Since she hit the scene a year and a half ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been the hottest commodity in liberal politics — and no one knows that more than AOC.
The first-term congresswoman has no intentions of hanging out in the House of Representatives, representing the people of the Bronx forever. Her team has been plotting and planning a big future, and they just let her next big move slip out.
Is she planning to run for president?
Yes, her aides said, making a stab at the White House “has been a topic of conversation among her advisers,” reports New York Magazine… but she can’t run for another four or eight years. And if she runs, she’s too young to serve: The Constitution says all presidents must be 35 years old. She just cracked 30.
But she has another problem: She doesn’t have four or eight years to make a move. She might have only one.
Thanks to socialist policies like the ones supported by Cortez, New York state has been losing population faster than any state other than California.
A whopping 1.4 million people have fled the tax-raising, police-bashing policies of the state since 2010, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy.
That’s a problem for New York — and an electoral headache for AOC, because the state will lose representation in Congress… and her House seat could be on the chopping block.
Lawmakers in Albany might just gerrymander her into a less friendly seat against a more popular incumbent to get her out of their hair.
The fact that she might have to face another Democrat in 2020 could explain why she refused to make donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as all House members are expected to do: She’s afraid she’ll be funding her own opponent.
But Cortez is a typical politician. Now that she’s tasted power, she’s never giving it up. She just needs to run for another office.
She thought about running for mayor of New York City, a huge office with a national platform, but she “decided against it,” the magazine reports. The office is currently held by a socialist, Bill de Blasio, and being mayor didn’t help his failed presidential hopes at all.
Instead, she will probably announce a campaign for the U.S. Senate against another fizzled presidential hopeful, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, in 2024… or she could take on the state’s other senator: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the most powerful man in the body next to Mitch McConnell.
Schumer’s up for re-election in 2022 — so AOC could drop out of her House race and spend the next two years doing what she does best and campaign in the liberal media.
If she does that, she might just get a lot of help from an unexpected source: the Republican Party.
Every election, the two parties try to go after each other’s leaders. The GOP took out former Senate leader Tom Daschle, and the Democrats have all their fire trained on McConnell’s Kentucky seat.
Sending the other party’s leadership home is a party goal… and sometimes they help primary challengers.
The Republicans would like nothing more than to see Chuck Schumer driven out of office, especially after he spends the coming days trying to impeach President Donald Trump.
If Cortez won, it would be a major coup and set her on her way to her real goal of becoming president of the United States.
She turned heads recently when she turned a campaign speech away from Bernie Sanders and onto herself.
“I know, and we all know, that this isn’t just about Bernie Sanders,” she told the crowd. “This is about a movement that has been decades in the making.”
She and Sanders draw huge crowds—at least, for Democrats—and she has been moving his cult of Bernie Bros into her own support column.
She gave a speech without him, in Spanish, in the swing state of Nevada.
The president of California’s Young Democrats said AOC “has gripped the attention of fellow
millennials across the country. The Green New Deal has changed the conversation on environmental action in the Democratic Party.”
AOC has taken on Mayor Pete Buttigieg for saying the party should tack to the center to win national elections.
Buttigieg later shot back, “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have values and give a damn.” It wasn’t the first time they’ve tussled: Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg got into a back-and-forth about small-dollar fundraising in October.
AOC and Mayor Pete “are fighting generationally for the direction of the party,” a Sanders insider told Politico.
Even Sanders’ backers asked, if Bernie loses this campaign, “who builds that coalition moving forward?”
AOC wants that label for herself. She’s stumping harder than Bernie to keep the White House buzz going. But she needs somewhere to rest until then.
Chuck Schumer’s seat may be her next stop. And, as crazy as it sounds, don’t be surprised if the Republican Party helps put her there.
Via HornNews
