AOC Is Damaged Goods

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demurred when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked her if she was prepared to run for president in 2028. “I’m focused on winning the midterms,” she replied. But she was quick to admit that she hadn’t “ruled out the possibility.” Neither have Democratic primary voters.

 

In the extremely preliminary polling of the 2028 Democratic primary electorate, the self-described socialist from New York typically trails better-known candidates like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and even Pete Buttigieg. On the eve of the “invisible primary,” however, in which presidential candidates corner donors and influencers in advance of a campaign, the oddsmaker Kalshi has put Ocasio-Cortez in the pole position in the race for the party’s presidential nod.

 

AOC is enjoying a boomlet, but she’s got a lot of work to do if she’s going to translate that enthusiasm into national momentum. Echelon Insight’s latest survey found that just one-third of respondents have a favorable outlook toward Ocasio-Cortez. Forty-three percent view her unfavorably. Nearly one-quarter of respondents are either neutral on AOC or have never heard of her.

 

The congresswoman’s opponents will bombard those open-minded voters with information designed to boost AOC’s already disproportionately high negatives. They’ll have plenty of material to work with. Partisan Democrats may have forgotten all the baggage Ocasio-Cortez will lug with her into the campaign season. Perhaps they could use a refresher.

 

Ocasio-Cortez was a passionate supporter of the “defund the police” craze right from the start. Within days of George Floyd’s 2020 death, she described herself as an advocate for stripping the NYPD of its budget, which “costs us books in the hands of our children.” And she wasn’t dealing in metaphors. “Defunding police means defunding police,” she said in a statement. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”

 

She seemed to relish the degree to which her advocacy antagonized the very voters she must court if she’s going to win the White House. AOC expressed her contempt for those in her party attempting to refurbish her “defund” rhetoric to make it more “palatable for largely affluent, white suburban ‘swing’ voters.” Indeed, to make her vision manifest, she asked those despicable Americans to endure hardships. “What are you willing to sacrifice to make sure that overfunded police departments are defunded?” she asked America’s voters. It turned out that the answer was “nothing.”

 

The “defund” mania of 2020 is now in bad odor among Democrats with any sense. But the passions that animate the activist class today have recast their hostility toward federal immigration enforcement in a more flattering light. It’s a presentist bias, however, to conclude that what animates Democrats today will appear wise two years from now. For all the public’s distaste for Donald Trump’s imperious approach to immigration enforcement, voters approve of his efforts to close the border. Those voters will soon learn that AOC does not and never has.

 

In her first campaign for Congress, she called the existence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “moral problem” due to its “fascist” origins. It was a product of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 reforms and is, therefore, tainted in the same way that “the Patriot Act, the AUMF,” and “the Iraq War” were. ICE is an expression of America’s inherent racial hostilities, she added — an expression of a “policy based on racial exclusion” that is at “the very bedrock of U.S. immigration policy.” True to her convictions, AOC cosponsored legislation that its advocates correctly said would “decriminalize unauthorized border crossings” as well as “ban local law enforcement” from supporting federal immigration enforcement initiatives or housing detained migrants.

 

At the time, the Washington Post was curious. “Nobody knows how ‘abolish ICE’ plays politically,” it observed. But within a couple of cycles, we did. “No one should say ‘defund the police’ ever again,” then–Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger told her colleagues in an angry call following a disappointing election cycle for Democratic House candidates in 2020. “Nobody should be talking about socialism.”

 

By then, AOC had already left a bright-red socialist mark on her party. She was perhaps the loudest advocate for what she called the “Green New Deal” — landmark legislation that attracted more than 60 cosponsors in the House and was endorsed, in whole or in part, by eight of the Democratic candidates who sought the White House in 2020. But the GND wasn’t just a “climate thing,” according to AOC’s chief of staff at the time, Saikat Chakrabarti. Rather, “we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” He wasn’t kidding.

 

The ambitious ten-year plan called for the shuttering of every fossil-fuel power plant in America, the refurbishing of the nation’s energy grid and water-related infrastructure, the elimination of all greenhouse-gas emissions produced by transportation, the truncation of America’s industrial agriculture sector down to “local-scale,” and the renovation of “every residential and industrial building” in America.

 

A humiliating companion document that burst into flames upon contact with the broader American electorate explained that the Green New Deal would retire the internal combustion engine and replace air travel with “high-speed rail at scale.” Of course, “guaranteeing a job” to “all people of the United States” would have to be part of this initiative, just as “free college” and taxpayer-funded job training must accompany the GND’s economic disruptions. And to compensate for the public’s impoverishment, the government would of course provide a “universal basic income” to all — even those who are “unwilling to work.”

 

To socialists and Democrats alike, all that seemed reasonable at the time. In our era, it seems just as reasonable to echo the progressive left’s monomaniacal hostility toward Israel. But just as the Green New Deal soured with age, it’s easy to envision a future in which it is all but universally acknowledged that, when it came to Israel, the far left got out over its skis.

 

AOC accused Israel of executing a “famine that is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance.” It turns out that, if there ever was a famine, much less an engineered one, the Palestinians managed a miraculous recovery (ten months after the end of major combat operations in Gaza, Palestinian children are today afflicted with “obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4 percent of children under the age of 5”).

 

“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes,” she said in the same speech. Her eyes, however, were and remain closed to the preponderance of evidence that refutes her charge. “I believe we have crossed the threshold of intent,” she told CNN. “Starving a million innocent people to death by halting and slowing U.S. humanitarian assistance is a massive, deliberate choice.”

 

It’s unlikely that AOC has revised her outlook. She didn’t need evidence to allege that Israel is a genocidaire, just as she didn’t need it when she accused Israel of being an apartheid state in 2021. “Apartheid states aren’t democracies,” she observed. True enough. Presumably, the full rights of citizenship enjoyed by Israel’s substantial Arab population, some of whom are members of Israel’s national legislature, render the Jewish state a full-fledged democracy in AOC’s own formulation. Much like her fellow Democratic Socialists, AOC has never reconciled her prejudice with the observable reality of life inside Israel.

 

The same could be said for AOC’s economics. At a time when “60% of American workers make less than $40,000 a year, billionaires shouldn’t exist,” she wrote at a time when Democrats were debating whether they should expropriate all or part of the wealth amassed by America’s most successful. It was pure demagogy — avarice masquerading as a policy preference. It isn’t “that all billionaires are immoral,” she said. But “a system that allows billionaires to exist” sure is. What else could she mean but the Constitution and its jealous protections for property rights?

 

AOC’s distaste for the engines of wealth creation has downstream effects. Just ask the Brooklynites whom she saved from “displacement” by blocking the development of Amazon’s East Coast headquarters in her district. She succeeded in scuttling that project. Amazon’s HQ2 went to Northern Virginia, after which the online retailer went on a hiring binge. Since 2018, “Amazon has invested more than $2.53 billion in capital and created nearly 8,500 jobs at HQ2,” the company notes. That’s precisely the kind of “help” from a government agent of which Ronald Reagan warned us.

 

AOC made headlines in her interview with Karl, not for flirting with a presidential bid, but for laughing off the excesses of what she called “Woke 1.” She hopes you’ll forget that she was an eager advocate for those excesses. Indeed, she has demonstrated throughout her political career a fatal weakness for the latest progressive intellectual fad, the more impractical the better. Call that a deficit of wisdom and prudence or simple naiveté — neither is a desirable trait in a president.

 

AOC may try to divorce herself from her old views. Like other DSA types, she’ll contend she underwent a conversion, but she cannot retail a persuasive conversion narrative if one doesn’t exist. Ocasio-Cortez is a true believer. And if she runs for president, voters are going to become intimately acquainted with what she believes.