The False Promise of AOC

As Trump’s aggressive start to his second term continues unabated, many Democratic voters have begun imploring their party to punch back. Last month, several party lawmakers received an earful from angry constituents at their town hall meetings. CNN reported that Arizona’s two U.S. senators were told to “fight dirtier” and “get in the mud” against Republicans, while one Maryland man said to his congressman, “We want you to show some of the backbone and strategic brilliance that Mitch McConnell would have in the minority.”

One target of their ire has been Chuck Schumer. The Democrats’ leader in the Senate rebuffed calls last month to force a government shutdown, which many in his party had pined for in hopes of stymieing Elon Musk and DOGE’s efforts to gut the federal bureaucracy. This refusal infuriated the party’s base. In response, progressive activists and even some House Democrats called on Schumer to step down from his leadership post, arguing he was incapable of leading the party at this moment.¹ His counterpart in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, has also faced pressure to do more to oppose Trump.

Frustrated Democrats who see a leadership vacuum have begun rallying around a pair of familiar faces: Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). Over the past month, the duo has been traversing the country on a “Fight the Oligarchy Tour,” which has received real, grassroots support. One rally in Denver saw an eye-popping 34,000 people turn out—more than even Kamala Harris drew at her pre-election Houston rally with Beyoncé. They have used the tour as a platform to go after, among others, Musk for his cuts to the social safety net.

Sanders and AOC’s message—increasingly embraced by others like Senator Chris Murphy and Congressman Ro Khanna—has clearly resonated with not just the Democrats’ left flank but even some of their more mainline voters. And while it appears Sanders’s career in politics will come to an end at the end of his term, when he’ll be 90 years old, his millennial partner’s political future has become a hot topic in recent weeks. Will she primary Schumer in 2028? Would she even take the bolder step of running for president?

But before Democrats crown AOC as their future standard-bearer, they should examine just how broad her appeal really is.

There are certainly some encouraging signs. Last cycle, for instance, her congressional district swung rightward at the presidential level by more than almost any other. Yet, she did better than most New York Democrats up and down the ballot in her deep-blue district, thanks at least in part to support from working-class voters who also voted for Trump.

There’s no question that she has endeared herself to Democratic voters. A February Gallup poll put her net favorability among Democrats at +61, with fully 66 percent viewing her favorably against just five percent who viewed her unfavorably. A recent Morning Consult survey showed her in a three-way tie with Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom at five percent support for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination (behind only Harris and Pete Buttigieg), while Democrats in a CNN poll from earlier this month listed AOC as their top choice when asked which party leader they feel “best reflects the core values” of the party (though she came in at just ten percent). More recently, the progressive polling firm Data For Progress released a poll showing her leading Schumer in a hypothetical 2028 New York Senate matchup by 19 points.

Despite all this, AOC also has considerable vulnerabilities. While she fares well among her own voters, her appeal to the broader electorate is much more muted. The same Gallup poll found her favorability underwater among all Americans, with just 30 percent viewing her favorably against 40 percent who viewed her unfavorably. She faces a similar dynamic in her home state of New York. In the 2024 election, only around 40 percent of all New Yorkers said they viewed her favorably, despite fully 54 percent of the state’s electorate identifying as Democrats.

One likely reason for this is that, unlike Sanders, a liberal stalwart who has held a near-monomaniacal focus on economic fairness throughout his career, AOC has picked high-profile culture war fights from the left, which Sanders largely avoided throughout his career. For example, she has vocally supported (or at least defended) controversial policies like abolishing ICE², defunding the police, doing away with private health insurance, and even abolishing prisons. This reflects much of the case that Trump made against Harris to great effect last year. Helping his cause were video clips of Harris espousing similarly controversial views, which exist in abundance for AOC.

One way AOC hopes to break through to a wider audience is by following the formula she has laid out in her recent tour with Sanders: enthusiastically embracing economic populism. As a recent New York Times interview said of her thinking, she “believes her party can come together around fighting for the little guy and gal, a core value she insists does not belong to any particular ideological camp—or at least shouldn’t.”

This sentiment would no doubt resonate with many voters, and party hopefuls are wise to speak to it. But an embrace of economic populism alone, with a focus on “oligarchs” and corporations, is unlikely to be sufficient. As my TLP colleague John Halpin has written:

Bashing corporations and the rich can only do so much, and may not work at all depending on the specific audience. Working-class voters today are much more interested in getting ahead in life with help, not hindrance, from both the private sector and the government.

He also noted that in a 2024 survey of battleground state voters,

working-class voters express the most enthusiasm for a host of proposals that go well beyond traditional left-populist ideas. Three-quarters or more working-class voters support policies like making it easier for people to start a business, creating more alternatives to college, reducing the federal budget, building more housing and other infrastructure, tackling high medical costs, reinventing government, lowering taxes, and increasing military investments. Strong support ranges from 46 to 56 percent on each of these issues.

Similarly, my colleague Ruy Teixeira has observed that the roots of populism run deeper than just attitudes about economic well-being:

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power.

A fixation on economic populism risks missing the cultural dynamics animating voters’ populist resentments, and AOC’s culture war fights are bound to leave many of them questioning whether she truly represents disillusioned working-class voters in more than economic terms—or whether she’s simply part of the educated elite. Enough voters decided last year that Harris belonged to the latter camp. Before following AOC into the future, Democrats would be wise to ask themselves whether her economically populist rhetoric will be enough to make voters in, say, Michigan or Pennsylvania overlook her past left-wing views and proximity to the party’s professional-class base.

1. Schumer has rejected those calls.

2. Her campaign website even added swag in support of the cause.