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The election was decided more than four months ago and the next one is years away, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in full campaign mode when she took to the stage in Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon.
“Are you ready to fight? Are you ready to win?” she shouted to a capacity crowd of more than 3,000 people. “We’re gonna take our country back.”
Ocasio-Cortez traveled across the country to join her political mentor Bernie Sanders on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that will hit several states this week.
They are visiting Nevada, Arizona and Colorado over the next few days, where they will hold rallies and “hold town meetings with working people,” Sanders announced this week.
“We are here together because an extreme concentration of power and corruption is taking over this country like never before,” the New York congresswoman told the crowd, before taking aim at Elon Musk and his efforts to cut government spending.
Sanders has been drawing thousands to his rallies on this tour, which has taken him from Kenosha, Wisconsin to suburban Detroit and out to Nebraska. In hitting the road and talking to voters while Democrats in Washington are soul searching, he has taken on the leadership of the anti-Trump resistance, such as it is, the second time around.
Now, he has a partner.
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It is not unusual for the progressive pair to hold events together, but coming at a time of deep crisis for the Democratic Party, when its leadership is facing growing anger over its inability to oppose Donald Trump’s agenda, and when calls for a new direction are becoming harder to ignore, their message feels pointed.
It comes just a week after the party’s ostensible leader, 74-year-old Chuck Schumer, helped Republicans pass a spending bill that almost all Democrats opposed, allowing sweeping cuts expanding Trump’s power to control government funding.
Ocasio-Cortez came out as one of Schumer’s strongest critics, calling his move “a tremendous mistake.”
Democratic voters — from moderates to young voters to progressives — were already frustrated at an apparent lack of action in response to Trump’s brazen first months in office. Schumer’s decision added to the outrage.
Democratic lawmakers faced down angry constituents at town halls across the country.
In Las Vegas on Thursday, a man in the crowd summed up the mood not long into AOC’s speech when he shouted: “Primary Chuck!”
The devastating election loss and the party’s failure to find its footing since have sent it into a spin that it has struggled to control. Its approval rating hit an all-time low this week in a national NBC News poll, with just over a quarter of registered voters (27 per cent) saying they have positive views of the party.
Meanwhile, the same poll found that Democratic voters’ appetite for compromise is vanishing. In 2017, 59 per cent of Democrats said they wanted congressional Democrats to work with Trump to gain consensus on legislation, with 33 per cent saying they should stick to their positions even if it meant stalling things in Washington.
That sentiment is now reversed. Some 65 per cent of Democrats say they want Democrats in Congress to stick to their positions, and just 32 per cent want them to make compromises with Trump, according to NBC.
In other words, Democrats are eager for someone to take the fight to Trump.
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That may explain another poll of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents that found Ocasio-Cortez narrowly leading on the question of which political leader “best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party.”
Ten percent said Ocasio-Cortez, 9 percent said former Vice President Kamala Harris, eight percent said Sanders.
There is a parallel here to another political moment — if not in policy, then in fervor. The Republican Tea Party movement that came to life following the election of Barack Obama was fueled by anger from the party’s base. It was grassroots and decentralized.
It came to be known for its extreme methods to oppose Obama’s policies — a lesson many Democrats would clearly like to draw from today — and it created a blueprint for how the Republicans could harness anger among its base into electoral success. It produced young luminaries like Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who now occupy the highest rungs of the GOP.
Years later, that energy would shift into the MAGA movement, and to the White House.
Could these two insurgents of the left be on the verge of their own takeover?
It’s a curiosity of the Democratic Party that it only feats leaders who are too young or too old to be president. Eighty-three-year-old Sanders, who started this tour on his own before Ocasio-Cortez joined him, may have missed out on his shot, but he seems more relevant now than he has in years.
The next election will be the first time 35-year-old Ocasio-Cortez will be eligible to run for president. She would certainly be a longshot candidate, but her name is increasingly in the conversation, and she is currently front and center in articulating the anger many in her party feel about Trump’s presidency.
“We need a Democratic party that fights harder for us,” she said at the rally, as the crowd looked back to her.
