Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said she will weigh the decision of whether to run for president after the midterm elections. The decision is clearly already weighing on her.
In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez revealed the electoral equations she is crunching and the mental “math” she is calculating as she approaches the biggest crossroads of her political career.
Her gender. Her ethnicity. Her electability. Her eggs. Her movement. Her moment.
“There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she said. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is now in her eighth year representing parts of the Bronx and Queens. She could simply keep winning re-election. But in 2028, she has two other choices: run for the White House, or seek the seat now held by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York.
“Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby.
At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy.
“I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.”
“Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress as a left-wing outsider and remains one of the party’s most progressive voices. Some party strategists are urging Democrats to move to the middle. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was heartened by “the ascendance for the first time” of progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who toppled big-money candidates in this year’s Senate primaries.
‘Everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?’
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knows that broaching the roles of race and gender in politics can be unpopular, even unappealing. “I often hesitate to even talk about it,” she said, “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.”
She is talking about it anyway.
“If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of running for president as a woman. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?”
She described the gender gap as a fact of American electoral politics: Roughly 27 percent of Congress is female, she said, and 0 percent of past presidents.
It’s not just that a five-second video of her adjusting her hair in the Bronx this year drew more than 25 million views on X and a tsunami of sexualized replies (“that’s the most kind of, like, brazen and obvious forms of it,” she said). It’s how “female politicians are discussed, approached, covered” overall.
“What is very odd about our political culture is that for some reason when you raise it, people just freak out,” she said. “They get so defensive at the mere suggestion that gender could play a role.”
She made plain that this was a problem “independent of ideology.”
“I experience it tremendously — from the right and from the left,” she said.
The losses of the only two women ever to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, loom large. “It may or may not be related, but I absolutely empathize with the heartbreak that people feel around that and, frankly, how those women were treated,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.
She said she had discussed the issue with Ms. Harris, who is also considering a 2028 run, but she declined to describe their private conversations.
“This country has never elected a female president. Why are we pretending that this is not a factor?” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said with a laugh. “That doesn’t make it impossible, but to act as though it’s not a factor in anything ever is really a form of, like, denialism.”
Little desire for ‘deference’
Few politicians can command public attention like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Her egg-freezing set off a national conversation about fertility. Her offhand remark on ABC News that “Woke one was crazy” spawned a thousand takes on her thinking and her party’s evolution.
No matter the size of her megaphone, it is also true that no House member has ascended directly to the presidency in modern history. (Few see any applicable lessons in the election of James A. Garfield in 1880.) Even if she is one of the House’s most prolific fund-raisers, a potential attempted leap to the White House would be essentially unprecedented.
The Senate seat in New York could be an alluring alternative.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who won her seat by toppling a powerful Democratic House leader in a 2018 primary, did not rule out the possibility of challenging Mr. Schumer — even if he helps Democrats win a Senate majority in the midterms.
“That would honestly be the best possible problem we could have as a country,” she said of the idea that a Democratic Senate majority could further complicate her 2028 choices. She added, “We’re working hard to have that problem, and I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”
Mr. Schumer, 75, has not announced his own 2028 plans.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made this much clear: She is not waiting on anyone other than herself, whether that pits her as a primary challenger to a potential Senate majority leader or to a former vice president.
“I don’t think that my decisions would come down to deference,” she said.
Why a White House run would be ‘very all or nothing’
Back in May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went viral for an answer she gave at a forum with David Axelrod, the onetime adviser to former President Barack Obama, in which she said her ambitions were not a “title or a seat.”
“My ambition is way bigger than that,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”
Mr. Axelrod said in an interview that he believed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez when she spoke about her motivations.
“She is very honest in her communications. It’s what makes her disarming,” he said. “Her bottom line is producing something for the people she’s fighting for, so I think this decision is partly seen through that prism.”
In her interview with The Times, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez repeated variations of that line about her lack of interest in “my title.” But she also expressed a keen awareness of the realities that House members must seek re-election every two years and that losing would mean being out of office entirely.
“It’s very all or nothing,” she said. “If I were to run in this cycle, and not win, I would be done.”
“And I am not opposed to that,” she added. But it was also a consideration. “That, in and of itself, does not exclude the decision,” she finally said. “But it has to make it worth it.”
A successor to Bernie Sanders?
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her mentor and ally, is 85. Many on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as his natural successor. The two politicians’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in 2025 drew huge crowds.
“These rallies were bigger than the sum of their parts,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “When Bernie was on his own, or when I’m on my own, it’s different because we have overlapping but also complementary coalitions.”
In other words, she is thinking about the political coalition of Mr. Sanders, the runner-up in the last two open Democratic presidential primaries — and how it might intersect with her own.
Mr. Sanders had advantages that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez does not. His 2016 run made him a national figure on the left before the right took to attacking him. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been a boogeywoman for Republicans almost since her arrival on the scene in 2018, and she would be the Democratic Party’s most progressive standard-bearer in decades, if not ever.
Overall, just 30 percent of likely voters nationally viewed her favorably, with 41 percent holding an unfavorable opinion.
Her democratic socialist ally, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, had a higher favorable rating, 38 percent, and a lower unfavorable rating, 33 percent. (Born in Uganda, Mr. Mamdani is not eligible to serve as president.)
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez hailed Mr. Mamdani, 34, as “an incredible political talent.”
“There are also major differences between an executive position for a municipal seat and a legislative position,” she said, which regularly sets up “conflict with your peers.”
“Of course, obviously, there are…” she paused. “I don’t know why it’s controversial to say that there are headwinds in identity and gender.”
