She leaped into office six years ago as a 29-year-old outsider intent on upending the Democratic establishment, and has used her platform to challenge party leaders at nearly every turn.
But in the waning weeks of the 2024 election, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has thrown herself fully behind Vice President Kamala Harris, stepping onto the presidential campaign trail for the first time as an emissary to skeptical young progressives.
The congresswoman has turned out boisterous crowds in Wisconsin, Texas and Pennsylvania, warning college students about the costs of letting older voters decide the outcome. She has taken aim at Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee who Democrats fear could win over disillusioned voters, blasting her as “not serious” and “predatory” in videos on social media, where Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has millions of followers. And she rallied thousands of volunteers in swing states trying to mobilize Latino and union voters.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 35, and Ms. Harris, 60, have never been particularly close. The congresswoman has made no secret of her policy differences with a nominee who is tacking aggressively to the center — often away from the very issues Ms. Ocasio-Cortez values most.
But rather than stoke their differences, the congresswoman has used them to try to burnish her credibility as she seeks to reach crucial segments of their coalition: younger and left-leaning voters who Democrats fear might stay home, many out of fury at the party’s support for Israel in its war in Gaza.
“We elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and we get to see another day in our democracy,” she said Friday night during a stop at Penn State.
It is a role that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. But the democratic socialist who once chastised fellow Democrats for offering voters “10 percent better from garbage” and worried they cultivated “too big of a tent” appears ready to show a different side of herself: pragmatist.
In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she was motivated by several factors: the urgent threat that she believes former President Donald J. Trump poses to American democracy, the challenge of standing up a presidential campaign in just a few months and “a certain understanding” she had developed with Ms. Harris, a fellow woman of color.
She recalled that Ms. Harris, then a California senator, had been among the first people to call her after a Republican congressman called Ms. Ocasio-Cortez “disgusting” and cursed at her on the Capitol steps in 2020. (The congresswoman declined to detail her more recent conversations with the vice president, but acknowledged that “there are certain things I don’t love” about her campaign’s positions, including an embrace of cryptocurrency.)
She also pointed to something simpler: Unlike other Democrats, Ms. Harris had asked for help.
“When I first arrived in 2019, there was an enormous amount of hostility from the party establishment,” she said. “For a very long time, it felt like we were speaking to a wall when we said we can’t take the party’s base for granted.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez backed Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primary four years ago and made waves when she said that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.” Come the general election, she served on a task force meant to bridge party divisions, but never officially campaigned for Mr. Biden.
When he entered the White House, though, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Biden’s willingness to engage with the left and to initiate what she called a shift away from Clinton-style triangulation politics focused on adopting Republican positions.
The results were appealing. She did not get the Green New Deal, but Democrats worked with Mr. Biden to pass the most ambitious climate legislation in American history.
This year, she wasted little time endorsing Mr. Biden, and was one of the loudest Democrats saying he should stay in the race. She believes Ms. Harris shares his values.
Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Ms. Harris who previously worked as a top aide to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, called her “a powerful messenger” whom the campaign was glad to have on the trail.
Still, there are limits to the thaw, and risks for each side.
Ms. Harris has no plans to appear with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez before Election Day. Republicans continue to use the congresswoman and the leftist “squad” she leads in the House as potent foils, featuring them prominently in ads this fall that try to portray Ms. Harris as an apologist for antisemitism.
For Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, embracing her party’s nominee has alienated some of her earliest supporters on the left. The national leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America pulled its endorsement this summer. An organizer for the group in New York City wrote an essay in The Nation calling the congresswoman’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which she said Ms. Harris was working “tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza,” a “betrayal” of their movement.
Yet her new role has allowed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to take her vision of politics to places that previously shut her out, and has given Democrats like Ms. Harris a messenger who can reach corners of the electorate that others cannot.
At Penn State, the largest university in the largest swing state, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez recalled her own feelings of “deep cynicism” when she worked as a waitress without health insurance, wondering whether politics was “just all a foregone conclusion.”
Indulging that question, she warned hundreds of students in a packed theater near campus, would only empower Mr. Trump and work against the most vulnerable, the cease-fire movement and a host of other progressive policy positions.
“I need us to understand that our responsibility here is real,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “When I say ours, I mean ours. I mean this room, and I mean young people specifically.”
“Voting,” she added, “is not like something you wear. It’s not a personal expression. It’s about setting conditions, and it’s about who I want to be wrestling with.”
There have been other changes. This spring, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez donated $260,000 to House Democrats’ campaign arm, the first contribution by a lawmaker who once vigorously opposed its candidates in primaries. Behind the scenes, she and fellow New Yorkers formed a “Dems Glow-Up Committee” to recommend improvements for Democrats’ ground game in key House races.
In another first, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez joined Representative Pat Ryan, the sort of swing-seat Democrat who historically has been afraid to appear with her, to campaign in New York this month. The two hugged onstage.
The congresswoman’s appeal is “a commodity that she has, and she’s learning how to use it and exploit it,” said Joseph Crowley, the high-ranking Democrat whose primary loss to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 shook the political world.
“That’s how you make friends, by being willing to expend some of that capital,” he said. “It’s not so much a game. It’s real life, and I think she gets that.”
In the interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez rejected the idea that her approach to politics had fundamentally changed. In her view, many in her party had placed too much emphasis on her ideology and missed the pragmatic streak that helped her get elected in the first place.
“It is something people got wrong about me from the beginning,” she said. “The fact of the matter is, a waitress doesn’t unseat a 20-year incumbent by accident. It took very calculated decision-making and hard work over the course of two years.”
She has taken a similarly frank tone on the campaign trail.
When she headlined a rally for Mr. Ryan at the State University of New York at New Paltz, dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators greeted her, chanting “A.O.C., you can’t hide, you’re leading genocide,” and “no justice, no votes.”
Inside a lecture hall, she acknowledged her own disappointment with the status quo, including telling hundreds of students that “we sometimes need to hold our breath.” But she also laid out a more direct case for engagement, no matter the candidate.
“For me, as a person who is deeply invested in expanding the minimum wage, in expanding union rights, in fighting for universal guaranteed health care, I know that we need to build a coalition to run the board on this,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “That’s how we do this. That is the political theory.”
The protesters locked outside probably heard none of it. But several undergraduates, who had attended despite their alarm at the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel, walked out echoing her arguments.
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