AOC Grabs a Tiger by the Ears

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chose the New York Times as the venue to debut her first Senate endorsement of the 2026 midterm cycle. In its pages today, AOC threw her support behind Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed.

 

Sure, within the Democratic Party, there are “ideological differences,” she said, but all Democrats agree that we are in a moment of “existential” peril. That’s why, she said, “many people are willing to put aside differences in order to give us the best chance at winning.”

 

A lot can be said of El-Sayed’s candidacy, but the notion that he represents the Democrats’ “best chance at winning” is a stretch. Indeed, he may be the riskiest candidate in the field of mainstream Democrats vying to face the GOP’s likely nominee, former Representative Mike Rogers, in the fall.

 

Electability is not what El-Sayed brings to the table. Rather, his campaign’s selling point is that it channels the passion for “socialism” among the online left. For ambitious radicals, catering to that sentiment despite its potential electoral drawbacks is the order of the day.

 

AOC tacitly admitted as much. In her self-serving estimation, the Democratic Party cannot compete unless its candidates devote as much attention as possible to the radicals on social media. “I think we’ve now kind of crossed this Rubicon where online and digital messaging is no longer a niche,” she explained. “It is a core competency, just like any other.”

 

That’s a useful admission. It’s an implicit confession that the internet-based activist class is AOC’s core constituency, too. The extent to which the internet rewards and, therefore, encourages antisocial forms of communication is a long-studied psychological phenomenon. Being able to “message online,” as Ocasio-Cortez calls it, often entails being a jerk. And AOC is right: El-Sayed has that part down.

 

“Haley Stevens is a suit with a large AIPAC bank account, that’s it,” he told Semafor’s David Weigel, of one of his opponents. “I hope maybe they find some way to teach her how to string together two coherent sentences.” That’s the sort of pugilism that enlivens those who confuse governance with professional wrestling, many of whom consume politics as a form of entertainment. Whether it’s Donald Trump, Gavin Newsom, or the DSA activist class, dispensing with decorum for the benefit of internet-based shut-ins is not something most voters reward. A critical mass of the American electorate can be convinced to look past churlish irascibility, but they don’t endorse it.

 

Deft navigators of the online political environment also tend to align themselves with irredeemable miscreants who, in turn, reinforce the radicalism that generates attention on social media. That explains why El-Sayed maintained relations with a onetime staffer who was one of eight people indicted for harassing and vandalizing the homes of members of a Michigan-based pro-Israel organization (El-Sayed defended the accused, claiming they were being persecuted for their beliefs). It also explains why the communist influencer Hassan Piker has become a fixture at El-Sayed events. Piker’s schedule may preclude future appearances, though, as federal law enforcement has recently charged members of the group that brought him to Cuba with the allegation that their outfit is a front for Cuban intelligence.

 

Perhaps the biggest downside of being a darling of the online left is that the status can be attained only by those willing to offend a much larger number of American voters. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of voters in six battleground states found that a majority of likely voters in five of those states said the Democratic Party had leaned too “far to the left” (in Maine, a plurality said the same).

 

The Times-Siena poll dovetails with the Pew Research Center’s findings. “Many Americans — including a 56% majority of Democrats — say they neither like nor dislike political leaders who call themselves democratic socialists,” Pew found. By contrast, about one-third of Democrats told pollsters they affirmatively endorsed self-described Democratic Socialists. Likewise, a recent Marquette Law School poll found that 42 percent of Democrats viewed the DSA favorably, but only 21 percent of all American voters agreed.

 

It wasn’t long ago that Democrats committed themselves to a struggle session over how they allowed the unrepresentative online left to dominate their party at the expense of their appeal to the middle of the American electorate. Whatever lessons Democrats gleaned from that process have gone out the window amid the frantic scramble by the party’s opportunists to rush to the front of the Democratic Socialist parade.

 

AOC’s endorsement of El-Sayed is a risky gamble. The Democratic Socialists have not been at all coy about what their intention really is: capturing the Democratic Party by posing as its members, only to hollow it out from within and replace it with an unashamedly socialist political vehicle. The DSA’s activists are more likely to identify as anarchists or Marxists than as Democrats. And as the Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait found through a careful study of the far-left’s program, once the DSA has coopted the Democratic Party, the plan is to “break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die,” he wrote. “This gambit is called the ‘dirty break,’ a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin.”

 

The DSA is wagering that the Democratic Party is a spent force. It’s so bereft of a self-preservation instinct that it can be coopted from within. And yet the party is not so enervated that a more socialistic iteration of it can emerge from that hostile takeover and immediately govern the country. That’s just the sort of sprung logic to which the terminally online are inclined.

 

AOC has signed herself up for that project. Her fortunes will rise or fall with it. And if the voters in November are willing to subordinate their worries about the socialist left to their dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s GOP, history might come to regard her bet as a bold and successful one. If they don’t, Ocasio-Cortez will have put her political future in peril by associating herself with the oldest of ideological fads.