In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez revealed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she approaches the biggest crossroads of her political career.
“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she said. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is now in her eighth year representing parts of the Bronx and Queens. She could simply keep winning re-election. But in 2028, she has two other choices: run for the White House, or seek the seat now held by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.
“Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby.
At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy.
“I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.”
“Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress as a left-wing outsider and remains one of the party’s most progressive voices. Some party strategists are urging Democrats to move to the middle. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was heartened by “the ascendance for the first time” of progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who toppled big-money candidates in this year’s Senate primaries.
“I have a tremendous amount of fear over the corruption of our political system,” she said. [...]
‘Everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?’
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knows that broaching the roles of race and gender in politics can be unpopular, even unappealing. “I often hesitate to even talk about it,” she said, “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.”
She is talking about it anyway.
“If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of running for president as a woman. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?”
She described the gender gap as a fact of American electoral politics: Roughly 27 percent of Congress is female, she said, and 0 percent of past presidents.
It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.
“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”
She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”
“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said. [...]
Why a White House run would be ‘very all or nothing’
Back in May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went viral for an answer she gave at a forum with David Axelrod, the onetime adviser to former President Barack Obama, in which she said her ambitions were not a “title or a seat.”
“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”
Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he believed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez when she spoke about her motivations.
“She is very honest in her communications. It’s what makes her disarming,” he said. “Her bottom line is producing something for the people she’s fighting for, so I think this decision is partly seen through that prism.”
In her interview with The Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeated variations of that line about her lack of interest in “my title.” But she also expressed a keen awareness of the realities that House members must seek re-election every two years and that losing would mean being out of office entirely.
“It’s very all or nothing,” she said. “If I were to run in this cycle, and not win, I would be done.”
“And I am not opposed to that,” she added. But it was also a consideration. “That, in and of itself, does not exclude the decision,” she finally said. “But it has to make it worth it.”
by Shane Goldmacher, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
[ed. In a heartbeat. It's hard to imagine what a 'normal', boring government might feel like again, led by someone who actually came from middle class and cares about everyone.]
