By admin 
- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remains undecided about whether she’ll run for president, Senate or reelection to the House in 2028.
- The New York congresswoman is working to expand her appeal beyond the progressive base with endorsements and committee work.
- Her advisers are planning a fall tour to test whether she can win a national campaign.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been doing a lot of knitting lately.
She’s slowly churning out a collection of hats and sweaters as she quizzes aides about campaigns she’s thinking of endorsing or working with House colleagues on what to include in bills and how to communicate what they’re doing. Some of the knits, she wears herself. Some she gives out as gifts.
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Long gone are the days of her spontaneously joining a sit-in about the Green New Deal in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Now, she advises newer House members to learn from her early experiences of antagonizing party leadership and talks excitedly about her work on the House Energy and Commerce Committee: Her grilling of Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin during a committee hearing in April created a viral moment.
The New York congresswoman is truly undecided about what she’ll do in 2028, when she can run for president or for the seat held by Sen. Chuck Schumer. But Ocasio-Cortez, 36, is positioning herself to try to reach nationally beyond the deepest blue parts of the Democratic base — and making clear in private that whatever she decides, she has no interest in being merely a protest candidate.
Whatever she runs for — including possibly just re-election to her ultra-safe House seat, which has provided quite the platform already — she says she wants to make sure she wins. Same goes for any candidates she backs. And for legislation she gets behind.
“We’re seeing an opening, definitely among swingy independents, but also among Republicans: They don’t agree with everything she says, but they believe she is honest and that she’s going to work for people,” said one person close to her. “That will be put to the test in the coming months: Will Democratic candidates in tough races recognize she is a net positive for their campaign?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s aides are putting together a fall schedule meant to beta-test her appeal beyond a base that adores her and mostly outside of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ political operation after making several stops on his “Fighting Oligarchy” campaign. The tour will also test her own appetite for what a presidential campaign would entail.
She’s kept up with the Democratic Socialists of America and Sanders, but also with former President Joe Biden. And she’s been collecting a strong record of primary endorsements, with three people she backed winning or advancing in New Jersey, California and Montana just last week.
Chris Rabb, the Pennsylvania state legislator whom Ocasio-Cortez backed late in his mid-May primary for a House seat in Philadelphia, said her support was unlike anyone else’s. When she surprised him by calling him to say she was endorsing, he invited her to come campaign with him and scrambled to get her the Friday before Election Day.
“It really broke open the doors for anti-establishment progressives of color,” Rabb told CNN.
Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman first connected with Ocasio-Cortez as she helped organize a pro-Palestinian protest outside the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Now running for state Senate, Romman met with Ocasio-Cortez during the congresswoman’s recent swing through the state.
“‘Would an endorsement help?’” Romman remembers the congresswoman asking, adding her reply was: “This is a Democratic primary. You poll like plus-40 among Democrats in Georgia. Anything you can give me!”
Ocasio-Cortez is also being careful about not getting involved in some cases. She hasn’t backed Graham Platner in Maine’s Senate race even though both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren hosted rallies for him. She kept her distance from a former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who came in third in Pelosi’s San Francisco district despite his own efforts to constantly invoke Ocasio-Cortez on the trail.
She stayed firm in her denunciations of former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as well as the Texas Democratic candidate who called for “a prison for American Zionists,” even though she received attacks from some of the loudest social media posters on the left.
And when Tom Steyer’s California gubernatorial campaign ran an attack ad against Xavier Becerra’s handling of immigrant children that featured her without a heads-up, the ad was recut so she no longer appeared after some quiet outreach from outside Ocasio-Cortez allies.
But whether she has what it would take to win a national campaign or has the capacity to do it is a question even boosters are asking.
Some in her circle acknowledge that her name recognition and preternatural political skills may have left them spoiled. And for all the benefits and monster crowds that came from folding into Sanders’ national operation, it left Ocasio-Cortez starting mostly fresh on her own just months before the 2028 maneuvering officially begins, with a smaller team than many other potential contenders.
“It’s for her to decide how serious she’s going to be, since people are going to be waiting to say she’s not ready,” said one person who’s been involved in several conversations with her circle. “She has the talent, but does she have the team?”
The Munich moment
What Ocasio-Cortez herself keeps coming back to is that moment in February at the Munich Security Conference, during what was meant to be her big debut on the international stage, talking about how the rich were manipulating the working class globally.
Instead, she appeared stumped by a question about whether the US should commit troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a future invasion by Beijing – a cornerstone question of US-China relations that presidents of both parties have handled by maintaining “strategic ambiguity,” refusing to answer that question outright.
“Um, you know, I think that, uh … this is … such a … you know, I think that this is a, um … this is of course a … a very longstanding, um … policy of the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said then. “And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.”
Watching the replays and comments piling up was a rough moment, according to people who spoke to her. She was surprised by the backlash. Annoyed.
Several otherwise sympathetic critics told CNN they see a deeper problem: Not only didn’t she prepare herself well enough, but she didn’t know how to, and that left her not ready enough for the spotlight in an unscripted moment that wasn’t on Instagram Live or in the reporter scrums at the US Capitol she’s started more eagerly making herself available for.
After days of cleanup, she told people close to her, she was dug in: There was no political model for the position she’s in, and she didn’t get to road test any of what she’s going to be doing without making international news. So rather than getting caught up about what others will think, she might as well just say what she wants and keep doing it her way.
That thrills and terrifies her, those who’ve talked with the congresswoman say.
“She’s a relatively young, very smart and talented person who unexpectedly found herself in this position as the leading political voice of her generation – and she takes that very seriously,” an outside adviser told CNN. “But like any normal person would who has not been planning for this since they were eight years old, she’s rightly cautious about how she uses her platform, and about the power she now wields.”
Ideological allies and fans have their doubts, along with some gripes about being left out of her decision-making. She hasn’t, for example, joined an organizing call put together by the Sanders-inspired political group Our Revolution, even though the group backed her first race when the senator himself did not.
“She’s built a big brand by herself. She’s getting strategic advice that you can go it alone,” said Joseph Geevarghese, Our Revolution’s executive director. “There are a lot of people in grassroots organizations that would benefit from working with her on advancing the issues that we’re all fighting for.”
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Notably, though every time Our Revolution polls its members for their 2028 favorites, she’s at the top of the list.
Moving beyond just the Sanders lane
Sanders will turn 87 a few weeks before the 2028 election, and even he has acknowledged he won’t be running for president again. But as he’s been making clear constantly on TV and on the trail, he is more intent than ever in extending his influence.
Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he kibbitzes, advises and occasionally argues with over short and long phone calls multiple times per week, is his obvious heir. It’s no coincidence that when Sanders wanted someone to carry the House version of his bill to regulate new data centers — convinced that AI is a threat to humanity and perhaps his final political mission to stop — he turned to Ocasio-Cortez.
It doesn’t take Sanders’ former campaign manager and top political adviser Faiz Shakir becoming part of Ocasio-Cortez’s kitchen cabinet, or his former communications director Mike Casca now as her chief of staff, to know that she’d have the inside track for his endorsement. And for the occasional grumbling on the left about her, no operative sizing up the prospective field doubts she could easily line up most of the Sanders support, including absorbing most of his staff.
Sanders’s immense and very specific shadow leaves her and her small circle of trust trying to figure out how to better establish her own identity without distancing too much from him.
The only real competition among that flank for now would be Rep. Ro Khanna, the 2020 Sanders campaign co-chair who’s nowhere near as well-known but much more active in trying to get people to pay attention to his presidential hopes.
“It may be interesting to have more than one progressive,” Khanna said, noting that Ocasio-Cortez’s decision about running wouldn’t affect his own. “We have plenty of establishment candidates and retreads running.”
Advisers to several other 2028 prospective candidates without the same claim to or interest in the Sanders wing told CNN privately they’re hoping she runs — a feeling shared by ambitious New York politicians who assume she’d make an easy romp of the Senate race they want to win instead.
Prospective opponents’ teams figure Ocasio-Cortez in the presidential field would likely lock down 25%-30% on the left, which they think would leave the other candidates to compete for the rest without having to appeal to voters they worry they could never fully satisfy.
Higher name recognition means she already also has higher negative numbers than many of the others looking at running. But those other candidates’ advisers also acknowledge that in what’s likely to be a splintered field with a dozen or more viable contenders, that would also put her in a strong position to build just a little bit and become the nominee — especially if she turns out to be one of the few women and few people of color running.
Back in Washington, Ocasio-Cortez is already building past that left flank.
Just this week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries made her the co-convener of the healthcare working group for his midterm agenda. A few weeks earlier, the Congressional Progressive Caucus made a centerpiece of its agenda her bill to cap the cost of childcare — on which she is collaborating with Warren after taking it over when the original sponsor and generally more moderate Mikie Sherrill resigned to become governor of New Jersey.
“She can communicate that in a way that makes sense to millions of people on the internet, but here in DC, it’s, ‘This is the Mikie Sherrill bill, and we’re polishing it up so that Republican governors can’t block the childcare expansion,” said Texas Rep. Greg Casar, the chair of the progressive caucus. “It’s the kind of thing that gives people inside here the confidence we can pass that bill.”
Sherrill approves too.
“I’m so glad Alex, a champion for working people, has picked up this bill Sen. Warren and I fought hard for,” she told CNN in a statement.
(One way to tell which of her colleagues have actually had a conversation with her is who refers to her as “Alex” and who calls her “AOC.”)
‘My ambition is to change the country’
Ocasio-Cortez drew widespread attention with her answer to a May question about whether she would run for president or Senate in 2028, saying people “assume my ambition is a title or a seat.”
“My ambition is to change this country,” she said, noting she wanted to enact single-payer healthcare and a “living wage.” “Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go.”
As Ocasio-Cortez discussed a trip this spring for meetings about regulating data centers, she told aides to look to Georgia for what became an intense three-day swing.
Realizing that she would be there in the days after the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, she told them to add a Sunday stop at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, once led by Martin Luther King Jr. and now by Sen. Raphael Warnock as senior pastor.
When, an hour before the service began, a person from the church called to ask if she would speak, her aides initially pushed back. They weren’t ready to get a speech to her. She overruled them and spent the next 45 minutes building out what she wanted to say.
Called up by Warnock as a “national voice of conscience,” she did a four-minute preach, microphone in hand, picking up the legacies of the prophets Deborah and Daniel, and of King, calling on the congregation there and beyond to stand together.
“Our faith is the foundation that gives us the courage to fight in the face of overwhelming odds,” she told the congregation. “I’m here today, brothers and sisters, with a simple message: We stand together and we are not going back.”
Ocasio-Cortez also keeps talking about a feeling she first got on a Salt Lake City stop of her tour with Sanders last year, looking out from the stage and thinking about the thousands of Democrats in red states who often get overlooked.
She started talking about the “faith of the mustard seed,” a reference to a verse from the Book of Matthew about how conviction and belief can move mountains.
“When we start working with another, when we start building together, when we start watching each other’s kids so the other can go out and organize the block,” as she put it in a recent stop back to Missoula, Montana. “You never know what can happen.”
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