[[link removed]]

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ SHOULD RUN FOR PRESIDENT  
[[link removed]]


 

Bhaskar Sunkara
July 21, 2026
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The congresswoman can run a serious national campaign on the left
and pull a movement in behind it. She should get in early _

‘To win, and to transform the country, she will have to speak to
people’s anger and draw workers of every background into her
coalition.’ , Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

 

In the summer of 2018, almost no one thought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]] could
beat Joe Crowley. Crowley was a 10-term incumbent, the fourth-ranking
Democrat in the House, a man some thought would one day be speaker. A
28-year-old former bartender and democratic socialist was the longest
of long shots to succeed him. But ever since she did, the political
establishment has been trying to decide whether to take her seriously.

For a while it decided not to
[[link removed]].
The Missouri representative Emanuel Cleaver said the Democratic caucus
did not need her “sniping
[[link removed]]”,
while the then senator Claire McCaskill dismissed her as a “bright
and shiny new object
[[link removed]]”.
Ocasio-Cortez seemed to enjoy the response. Asked on 60 Minutes
whether she wanted people to underestimate her, she said
[[link removed]]:
“Absolutely. That’s how I won my primary.”

American socialism has produced dazzling individuals before. A little
more than a century ago, Eugene Debs won nearly a million votes for
president, while his socialist party sent Victor Berger to Congress,
elected more than a thousand of its members to office and ran city
halls from Schenectady to Milwaukee. Then it was gone, broken by
wartime repression and its own splits, and eventually absorbed into a
New Deal coalition that adopted parts of its program while denying it
an independent political role. At best, it has been honored as a
tradition of noble campaigners, a moral compass for the country rather
than a contender for power. As Senator Ted Kennedy said of the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) founder after his death in
1989: “Michael Harrington never believed that we could not do better
and never stopped urging us to try harder.”

Ocasio-Cortez never seemed content to be solely a voice of conscience,
however. On Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, she made herself
the most visible defender of the Berniecrat program and built a mass
following among young Americans. In parts of Europe, the anger of a
downwardly mobile generation hardened into support for the populist
right. In the United States, Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]] and Ocasio-Cortez
won a good part of that generation for the left instead.

A majority of Americans under 35 and of Democrats overall now tell
pollsters they view socialism favorably
[[link removed]],
and the DSA has grown to more than 120,000 members. Yet unlike the
socialism of Debs, which was a movement of miners, garment workers and
machinists, today’s socialism is built disproportionately by the
young and the credentialed. Like the Democratic establishment they
loathe, the left’s candidates have run strongest among
college-educated professionals in cities and weakest among
non-college, older and manual workers, especially those in more rural
areas.

It hasn’t always been clear that AOC could help broaden the left’s
existing base rather than just deepen it. Her early trouble largely
involved language and communication. Sanders moved people with plain
talk about millionaires and billionaires. Ocasio-Cortez, despite being
inspired by him, would sometimes drift into the dialect of the
progressive non-profit and academic world, using terms more familiar
in seminar rooms than union halls.

In 2022, she scolded Democrats
[[link removed]]
who objected to the use of “Latinx”, a term used by 3%
[[link removed]]
of Hispanics. She offered
[[link removed]] “Latine” as an
improvement, a fix to a problem most Latinos didn’t know they had.

Or take the language of the Green New Deal resolution she introduced
[[link removed]]
in an attempt to bridge the gap between environmentalism and the old
producerist politics of the left. That resolution promised to repair
the historic oppression of Indigenous peoples, communities of color,
migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural
communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, elderly people,
unhoused people, people with disabilities, and youth. Of course,
nobody on that list is un-wronged. But itemizing members of the same
economic class as discrete interest groups was the opposite of how the
2016 Sanders campaign spoke, and of how the left traditionally has. It
was the scholarly language of intersectionality, not the commonsense
solidarity she was trying to inspire.

Nor were her loyalties as fixed as her admirers assumed. Ryan Grim’s
reporting in his book The Squad
[[link removed]]
shows that in 2019 she gave consideration to Elizabeth Warren, who had
courted her and believed her backing would settle the nomination.
After Bernie Sanders’s heart attack, however, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed
the ailing senator at his most perilous point and became the most
effective surrogate he had. The left had sometimes faulted her for how
she weighed confrontation against getting along inside the Democratic
party. In that moment, it got the version of her it wanted.

The direction she has traveled since has been encouraging. After
Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, AOC went to dozens of her
constituents who had voted for both her and Trump and asked them why.
She wanted to understand them rather than lecture them. Their answers
– that she and Trump both read as outsiders, that both sounded like
they were on the side of working people – informed her politics in
the months to come. Some of the people who once formed the base of the
left had split their tickets or stayed home, and she was one of the
Democrats [[link removed]] willing to
walk toward them instead of writing them off.

In going to them, she was approaching one of the central questions of
our era. In 1992, nearly two-thirds of working-class voters backed
Bill Clinton for president. By 2024, the Democratic share of
working-class voters was 45%, while among middle- and upper-class
voters it had climbed to 68%. The lines crossed. The party of
Roosevelt has become the party of the diploma
[[link removed]],
and its strategists have made peace with it, betting on affluent
suburbanites and young professionals to sustain the party’s future.

The math might work for those looking to win elections with 51% of the
vote, but not for those looking to create a majority for sweeping
change. In his long career and in his first run for president, Sanders
offered a glimpse of how such a majority might be built. He held
Vermont’s rather conservative Northeast Kingdom for decades and ran
well ahead of his party among independents nationally in 2016, and a
good deal of that rested on the sharp line he drew between himself and
the Democratic establishment. Ocasio-Cortez will have to draw that
same line despite being far more of a Democrat than Sanders ever was,
more embedded in its caucus, and more implicated in its choices.

The evolution of her rhetoric shows that she might be up for the
challenge. On the “Fighting Oligarchy
[[link removed]]”
tour with Sanders through 2025, she was talking to parts of the
country the Democratic party had long since abandoned. More than
12,500 people turned out for a rally in Nampa, Idaho, a bigger crowd
than the number of registered Democrats in the entire county. Twenty
thousand came out in deep-red Utah. Whatever the tours’ ultimate
efficacy, the US’s two most prominent leftists were showing their
50-state ambitions.

Crowds are not a party, but Ocasio-Cortez has both. She is a member of
the Democratic Socialists of America, part of its socialists-in-office
bloc, and that affiliation ties her to a concrete worldview, to an
ideology and a history, even if she has at times seemed a
less-than-enthusiastic member of an unruly organization. But DSA has
plenty going for it, including thousands of talented organizers and a
roster of hundreds of elected officials that includes the New York
City mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

There are other capable progressives weighing a run in 2028, such as
the California congressman Ro Khanna. However, none of them can do the
two things AOC can do at once: run a serious national campaign as one
of the most recognized figures in the country, and pull an entire
movement into being behind it. The last time the left had a
standard-bearer with her reach, in Sanders, it expanded the largest
socialist organization the country had seen in generations. A credible
Ocasio-Cortez campaign would do more, and perhaps be a part of
building a leftwing infrastructure rooted in working-class life and
built to outlast any one candidate.

The only thing left is for Ocasio-Cortez to announce her campaign, and
to announce early. She should remember the lesson of 2015. Sanders got
in as a protest candidate, with no national organization and no
expectation of winning. He spent a year building what he needed to
compete, and by the time he had it, Hillary Clinton had the nomination
sewn up.

Ocasio-Cortez should move decisively to consolidate the left behind
her and ward off potential challengers. But consolidating the left is
the easy part. To win, and to transform the country, she will have to
speak to people’s anger and draw workers of every background into
her coalition. That’s the longest of long shots, and it’s worth
taking.

*
_Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist. He is the president of
the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The
Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of
Extreme Inequality_

* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]]
* 2028 Elections
[[link removed]]
* presidential election
[[link removed]]
* Left Electoral Strategy
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]