Buzz builds around Ocasio-Cortez's future

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is helping draw massive crowds across the country as part of a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), fueling speculation about her future political ambitions.  

The two progressives have been crisscrossing the country and holding rallies in cities, most recently generating crowd sizes of tens of thousands in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. 

The excitement around the tour has led to questions about Ocasio-Cortez’s future amid signs of Democratic frustration with the party’s current leadership. 

“She represents the next generation of Democratic politics,” said Basil Smikle, former executive director for the New York State Democratic Party.  

“I think what she has been saying, either tacitly or explicitly, is that there needs to be a generational shift in the party's leadership and its message to voters. She essentially did that in her race against Joe Crowley.” 

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been traveling to cities across the country in recent weeks, holding rallies predominantly in western cities like Denver, Tucson and Nampa, Idaho.  

The tour has been billed as “hitting the road to have real discussions across America on how we move forward to take on the Oligarchs and corporate interests who have so much power and influence in this country.”  

Ocasio-Cortez is often featured at the events, which the Sanders’s team has said have attracted thousands of people, including 20,000 inside the venue in Salt Lake City alone and many thousands more in Los Angeles.  

“So many of us know what it feels like for life to be one bad day, one bad piece of news, one major setback from everything feeling like it’s going to fall apart. And we don’t have to live like this anymore, Utah!” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd in the Beehive State on Sunday. “We can make a new world, a better country where we can fight for the dignity of all people.” 

Though both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been prominent figures for years now, the rallies have taken on increased attention as Democrats have struggled to find a way to reset and oppose President Trump during his second term in office. 

They’ve also raised questions about what’s next for Ocasio-Cortez specifically — something that was on clear display during the Salt Lake City rally. 

“Now I want to say a word about my daughter,” quipped Sanders during the rally, as he held Ocasio-Cortez's hand. 

“No, I want to say a word about Alexandria,” the Vermont progressive said after a beat, “and why — why what she’s doing is so important, and here’s the story.” 

“Future president!” someone yelled in the crowd while Sanders continued, leading to cheers from the crowd. 

“I think people are mistaken if they're dismissing these crowds as like a reaction to Trump and not an embrace of, like, some unique features of who she is and the policies she advocates for,” said a person familiar with her thinking, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. 

There’s no denying that Ocasio-Cortez has been a force within the Democratic Party — whether members of the party have agreed with her or not. She made headlines in 2018 after she defeated longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), and days after her election took part in a climate change protest sit-in in Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office. 

She would go on to make a name for herself by bucking her party on key votes, like the 2019 Pelosi-backed emergency border funding bill, and criticizing its leadership over its handling of issues like Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. 

More recently, her blunt assessment of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) handling of the government funding bill — in which he initially said Senate Democrats would vote against only to later reverse his position, igniting anger within the party — went especially noticed. Even some members of the party who largely don’t agree with the House progressive have said they were keen to see her primary Schumer in 2028. 

Ocasio-Cortez has publicly shied away from talking about next steps. She told Politico in an interview last month that working to stop Republicans’ cuts and making sure that Democrats advocated for working class people were her “central focus.”

Though the rallies have generated large crowds and a lot of buzz, not all Democrats agree with the approach. Matt Bennett of the center-left Third Way expressed concern that the people attending the rallies represented the party’s “base voters” and not the kinds of voters that Democrats needed to be concerned about in future elections. 

“We gotta make sure that we're listening to them, but we need to pay more attention to the voters that we lost, the drop-off voter, the people who left the Democrats after voting for Biden and then [who] voted for Trump,” he added. “And [if] we don’t get those back, then we’re going to be in the wilderness for a long time, and those are not the people showing up at these rallies.” 

Still, even if members of the party disagree with her methods, they also see a lot of potential from her. Bennett said he hoped she would stay in the House. 

“I think she is a very, very, very effective member of the House,” Bennett said, adding that if she stayed in the lower chamber and Democrats got their majority back in the House, “she would be in position to really prosecute the case against Trump effectively.” 

Democrats say there’s a whole host of options for the New York progressive. What those moves may look like could depend a lot on how she helps the party navigate the uncertainty of its future.

“I would say, in some ways, she’s a moral compass, but also offers a — beyond the political leadership — has also a cultural appeal that most others in the party can't capitalize on, and it is because she has lived experience and the authenticity and the youth,” said Angelo Greco, a progressive operative who worked on Sanders’s presidential campaign.