The Hill Floats AOC as Potential 2028 Presidential Candidate

“She and the ‘squad’ started pushing too hard, too fast,” another strategist told the Hill. “D.C. doesn’t work that way. And our party doesn’t work that way. We need to get back to the basics.”

Ocasio-Cortez represents a deeply progressive faction of the party, as the strategist pointed out, and Vice President Kamala Harris, the most progressive and radical presidential nominee in history, notably lost the election to President-elect Donald Trump earlier this month in a landslide.

Many, including some Democrat strategists, are pointing to the left’s radical progressive policies as factors behind the loss.

Democrat Strategist Julie Roginsky told CNN’s Newsroom days after the election that Democrats have trouble communicating with “normal people.” She pointed to the left’s use of the term “Latinx,” which was created to describe Latinos and Latinas without assigning sex, as one example:

You know, I’m going to speak some hard truths to my friends in the Democratic Party. This is not Joe Biden’s fault. It’s not Kamala Harris fault. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault. It is the fault of the Democratic Party in not knowing how to communicate effectively to voters. We are not the party of common sense, which is the message that voters sent to us. For a number of reasons, for a number of reasons, we don’t know how to speak to voters. When we address Latinos — and language, and language has meaning — we address Latino voters as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say when normal people look at that and say, ‘Wait a second, I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns.’

After Harris’s loss, Ocasio-Cortez took a different route and pointed to “misogyny” among voters as one potential factor behind Harris’s loss.

“This race may not have been decided by any one individual factor, but misogyny is very, very real in this country,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a November 6 live stream obtained by the Daily Caller.

“As another widely known woman of color in office, you know, I knew that sexism and racism were real, but it was not until I got subjected to a national stage that I actually was shocked at how bad it is,” she added.

Along with Ocasio-Cortez, Parnes tabbed Harris, Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), JB Pritzker (D-IL), Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and outgoing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as possible 2028 Democrat candidates.