Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will probably never have a better opportunity to be elected president than 2028.
I have very little to say about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to freeze her eggs, other than to say parenthood is one of the great joys and experiences in life, and I hope she gets to enjoy that someday.
Over in the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that AOC’s video discussing her eggs is a de facto announcement of her 2028 presidential campaign: “The rollout — personal, confessional and intimate — had all the social media savvy that made her a political star. It also gets ahead of the inevitable questions about how, or if, she will have children. In short, Ocasio-Cortez has crafted a political message in which the form and content suggest that she will run as a woman but unlike how every woman before her was forced to run.”
Over in the Washington Post, our old friend Henry Olsen argues that AOC should run in 2028, because she is unlikely to ever get a better opportunity.
On Inauguration Day 2029 she would be 39, which is four years younger than the youngest-ever elected president, John F. Kennedy (Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when he took office after William McKinley’s assassination). That’s young. Won’t she still have plenty of other opportunities to run?
The problem is that if the lane is there — and I’m convinced it is — someone is going to take it. Maybe it will be Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who makes no secret of his interest in running. Maybe it will be a surprise a la Carter or Clinton. Surely one of the likely front-runners will try. But former vice president Kamala Harris has wobbled between progressivism and centrism during her time in the national eye. Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is clearly a man of the center-left. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is better known for triangulation than for standing on principle. One or more could tack leftward, but none of them can compete with AOC’s authentic devotion to her causes.
If AOC chooses to run for president, she is extremely likely to be endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and she is likely to get that endorsement early in the process. In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary – the last time Democrats had a contested primary – more than 9 million Democrats voted for Sanders, and that was with the Covid pandemic reducing turnout in the later contests. More than 13 million Democrats voted for him four years earlier, when he was running against Hillary Clinton. Polling indicates that Sanders remains one of the most popular Democrats in the country.
Inheriting the Sanders fanbase would give AOC a pretty darn solid base of support to start a presidential campaign. Even if the calendar of early states isn’t quite as Sanders-friendly as it was in 2020, you figure she would have a decent shot of winning Nevada and New Hampshire, and the recent narrow primary victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primary suggests that about half of the state’s Democrats are open to a Democratic Socialists of America-style candidate.
That doesn’t add up to a guarantee of winning the 2028 presidential primary, but it is about as good a shot as any Democrat has. If she waits another four years . . . who knows what the national political dynamics will be like?