Holding a gold microphone and wearing a seafoam-green pantsuit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez energized the San Antonio crowd with her vision for flipping the state of Texas to Democratic control.
“It will happen,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a rally earlier this month. “The only question is when, Texas.”
As the crowd cheered, she added: “The work that you put in today, the work that you put in tomorrow, the work that you put in on Monday – when you go one more door when you’re tired, when you make one more call when you feel exhausted, you’re bringing that day one day sooner.”
The progressives in the audience roared in response, hanging on to her every word.
Four years after bursting on to the national political stage with a shocking primary victory over a long-serving House Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez is using her substantial political influence to promote progressive candidates and policies.
Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign in 2018 was largely dismissed as a pipe dream, but the leftwing New York congresswoman is now impossible to ignore.
Just this month, the New Yorker interviewed Ocasio-Cortez about the fight for voting rights and her role as a progressive icon, while the editors of New York magazine are releasing a book documenting her rapid rise in Democratic politics.
As she makes headlines, Ocasio-Cortez has continued to use her massive social media following and her significant campaign war chest to advance her leftist policy agenda.
With Democrats bracing for a potentially disastrous midterm season, the congresswoman’s actions on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill make it clear that she will continue to be a dominant force for the progressive movement. There seems to be no question now: AOC is here to stay.
Earlier this month, she pursued the bold strategy of trying to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had voiced opposition to the proposed ban, and Ocasio-Cortez’s tactics seemed aimed at forcing the hand of Democratic leadership. (Pelosi has since struck a more open-minded tone about the ban on members’ stock-trading.)