“Impossible is nothing,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd of more than 12,000 in deep-red Idaho. The crowd was 20,000 strong in Utah the day before, and the New York Democrat would help draw over 30,000 to a rally in a Trump-won California district the day after, as she crisscrosses the U.S. with Senator Bernie Sanders on his “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.”
“Don’t let them trick us into thinking we are enemies,” Ocasio-Cortez told the packed Ford Idaho Center in Nampa. “We are one.”
The rousing message made it into a 90‑second video of the event—shared on X last week—which pulled in 8.5 million views and reignited an old question: Could the youngest woman ever elected to Congress become the youngest person ever elected president?
Ocasio-Cortez, who has represented New York’s 14th congressional district since 2019, told reporters it was “just a video,” but 2028 noise is already buzzing among social media pundits and political analysts.
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“She is running and she is going to be more formidable than some Democrats seem to think,” said media commentator Chris Cillizza in a post responding to the viral X video.
With more than three years until the next presidential election, announcements for 2028 contenders are still distant, and Democrats must reflect on their 2024 defeat to President Donald Trump. Whether Ocasio-Cortez could emerge as the next leader of the Democratic Party, and go on to win a general election, however, depends on internal party divisions and competition from other candidates as well as the extent to which America can stomach a progressive candidate.
Newsweek contacted representatives for Ocasio-Cortez by email to comment on this story.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Grows in the Polls
If the former bartender from the Bronx does decide to run, she will first have to convince Democratic voters in what is likely to be a crowded primary.
Pollster Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, argued earlier in April that Ocasio-Cortez’s youth and media savvy could make her a strong 2028 candidate, although he cautioned that she might choose not to run. Ocasio-Cortez is 35 years old now, the minimum age required to be eligible for president.
Recent polls reflect a growing appetite among Democrats for Ocasio-Cortez’s candidacy. A Quantus Insights survey of 700 Democrats found her to be the second-choice candidate for 2028 with 14 percent support. She was behind former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November and got 30 percent in the Quantus poll. The poll was conducted between April 21 and April 23 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent.
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William F. Hall, adjunct professor at Webster University, told Newsweek that Ocasio-Cortez poses a “serious threat” for the nomination, citing her “huge rally turnouts” and strong poll numbers. Jacob Neiheisel, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo noted that her prospects hinge on how Democrats interpret their 2024 defeat—whether they believe Harris being “too moderate” hurt the party or not.
“In the wake of a loss, parties tend to ‘double down’ on whatever strategy they had in the previous campaign,” he said. “Typically, this means being more conservative or more liberal if the perception among insiders is that they weren’t sufficiently ‘pure’ enough to excite the base. It’s not clear what Democrats are thinking on this dimension. If the internal narrative is that Harris tried to be too moderate, then someone like AOC might have some appeal. I simply don’t know where the party is in terms of the narrative that they are constructing surrounding Harris’ loss.”
AOC Faces Same Challenges as Bernie Sanders
While there has been much soul-searching and analysis about Harris’ election defeat, according to polling conducted after the election by J.L. Partners for DailyMail.com, the two main reasons the then-vice president lost was because of voter’s reticence to elect a woman and because of economic concerns.
Thomas Gift, a political scientist who runs the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London (UCL) agreed and said Ocasio-Cortez was likely to come up against opposition similar to the opposition Sanders faced when he ran for the Democratic nomination.
In 2016, the Independent from Vermont garnered around 19 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. He dropped out in 2020 after receiving over 1,000 delegates.
“AOC is a celebrity with a near cult following,” Gift told Newsweek. “However, the same problem that Bernie Sanders ran into is the one AOC will run into if she aspires for the White House. It’s hard for a quasi-avowed socialist to win a national election in the U.S. America remains a center-right country, and that’s not changing anytime soon.
“While AOC clearly speaks to the populist, left-wing base of her party, it remains unclear whether she widen her circle of support and pick off a certain fraction of former Trump voters and moderate Democrats. In a Democratic primary, she’ll be picked apart for fringe views on a litany of cultural issues and her big government approach to policymaking.”
Ocasio-Cortez would likely be up against a host of moderate Democrats, including several prominent state governors, such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
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If Ocasio-Cortez wins the Democratic nomination, she will then face the electorate at large and run for president against the Republican nominee—likely to be Vice President JD Vance.
A Siena College poll of 802 New York state voters found that 21 percent of Republicans now view her favorably—up from just six percent in 2019.
Neiheisel said this “could just be a reflection of greater familiarity with her in the state” or because New Yorkers might “see her as one of the more reasonable” members of the so-called “squad”, a group of progressives in Congress.
And a Gallup poll in January suggested she had a net favorability rating of -10 percent among Americans, suggesting her popularity is far from assured.
Thomas Whalen, an associate professor who teaches U.S. politics at Boston University, told Newsweek Ocasio-Cortez was too progressive to win over the electorate.
“AOC has as much chance of winning the White House as the Las Vegas Raiders have in winning the Super Bowl, which is to say none at all,” he said.
“Her progressive stances on the economy, women’s reproductive rights, immigration and healthcare will not appeal to swing voters in the battleground states, especially more traditionally conservative suburbanites.
“Also, as two of the last three presidential elections have shown, slightly left of center female nominees are not electable due to traditional culturally biased attitudes against women in positions of high authority.
“It’s the last political frontier or, to be more precise, the last glass ceiling to be overcome.
‘Do Not Underestimate AOC,’ Republicans Warn
Mark Shanahan, an expert in American politics at the University of Surrey in the U.K., said Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t play as well with “older, more centrist Democrats” and is seen as radical by some states where “Democrats have to appeal to the center-right as much as the center-left.”
“The USA is an inherently conservative capitalist country and therefore it will always be hard for a true progressive to win the middle ground to a necessary extent to win the White House,” he told Newsweek.
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But some conservative voices are sounding alarms about Ocasio-Cortez’s potential.
“Just a word of warning to the Republicans, to my party, do not underestimate AOC, she’s young, she’s vibrant, she’s attractive,” former Trump Treasury official Monica Crowley told Fox News last November. “I think she’s wrong on everything, but she does have real grassroot support. And all the energy and activism in the Democrat party remains with the revolutionary left, of which she is a part.”
“She’s going to run and her message of economic populism is more powerful than people are giving her credit for,” conservative political commentator Meghan McCain predicted earlier this month.
Money could tip the scales. Ocasio-Cortez raised approximately $15.16 million during the 2023–2024 election cycle for her 2024 congressional reelection campaign, according to Federal Election Commission data. The average for House members that year was $3.31 million, according to OpenSecrets.
And in the first quarter of 2025, Ocasio-Cortez achieved her strongest fundraising quarter to date, bringing in $9.6 million from 266,000 individual donors, with an average contribution of $21.
If successful, she would become the first female president of the United States, and the youngest ever person to hold the office. A President Ocasio-Cortez would also beat the record for the U.S. president with the longest surname in history. That polysyllabic distinction currently belongs to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served in office between 1953 and 1961, and whose last name contains 10 letters. Two fewer than Ocasio-Cortez.