Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter
Hamby.
Tonight, some thoughts on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez paradox. A.O.C. is increasingly the focus of 2028 presidential buzz as she tours the country rallying the left against Donald Trump. But for whatever appeal she has with Democratic primary voters, she remains deeply unpopular with the broader electorate. “The country just isn’t there,” one progressive told me. Now, Republicans are preparing to make her the face of the Democratic Party
in the midterms—and they’re salivating over the idea of her as a presidential nominee. Are they speaking too soon?
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Abby Livingston
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Billionaire Peter Thiel is back in the Republican megadonor game after
sitting out the last election cycle. It’s a major turnaround for the Silicon Valley investor, who famously spent millions on Trump’s behalf in 2016 and almost single-handedly bailed out J.D. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign before retreating from the
spotlight. In 2023, Teddy Schleifer reported in Puck that Trump had called Thiel to berate him for not contributing to his campaign; Thiel responded that he was tired of being “at the center of the
hurricane.”
In any case, Thiel appears to have gotten over it. He directed a boatload of money to House Republicans over the first quarter, cutting at least $1.3 million worth of checks that will bolster the G.O.P.’s effort to hold on to the gavel next year. According to F.E.C. records, among his biggest donations was a $852,000 check to Grow the Majority, a joint fundraising committee helmed by Speaker Mike Johnson that supports vulnerable Republican incumbents,
state parties, and future House Republican nominees. Thiel also donated more than $300,000 to the House Republicans’ campaign arm, the National Republican Campaign Committee.
Thiel also cut checks to more than a half-dozen endangered House Republicans: Alaska’s Nick Begich; Nebraska’s Don Bacon; Montana’s Ryan Zinke; Wisconsin’s Derrick Van Orden; Arizona’s Juan Ciscomani, Eli
Crane, and David Schweikert; Texas’s Monica De La Cruz; and California’s David Valadao, in many cases maxing out to both their primary and general election campaign funds.
He even donated to nascent campaign funds that will be turned over to House Republican candidates after they secure their party’s nomination to face a number of House Democrats: Marcy Kaptur in Ohio; Vicente Gonzalez
and Henry Cuellar in Texas; Laura Gillen in New York; Gabe Vasquez in New Mexico; Susie Lee in Nevada; Don Davis in North Carolina; Kristen McDonald Rivet in Michigan; Jared Golden in Maine; and Adam Gray in California. All of it is hard money, meaning that it goes directly to candidates.
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Recent fawning coverage of the New York congresswoman tends to overlook
one pertinent fact: She’s one of the most polarizing and unpopular Democrats in the country, with favorables below even Elon Musk.
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In some ways, the current hype cycle around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
makes a lot of sense: There’s a leadership void in the Democratic Party, the base is hungry for guidance and new ideas, and Ocasio-Cortez is young and dynamic, a desperately needed contrast to the crusty old leaders that seem to dominate the party. She excites young people who have been tuning out the establishment for years, with a message of economic fairness and thunderous attacks against the billionaire class. She is a digital native, literate in the fast-changing vocabularies of social
media and gaming, who understands that the small screen in your hand matters more than the big one in your living room, that conflict seeds attention, and that attention is really all that matters in politics these days.
She’s also a remarkable small-dollar fundraiser, a headline act, the rare political figure on the left who can draw big crowds. Just look at her recent rallies with Bernie Sanders. Who else can pack venues like that? Not just in Los Angeles and Tucson,
mind you, but in Idaho and Montana, too. The images of these raucous rallies are made for television and algorithmic virality, offering hope to Democrats everywhere, as people in Washington debate whether Sanders is implicitly blessing A.O.C. as the next progressive torchbearer.
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These are all reasons why Ocasio-Cortez, at just 35 years old, is suddenly being
mentioned as a plausible candidate for president in 2028, a more advanced timeline than anyone in the Democratic Party would have predicted until now. The polling analysts Nate Silver and Galen Druke set off another round of A.O.C. publicity last week by ranking the New York congresswoman as their top hypothetical draft pick in the next Democratic presidential primary. Silver said A.O.C. has matured politically over the years, growing more pragmatic and less
beholden to her New York D.S.A. roots. “She is a canny politician,” Silver explained. “She is charismatic. She is one of the most visible figures in the party. The anti-oligarch message? That’s pretty relevant.”
That’s one way to think about the A.O.C. buzz. She has so many tools and talents, in a party demanding action and change, that it would be folly for her not to run, especially when the Democratic bench—at least for now—seems pretty meh. That was the Barack
Obama calculus back in 2007. But the confounding thing about A.O.C.—and a reason she is such a white-hot magnet for attention and argument—is that there are always two ways to look at her. Is she an ideologue or a pragmatist? A Squaddy socialist or a D.C. insider? A soldier or a sell-out?
So, let me present the bear case: What’s been almost totally absent from the recent presidential hype surrounding A.O.C. is any consideration of her obvious liabilities with the larger
electorate. I’ve spoken with many Democrats, elected and otherwise, who find the fawning coverage of her rallies completely blinkered. As one New York City operative told me on Monday, with some disdain: “Reporters are turning into suckle pigs at the first sight of a meaningful crowd.”
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A key fact to consider: Ocasio-Cortez, as it stands today, is one of the most unpopular
Democrats in the country. Sure, no one likes politicians these days, and about a quarter of Americans don’t have an opinion about A.O.C. at all. But among those who do, it’s bad news: 41 percent view her unfavorably, compared to 34 percent who have a favorable opinion, a recent YouGov poll found. Her net favorability is six points underwater, 18 points behind the much more popular Sanders. Plenty of other polls show the same, going back years. Right now, A.O.C.’s favorable ratings put
her below Donald Trump, below Elon Musk, and below J.D. Vance.
Charming the base isn’t enough, as one very senior Democrat in Washington told me, when the real game is winning swing voters. “Everyone in Washington gets excited looking at crowds,” this Democrat said to me on Tuesday. “But there is one test when it comes to Bernie Sanders and A.O.C.: Do they help you win a general election? Will they be invited to campaign in the Virginia
governor’s race this fall?” This person pointed out that, since Virginia is a light blue state, A.O.C. passes the test if she’s invited and fails if she isn’t—and either way, it will say a lot about her appeal. “It’s a simple test of whether this is a healthy drug that will clear the F.D.A.”
The implication—if it wasn’t obvious!—is that Ocasio-Cortez will not pass that test. One reason: Virginia’s Democratic nominee for governor, former congresswoman Abigail
Spanberger, is a loud and proud centrist who once complained angrily to House Democrats that A.O.C.’s brand of politics was toxic to vulnerable Dems in swing districts in 2020, when the party underperformed in House races. Those concerns haven’t gone away. Democrats have spent the past six months fighting over what went wrong in 2024, examining why the party has been exiled into the political wilderness. Most blame an aging and unpopular Joe Biden and
the rising cost of living. But the party has also been struggling to prove that it isn’t beholden to identity politics, language policing, and the boutique issues of the left. In swing states last year, Kamala Harris was drowned in ads showing a clip of her supporting taxpayer-funded transition surgery for prison inmates. Those ads weren’t the only reason Harris lost, but once Trump and his allied super PACs started airing the clips last October, her favorable ratings started to
tumble.
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Even if Ocasio-Cortez has gingerly tiptoed away from the more unpopular elements of
the progressive left in recent years, her digital footprint is right there for G.O.P. operatives (and Democratic primary rivals) to feast on. Any cursory glance at YouTube, Instagram, or the platform formerly known as Twitter reveals a cascade of videos showing her talking about intersectionality, defunding police departments, abolishing ICE, prison abolition, white privilege, and more. One progressive activist who has worked with A.O.C. in the past said her preoccupation with race and identity
is the key distinction between her and Sanders, and the core question swirling around whether she can appeal beyond a lefty New York congressional district. “Bernie is a class-first, class-only guy,” this person told me. “She is great on the class stuff, but how does she navigate the rest of it? She was an ‘Abolish ICE’ person. The country just isn’t there.”
This isn’t just a challenge for the left in swing states—it’s a challenge inside the Democratic nominating
process. For every primary state with a big bucket of educated white liberals, there’s also a state like South Carolina, where the median primary voter is a fiftysomething Black woman who goes to church every Sunday, didn’t go to college, and thinks more about local intersections than intersectionality. Sanders got clobbered in the South Carolina primary—twice.
There’s also the gender question. Democratic voters were enamored with Elizabeth Warren during the 2020 primary
cycle, but in Iowa at least, they got cold feet and bailed when a New York Times poll showed that she might not be able to beat Trump. Democrats have now lost twice with women at the top of the presidential ticket. Nominating a third might be a bridge too far. As one Democratic operative, a woman, told me last week: “I really love her, but I really don’t want to lose again.”
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Remember, Remember the Fifth of
November
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Ocasio-Cortez might just possess the raw talent to dance around these concerns, bend the
public narrative in her direction, forge some new kind of political coalition, or just change the conversation and win news cycles by punching Republicans directly in the face. Political identities aren’t fixed in stone—Trump’s favorable rating at the outset of his 2016 campaign was a measly 16 percent. We also don’t know
what the world will look like one year from now, let alone three. Issue sets always mutate. Maybe the country will be laboring through a second Great Depression, and any Democrat who doesn’t throw up on his or her shirt will be a shoo-in for the White House. Maybe we’ll be enduring another pandemic, or some crippling cyberattack. Or maybe J.D. Vance will be surfing a new era of MAGA economic prosperity to his first term in the White House (doubtful).
But for now, heading into the midterms
next year, Democrats might want to remember what last November felt like, because almost every Republican I talk to is absolutely salivating over the idea of running against Ocasio-Cortez. “A.O.C. is Kamala Harris without the rational centrist demeanor,” said Brad Todd, a veteran Republican operative who helped Dave McCormick win a Senate seat in Pennsylvania last year. “She’s guilty of saying all the left-wing things Kamala said, but in a more convincing way.”
I also checked in with Dave Carney, the longtime G.O.P. strategist in New Hampshire. Same vibe: “She should avoid the craps tables; taking the 20 in all the 80-20 issues is a sure loser.”
House Republicans, I’m told, are already compiling research and planning to make A.O.C. the face of the Democratic Party in their ads and messaging going into next year. “There is no bogeyman right now among the Democrats,” one House G.O.P. operative told me. “No one knows who
Hakeem Jeffries is. Pelosi is old news. Kamala won’t be super pertinent. A.O.C. going out there, it’s kind of a gift, honestly. If she continues to parade around the country getting these crowds, that is perfect footage for Republicans, because it gives us the ability to remind voters of her extremely unpopular policies.”
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