AOC for President?
This week the University of New Hampshire published a poll that surveyed their residents’ presidential preferences for the 2028 election. The leading candidate according to their data is …. wait for it, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Sandy garnered 22% of those polled while former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg got 21%, and former Vice President Kamala Harris was at 5%. This poll more than anything reported lately reflects the sorry state of the Democrat party.
An early Ocasio-Cortez presidential campaign is rooted in the fact that she is famous, young, blessed with a J-Lo like figure and fluent in the idiom of the Left. The Democratic Socialists of America’s answer to Miss America. One can imagine Senator Bernie Sanders singing her praises like the long-departed Bert Parks did during the halcyon days of that famous pageant.
What the American people need to understand is that we don’t need an Instagram influencer, masquerading as a member of Congress, whose previous vocation was giving advice to drunks during her days as a New York bartender and cocktail slinger. This is a woman who said Venezuela was below the equator and offered the following brilliance in a recent interview. She said the United States Senate “was founded on, uh, you know, Jim Crow.” Her exact statement (Jim Crow laws came 174 years later courtesy of the Democratic Party).
History is clearly difficult for her, yet she claims to have graduated with a degree in International Relations and Economics from Boston University. Living proof that her degree should have been in Attendance. Yet this one-time beverage dispenser is being touted as “presidential timber”. She wouldn’t make a good toothpick. How did this happen?
In the summer of 2018, almost no one believed an unknown Democratic Socialist could win the democratic primary. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave up her promising career as a bar counselor and decided to run for the House of Representatives, specifically the14th Congressional District of New York. All she had to do was defeat Rep. Joe Crowley, a 10-term incumbent, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, and a man many imagined as a future Speaker. The 28-year-old former bartender and was initially a huge underdog. Joe didn’t even campaign. AOC did the impossible. Her base showed up and voted. Joe’s supporters napped.
American socialism has produced alluring figures. More than a century ago, Eugene V. Debs won nearly a million votes in the 1912 Presidential election. In its heyday his Socialist Party sent members to Congress, elected more than a thousand officials, and governed cities. Now thanks to AOC’s enormous social media presence many Americans under 35 tell pollsters they view socialism favorably, and the DSA has grown to more than 120,000 members. Yet, unlike Debs’s labor-based socialism, today’s version remains disproportionately young, urban over-educated with useless degrees, and downwardly mobile
Given their anger about their lot in life, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Sandy Cortez have pulled this hardened generation into supporting the populist Left and built a massive following among young Americans. They believe in on Medicare for all, all things Green and increased government control of the engine of capitalism.
On their well-publicized “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in 2025, Sanders and AOC jetted around the Nation on a private plane, even visiting hard core Republican strongholds like Utah and Idaho. This odd couple drew some surprisingly large crowds in places the Democratic Party had long abandoned, more than 12,500 in Nampa, Idaho, and 20,000 in Utah.
Ocasio-Cortez has access to crowds and a party. She belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America which ties her to their particular worldview, a near Marxist ideology, and a history of mass failure wherever socialism has become the principal government. She lives like landed gentry as much of her contemporaries do, Bernie with his Dacha, Zohran with his Ugandan estate, Pocahontas Liz Warren and her Boston mansion.
AOC is an attractive millennial with a powerful surface appeal, her long sleek Raven hair and red lipstick but she’s no Kennedy or Truman or Roosevelt. This TikTok socialist and her fellow travelers never fail to disappoint when confronted with serious questions. The only answers that the Bernie Bunch has is wealth confiscation, relentless punishment of job creators’, and uncompromising punishment of innovators.
That never achieves anything other than stifling growth and opportunity, because the socialists aren't really interested in growth and opportunity, what they are interested in is gaining power by any means necessary even if it means creating chaos in the process.
The Nation doesn’t need Sandy Cortez at the helm. She should stick to putting cooking videos on her Instagram account and leave governance to those who actually passed eighth grade American history.
Wise up Citizens of New Hampshire….and America.