapiro’s politics in a few sentences if your life depended on it, without mumbling vaguely about “centrism”?
AOC might well be the only candidate in the field offering her party a distinct identity in 2028. And while Democratic voters typically haven’t been lured by such things—they chose electable empty vessels like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over Sanders in 2016 and 2020, didn’t they?—they haven’t fared very well in the Trump era by playing it safe with their nominees. Perhaps the time to take a political risk is approaching.
As they grow angrier at Trump’s abuses, excusing Ocasio-Cortez’s deficiencies will become easier for them. Yes, okay, she has some unaffordably cockamamie policy ideas—but she fights. Even normie liberals will relish the idea of President AOC turning the tables on the right by using Trump’s new powers to persecute Democrats’ cultural enemies.
Yes, fine, voters last fall signaled that they want a more moderate Democratic Party—but the right ignored that signal in 2012 and they’ve won two of the three elections since. Democrats can plausibly tell themselves that it was inflation, an open border, and the cover-up over Joe Biden’s health that sank Harris, not the “woke” they/them claptrap that would supposedly sink Ocasio-Cortez. If anything, Trump’s political success proves that Americans will tolerate a lot of inane cultural nonsense if it comes packaged with enough unapologetic populism. AOC can certainly supply that.
All told, I wouldn’t wager heavily on her to win the Democratic nomination if she runs in three years. But I would wager heavily that she’ll finish in the top two if she does.
That being said, let me leave you with this happy thought: There’s no candidate more likely to inspire another Republican coup attempt in 2028 than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I don’t mean to discourage anyone from supporting her by claiming that. We’re all but assured of another coup plot if a Democrat wins the next general election no matter who he or she is. You don’t convert the federal government into a weapon against your enemies, as Trump is doing, and then hand that weapon to the victim just because a slight majority of voters insists upon it. There’s no Democratic candidate so palatable to the right that his or her victory would ensure a graceful transfer of power by the Trump administration.
Besides, even if I’m right about a heightened coup risk involving AOC, Democratic primary voters shouldn’t punish her for the fact that the worst elements in American politics feel a special contempt for her. If you’re letting fascists intimidate you into not supporting the candidate you prefer, you’re granting them a veto over your political choices. Don’t reward them for their scumbaggery.
But I do think there’s a heightened risk. Ocasio-Cortez is the embodiment of the postliberal right’s cultural nightmare—nonwhite, a woman, genuinely radical in her leftism, and willing to antagonize them, the very picture of the new not-so-great America they loathe. The usual cries that the country is finished if a Democrat is allowed to take power will carry a greater urgency if she happens to be that Democrat. And their anxiety that, as president, she would use some of the precedents Trump has set to hamstring right-wing causes is well-founded, I think. Someone as pugnacious as her doesn’t seem like the type to “play nice” with people who haven’t played so nice with the left lately.
It will be ugly, but it always is anymore. We’re all Eeyores now.
