A lot has changed for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 10 weeks since her primary victory catapulted her from a barely known challenger to a one-woman revival of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 momentum.
“After we won, I thought it would just be a week of news, and then we’d be back to business,” says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after a rally the SUNY-New Paltz student union. “The fact that it’s just exploded to this extent is the most surprising.”
After defeating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez is running virtually unopposed in New York’s 14th congressional district. Being basically a congresswoman-elect frees her up to deploy sweeping generalizations on cable news, tour the nation to stump often inarticulately for progressive priorities, and hype statewide candidates, like Zephyr Teachout—New York’s progressive primary candidate for attorney general—who technically had top billing at the campus rally.
Watching college students react to her ascent, and to her arrival on their campus upstate, one could forget she’ll serve a district covering parts of the Bronx and Queens. Some say she seems to have forgotten it too.
For others her celebrity itself is still a local victory. SUNY student Jessica Meneses, for one, grew up in the Bronx neighborhood of Parkchester and finds Ocasio-Cortez more personally inspiring than any politician she’s encountered. “I know where she came from, I know what she stands for—and I believe she’s sincere,” Meneses says. “It’s what she has seen. You won’t understand if you don’t live there. She grew up there, too. There are some things you’ve got to be from the Bronx to understand,” she says.
Another Bronxite, Esther Joseph, 19, tells me she’s nervous to meet Ocasio-Cortez. “She’s the only person I’ve seen that represents New York City,” Joseph says with a sheepish smile. It’s a contrast to Crowley, says her friend and fellow student Michelle Javier, who hails from Harlem: “Even though he was in that district, he wasn’t in that community.” Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal, they agree, outweighs her inexperience and ignorance on the policy front—almost as though she, being a former waitress and bartender, is more a neighborly role model than a political phenom. “I’m just so proud of her,” Javier says. “Look at how she did it!”
Ocasio-Cortez is greeted with a standing ovation as she takes the stage at the student union.“What Zephyr Teachout represents is what we did in New York’s 14th,” she then says, trying to transfer enthusiasm to the candidate New Paltz voters are actually eligible to elect. Ocasio-Cortez’s political expertise pales in comparison that of Teachout, a lawyer and law professor.
“Politics is messy,” Ocasio-Cortez goes on. “Politics is hard. Because what the work of politics is, is acknowledging things as they are—and knowing the world that can be.” What the youth stand to give to their political elders, though, Ocasio-Cortez explains, is the dream of a utopia with no particular precedent: “Where we can guarantee a modern, moral and wealthy society for all people in the United States.” Whatever that means, the destination is for the youth to devise—“Young people have a special responsibility: When we show up, we change everything,” she says.They can show us how to navigate these ways. But we have to show up and bring the energy.”
Though the youth intend to change everything utterly, we need the olds, she reasons, because, “They understand the world as it is, and they understand how we can navigate within these systems.”
Teachout, who entered the race to replace Eric Schneiderman in May after he resigned in disgrace, probably counts as her fellow candidate’s—and most of this audience’s—political elder. Thus, graciously and perhaps in order to ride the Ocasio-Cortez momentum, she hands back some of the hype and recalls the momentous night of June 26: “She won big. And at that moment—I remember where I was—at that moment the whole horizon shifted in New York state,” she waxes. In the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s win, “We are in this earthquake moment. We can choose to ride it high.”
When will the Ocasio-Cortez fever die down?
Among the least smitten at New Paltz, oddly, is an actual socialist: the president of the International Socialist Club, Kieran Cavanaugh, 19, and disillusioned along with him, a potential new recruit in Alex Martino, 23. Cavanaugh says he’s pinned his hopes on a proper proletariat revolt, in the absence of which a “corporatist status quo” will always prevail—and Ocasio-Cortez, he can tell, isn’t really a revolutionary.
“Even if she were, the Democratic Party would eventually move her to the right,” he says, “It’s just what happens with every person who works within the party”—as Ocasio-Cortez had just described doing, with all her talk of “elders.” Martino agrees: Ever since Bernie Sanders lost the presidential primary, “I’ve lost trust in the system. I’m cynical,” he says, brooding.
In Delaware, rallying for Senator Tom Carper’s primary challenger, Ocasio-Cortez told one reporter she wouldn’t focus on forming a Democratic Socialist sub-caucus once in office but would set her sights on re-election instead. When I read this quote back to Cavanaugh and Martino, they wince.
Not just the line but its context made her look on the verge of selling out. Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, rebuts when I raise the critique, “I’ve only been out of the district 11 days!” But the time she’s spending outside the 14th, on doomed contests like Delaware’s, has earned her comparisons in the press to her old foe Crowley—whose chronic absence and love of D.C. made her insurgency so effective in the first place.
