Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has done a lot of growing up in the eight years since a stunning upset catapulted her from anonymous 20-something insurgent to establishment-busting avatar of American progressivism. She is pursuing alliances across the political spectrum rather than flaming other Democrats, betting that bridge-building is a better way to expand her movement.
She would like to see the left grow up, too.
In private discussions, she has urged fellow democratic socialists to foster a “culture of welcoming” rather than of “intimidation,” mindful that even she has sometimes failed their purity-minded litmus tests on issues like the war in Gaza.
She has called for “really big carrots” to attract new allies, talking up donations to colleagues in competitive House districts who take risky progressive stances.
And as she zigzags the country campaigning for some of the most liberal new voices in politics, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken pains to present herself as a kind of friendly neighborhood lefty: She will preach warmly to the unconverted, she suggests, whether they like it or not.
“I’ve had people say, ‘Well, we don’t want you at our luncheon’ or ‘We don’t want you around here,’” she told voters in Portland, Maine, while sharing a stage with Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate. “And I’ll say, ‘That’s fine. I’m not going to stop trying to be your friend.’”
In public and private remarks, meetings with lawmakers and appearances with midterm candidates inside and outside the socialist ranks, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 37, has begun sketching her preferred vision for the left’s next phase. She hopes to nudge the rambunctious coalition in a bigger-tent direction that mirrors her own path in Congress and stands to benefit both its collective agenda and her own potential ambitions.
She has repeatedly emphasized that she did not grow up in “a leftist household” (or, occasionally, a “militant leftist family”) that busied itself with high-minded political theory, positioning herself as an authentic champion of the working class who scrubbed toilets in her youth with her mother.
As she weighs runs for the presidency or the Senate in two years, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez hopes to establish herself as broadly palatable to Democrats — recently joking (but maybe also not entirely) that “Woke 1 was crazy” — without sounding too much like everyone else.
“There are more working people in this country than there are billionaires,” she told supporters of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, last month inside a high school auditorium in Detroit, where students, exuberant grandparents and a man in an “ACTIVISTS NEVER RETIRE” shirt creaked in wooden seats. “There are more single moms. There are more working dads.”
The flourish registered, almost, as the founding sensibility of a campaign in waiting, one that might evoke and expand upon the nation’s two most electric political movements of the left in this century: the people-over-profits populism of Bernie Sanders and the more-unites-than-divides-us appeals of Barack Obama.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez appears to believe that her base is ready to hear both of those messages at once.
“A.O.C.’s possibility and challenge really exemplify that of the larger socialist movement,” said Daniel Denvir, a D.S.A. member who hosts a popular podcast for Jacobin, the socialist magazine. “She both needs to fire up and consolidate her support on the socialist left while also appealing to a broader array of liberal voters. And from nearly the beginning, there were people on the left who were in a hurry to condemn her as a sellout for no real reason.”
That posture has not always endeared the left to the rest of the political world. Despite breakthroughs in places like New York City and Providence, R.I., socialism is viewed negatively by roughly half of likely American voters, according to a recent poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena University, while 31 percent view it favorably.
Ahead of Tuesday’s elections, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seems determined to demonstrate that her reach can be wider.
She has conferred with Black civil rights leaders and “Make America Healthy Again” activists. She has boosted Democrats in red states and directed money to the political operations of non-firebrands like Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor. She has toured the Deep South and upstate New York, where she pandered without apology in a Buffalo Bills sweatshirt.
And she has campaigned especially aggressively in Michigan, where the Senate race will stand as a meaningful test of how her politics might resonate in a presidential swing state.
“She has grown,” said Representative Nydia Velázquez of New York, an early Washington mentor with whom Ms. Ocasio-Cortez remains close. “D.S.A. needs to learn something from her.”
‘I Guess I’m a Democratic Socialist’
Eight and a half years ago, the D.S.A. remained a fringe actor in Democratic politics — with some 35,000 members, less than a third of the current tally — and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez betrayed little interest in becoming its public face.
While the group endorsed her, it was seen as a junior partner in her 2018 primary success. In interviews back then, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was reluctant to box herself in. She called democratic socialism “part of what I am” but “not all of what I am,” noting (presciently) that “plenty of socialists would say I’m not a socialist.”
“I don’t read a book and then decide what I am,” she told Hot 97 that July, saying that she cared more about policies like “Medicare for all” and tuition-free college than political labels. “If that makes me a socialist, then all right, well, I guess I’m a socialist. I guess I’m a democratic socialist.”
At the same time, two powerful forces with a keen interest in her rise — conservative media outlets hoping to elevate her as a far-left boogeywoman and socialist organizers eager to claim her as their own — were repeating the affiliation often enough for it to congeal into canon: A.O.C. and D.S.A., D.S.A. and A.O.C.
“I don’t think she realized that the democratic socialist label would become such an all-encompassing label that would be so attached to her,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and a longtime D.S.A. member. “All the sudden she’s being asked to defend and be connected to a platform that I’m not sure she ever fully agreed with.”
Whatever the label, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez established herself quickly as one of the most left-wing members of Congress. She pushed the “Green New Deal.” She irritated Nancy Pelosi. She endorsed Mr. Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign just after his heart attack, which for a time helped revive his bid.
That election year, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez emphasized positions she has been less inclined to highlight lately.
“Defunding police means defunding police,” she said that June, amid the wide-scale backlash to George Floyd’s killing. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has not clarified if this stance was part of the “Woke 1” craziness she cited, borrowing the phrase from a New York City councilman, Chi Ossé. When asked about the “Woke 1” comments in Nevada recently, she said she was referring not to policies but to her hope for a progressive movement “that is not rooted in judgment, castigation or being closed off.”
Supporters say she has begun modeling what a more accommodating left might look like, at no small cost to her credibility with some elements of the movement.
During Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez mostly determined, like Mr. Sanders, that working with the White House would be better for progressives than heckling from the sidelines.
After Mr. Biden’s disastrous 2024 debate performance, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was one of the most prominent Democrats publicly arguing that he should remain on the ticket.
Perhaps her most striking turn came after Mr. Biden ended his campaign: She earned a prime convention slot, just before Hillary Clinton, to celebrate Vice President Kamala Harris.
To many within the D.S.A., Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sounded far more like a Democrat than a socialist, giving Ms. Harris political cover on a major vulnerability, the war in Gaza, with a line that continues to echo grimly in D.S.A. circles.
“She is working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said of Ms. Harris, a remark that some pro-Palestinian activists continue to find offensively misleading.
By then, the national D.S.A., which is considered less pragmatic than its New York City chapter, had already loudly unendorsed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, accusing her of “deep betrayal” and condemning her for not universally opposing funding for Israel, including its Iron Dome antimissile system, among other concerns. She has more recently sworn off sending any military aid to Israel.
To Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s defenders, maintaining credibility across the party was a requirement for an inside-outside strategy that was producing results. The Biden White House, no lefty radical’s idea of lefty radicals, had listened to their movement on issues like climate change and health care. Left-wing candidates were claiming more offices up and down the ballot, often with her help.
“My motivation is winning,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said flatly on the left-leaning podcast “The Majority Report” recently. “One thing that I don’t like to be is alone.”
‘I’m Not Asking for Freedom From Criticism’
On a private D.S.A. video call this year — a congressional re-endorsement forum during which members of the New York City chapter loaded the screen with emojis (thumbs up, thumbs down, eyeballs, Palestinian flags) as she spoke — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had a request.
“I want to be judged as a human being and as a comrade,” she said, alluding to the prolific left-wing vitriol she had often read about herself as a doom-scrolling millennial. “I’m not asking for freedom from criticism. But I think what I am asking for is to be treated as a trusted person and friend.”
While the chapter voted overwhelmingly to re-endorse her, some who know Ms. Ocasio-Cortez see a cruel irony in how pockets of the left perceive her. She has helped elevate a new class of leaders, including Dr. El-Sayed (who is not in the D.S.A.) and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York (who is) — and has occasionally suffered by comparison, in the eyes of some in the base.
Dr. El-Sayed, a student of the new attention economy whom Politico recently nicknamed “Hurricane Abdul,” has summoned a swaggering machismo that some supporters say is simply not an option for a woman in politics.
And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is less instinctively tethered to the socialist project than Mr. Mamdani, who immersed himself in D.S.A. organizing well before his mayoral run. (Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, it emerged in August, had not even paid her membership dues for years. She quickly rejoined.)
While Mr. Mamdani has not universally pleased the left, it has long grated on some Ocasio-Cortez allies that the new mayor seems to be given more deference from more of the base than she was ever afforded.
Polling suggests that Mr. Mamdani is more popular.
“Imagine A.O.C. meeting with Bloomberg or some of the other corporate type guys,” Ms. Velázquez said, referring to Mr. Mamdani’s sessions with business leaders like Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor. “She would have been vilified. I think there is a different standard when it comes to her.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s own outreach has often taken different forms, hinting at her ambitions for the movement’s expansion — and at the “carrots” she can dangle. She recently poured $1 million into a political account for Dr. El-Sayed after sending $300,000 to help Democrats in New York.
She has advised activists to “grow movements instead of gate-keep them,” and cautioned supporters to consider the many areas where President Trump remains more popular than the Democratic Party and “work with that reality.”
Her wider endorsement slate has spanned from Tom Perriello, a former Virginia congressman running in a right-leaning House district, to Angie Nixon, a Florida state representative who is seeking to become the state’s first Black senator.
Ms. Nixon is among several Black leaders with whom Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has cultivated or deepened relationships ahead of the midterms — and ahead of 2028, when the Democratic presidential primary might well turn, as it often has, on which candidate performs best with Black voters.
“She’s really working to make sure the North and the South are connected,” said Justin Pearson, a state representative in Tennessee running for a House seat.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who introduced Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in August at an anniversary rally for the March on Washington, said he had found her much more accessible than some of her ideological peers.
“She’s done something that a lot of D.S.A. people have not done,” Mr. Sharpton said, “which is reach out into communities that may not necessarily be supportive.”
For years, the left could be an almost consciously lonely place, exemplified by Mr. Sanders’s proudly iconoclastic monologues about millionaires and billionaires at the Capitol.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s appearances with Mr. Sanders last year on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour were rich with generation-bridging symbolism. But in some ways, the final days of her midterm travel have doubled as a next step: persuading audiences that there is nothing radical or doctrinaire about these beliefs.
“Good schools is not communism,” she said on Tuesday night at a “Boricuas for Angie” event with Ms. Nixon in Kissimmee, Fla. “Funded hospitals is not communism.”
A responsive government, she concluded, was neither extreme, nor outlandish, nor “out far left.”
And with that she introduced Ms. Nixon, who recently joined the D.S.A.
Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting from New York City.
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