It might surprise some people that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American politics’ most dynamic progressive icon, wishes Democrats would stop thinking “that the power struggle within the party is between progressives and moderates,” as she told me recently.
“Whether it’s advisers or the consultant class, they are losing elections because of it,” she said.
Instead, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez believes her party can come together around fighting for the little guy and gal, a core value she insists does not belong to any particular ideological camp — or at least shouldn’t. “I believe economic populism is the path forward,” she said, a message she has taken on the road recently with Senator Bernie Sanders, at joint rallies on his Fighting Oligarchy tour that are the closest thing to an organized, energized bounce-back effort within the Democratic Party since Republicans won full control of Washington in November.
Can Democrats become the party of the working class again? Can economic populism unite progressives and moderates? Can a Democrat win in a swing district or state on a populist platform? Ms. Ocasio-Cortez thinks so. But whether she’s right or not, the important thing for Democrats at this early stage of the Trump-wilderness period is that she is putting big ideas and arguments on the table. There’s not enough of that in the party right now.
There is clearly plenty of anti-Trump energy to be harnessed — so much so that the president was nervous enough about possibly losing a red-district race to replace Representative Elise Stefanik that he pulled her nomination to be U.N. ambassador. But many Washington Democrats are struggling to push back against Mr. Trump, and the party seems to be casting about for inspiration and direction. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is taking up that mantle like few others, and along the way, challenging some of the caricatures of her as an upstart ideologue.
Case in point: In talking to me about economic populism, she didn’t cite members of the lefty Squad, but instead name-checked a very different colleague. “Look at a front-liner like Jared Golden, who is on Medicare for all,” she said, citing the Maine congressman who has staked out a liberal position on health care despite being a self-identified “progressive conservative” representing a Trumpy district. “This is why I say we need to have a rejection of this left-right, because there are folks that can lean into certain issues,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “Sure, there are third rails like immigration that are not going to fly in every single district. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t vocally support policies that are going to help people pay their bills.”
Mr. Golden sees things a bit differently — “the folks back home know that I am not driving in the same direction she is,” he told me — and would take populism in some slightly different directions, such as focusing on debt reduction. But even if the two are not perfectly aligned, they offer a sense that there’s energy and determination yet in a party that many Americans have turned on.
How far Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can go is a hot topic for many Democrats right now. With her youth, charisma, social media skills and political savvy, she is being talked about nowadays as not only the obvious heir to Mr. Sanders as leader of the progressive movement, but as a possible presidential contender for 2028. This both recognizes her potential and feels premature at best.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is arguably the best-known progressive figure in elected office — sorry, Bernie! — with all the divisiveness that comes with it. Her mere existence spins up Republicans to a degree reminiscent of their reaction to Nancy Pelosi in her heyday. Indeed, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez strikes me as having the potential to be a congressional force in the Pelosi model: a fierce progressive from a deep-blue district, vilified by Republicans as a left-wing extremist even as her pragmatism and strategic thinking go underestimated. Having blown into the House as a lefty bomb thrower in 2019, she has since taken steps to build relationships across her caucus, including by handing out campaign cash to more conservative colleagues in frontline districts.
The Fighting Oligarchy tour organized by Mr. Sanders and featuring her as a “special guest” drew fired-up crowds in numbers worthy of a presidential campaign: about 15,000 in Tempe, Ariz.; 11,000 in Greeley, Colo.; 34,000 in Denver. These events are about more than policy or ideology, but also sheer emotion. The frustration and fury among Democratic voters are palpable these days. (Just ask Chuck Schumer.) Democrats freaked out by Mr. Trump are clamoring for leaders who share their sense of urgency.
Fighting Oligarchy, with its revolutionary fervor, is working to scratch that itch. “We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us!” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez told the crowds. And although Mr. Sanders is the tour’s headliner, and plenty of other speakers have joined him, it is Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, serving as his fresh-faced, supportive warm-up act, who has many Trump-traumatized Democrats dreaming of a counterrevolution.
Representative Ro Khanna of California recalled to me that, at a recent town hall, people kept asking him, “What are you going to do to stop this?” None of his answers about what was possible in legislative terms ever “fully landed,” he said. “And then I would just say, ‘Look, it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take a movement.’ And that’s what Bernie and A.O.C. are doing. They get it — that it’s not just in Washington that this is going to be stopped. It’s going to take everyone.”
Large rallies often get mocked, but they are valuable in many ways, argued Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s chief adviser. “They build community,” he said, which he sees as critical with the decline of civic organizations and union halls and other places where organizing once took place on the left. “Coming out of the pandemic, people want to be with each other in commonality for an affirmative vision,” he said.
For movement building, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s more personal style of public engagement seems designed for an era of institutional distrust, in which many Americans have little use for party politics. As Mr. Khanna noted, “She connects with her life experiences in a way with young people and people who don’t follow all the details of politics by drawing them in.”
The “life experiences” issue is a hot topic, as Democrats grapple with having become identified as the party of the elite.
“On one hand, I think there are Democrats who think that’s a misperception,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “But on the other hand, we have to look at how people voted. We did lose working-class electorates.”
It is a question not only of message but of “the messenger,” she offered.
“I think the kind of candidates that maybe a couple of decades ago were once aspirational, like having the Harvard degree and the pedigree and an esteemed job after college,” are in a more complicated position, she said. “The inequality in this country has gotten to a point where it now represents things that people resent that they can’t ever have a chance at having.”
“I think that people need to see some of us who’ve actually made it from really tough backgrounds and have really seen some things in their lives and not just heard about things in their lives. Because it’s visceral. To actually know what it’s like to come home to an apartment and the lights are off, to actually know what it’s like to not be able to afford a prescription, is something that can be really felt.”
Not so many years ago, when the party’s left wing was feeling strong and aggressively challenging more moderate Democrats in primaries, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was seen as antagonistic toward, even a threat to, some of her less progressive colleagues. Now, with Mr. Trump running wild, the emerging fault line within the party is more about what those aligned with her might call fighters versus folders.
And it is giving the congresswoman an opening to try to erase some of the left-center divisions she once played into. This month, she found herself feuding on social media with Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whom she endorsed in his 2022 race but sees as too accommodating of Republicans these days. When Mr. Fetterman’s more moderate primary opponent from that year, former Representative Conor Lamb, took her side, she made nice. “I was wrong about you and I’m sorry. Where do I submit my Conor Lamb apology form,” she posted, tossing in a weeping emoji for good measure.
None of which is to suggest that there aren’t major differences among the Democrats. Mr. Golden, the progressive-conservative from Maine, suggested that many of his colleagues on “the left” won’t venture far enough down the populist path: “I feel like they’re not willing to embrace the populist views in their entirety.” For example? “Like, ‘We need economic populism, but not cultural.’ Why do they think that people are bifurcated like that? Because they’re not,” he said.
These debates about ideas and leadership are crucial to a healthy party. So is trust, which Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is working to help restore for the Democrats by assuring people that her team is fired up to fight against an out-of-control president and on behalf of the underdog.
Can all of this translate into Ms. Ocasio-Cortez becoming a standard-bearer for the entire party? She is a lightning rod for the right, and for some independents and swing voters, a persona traditionally not suited to assembling the broad-based coalition the Democrats need to reclaim the White House, especially when a plurality of the party’s voters say it needs to shift in a moderate direction. That said, the next presidential election is more than three years off, and no one can say how next year’s midterm elections will reshuffle the political deck — much less what the party, or country, will want in 10 or even 20 years.
“At the end of the day, we may vote in different ways,” she told me. “But as long as people feel like they can trust the person that is casting that vote, that’s the whole ballgame right there.”
