Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign in April 2017. At the time, she was working at Flats Fix, a taco restaurant in New York City's Union Square. Her campaign was small. She was the first person to run in the primary against Joe Crowley, the Democratic Caucus Chair. She did not have much money for the campaign. She said that candidates like here must have very new and different kinds of campaigns and cannot win just by spending more money Ocasio-Cortez's campaign did not take money from big companies or rich people. She did this because it was how Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign did it. Revolutionary posters from the past inspired her campaign posters.
Ocasio-Cortez was supported by progressive and civil rights groups such as MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and Democracy for America, and by actress Cynthia Nixon. Governor Andrew Cuomo, both of New York's U.S. Senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Planned Parenthood supported Crowley. California Representative Ro Khanna at first supported Crowley, but later supported Ocasio-Cortez.
During her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez held town halls where people who lived in her congressional district would talk about political issues. She focused her campaign on Latino communities of her district and criticized ICE. Her campaign used digital political ads more than actual rallies and events. She would also go to many houses in her district and talk about her campaign in person.
On June 26, 2018, Ocasio-Cortez won 57.13% of the vote to Joe Crowley's 42.5%. "Time" called her victory a big surprise during the 2018 elections. CNN made a similar comment. "The New York Times" said Crowley's shocking loss was "the [biggest] loss for a Democratic incumbent in more than a decade." "The Guardian" called it "one of the biggest upsets in recent American political history." Crowley raised more money, $1.5 million, compared to Ocasio-Cortez's $83,000. Merriam-Webster said that searches for the word "socialism" went up 1,500% after she won. Crowley accepted his loss but did not call Ocasio-Cortez that night to wish her good luck. Many people thought he was going to run against her in the general election with a third party.
Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky wished her good luck and were happy about the results. Many people said that her victory over Crowley was like when Dave Brat, a Tea Party movement candidate, beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary in 2014. Cantor was also a longtime congressman and important Republican politician. After her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez supported many progressive candidates who decided to run against current Democratic politicians across the country.
Ocasio-Cortez won the Reform Party nomination without campaigning for it. She won it as a write-in candidate in a congressional district nearby hers. She won only nine votes. She did not accept the nomination.
Ocasio-Cortez ran against Republican nominee Anthony Pappas in the November 6 general election. Pappas is an economics professor at St. John's University. Ocasio-Cortez was supported by many progressive organizations and politicians, including former President Barack Obama and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.
Joe Crowley stayed on the ballot, as the nominee of the Working Families Party (WFP) and the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). Neither Crowley nor the WFP party campaigned in the election. Both supported Ocasio-Cortez after her Democratic primary victory. Ocasio-Cortez said that the WEP was a centrist group that supported male politicians more than female politicians. Nixon ran against Governor Cuomo in the primary for New York Governor. Former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman wanted Crowley to campaign on the WFP ballot to beat Ocasio-Cortez. Dan Cantor, Executive Director of the WFP, asked voters not to vote for Crowley if his name was on the general election ballot.
Ocasio-Cortez won the election with 78% of the vote to Pappas' 14%. Crowley, on the WFP and WEP ballots, won 6.6% of the votes. Her election was part of a larger wave of Democratic victories in the 2018 midterm elections. The party won control of the United States House of Representatives.
"The Young Turks" (TYT) was the first media network who talked about Ocasio-Cortez and give her time to talk about her campaign. After her primary win, she quickly had media attention from everywhere in the country. A rally with Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in Wichita had to be moved from a theater with a seating capacity of 1,500 when more people said they would go to the rally. 4,000 people went to the event, with some sitting on the floor. "The New Yorker" wrote that she had made Sanders's progressive ideas more popular to a larger group of people.
Ocasio-Cortez had little media attention until she beat incumbent Joe Crowley in the 2018 Democratic primary. Many people believed the media did a bad job on covering the election because no one paid attention to her primary campaign.
"The Young Turks" has defended Ocasio-Cortez from political critics.
She was one of the people talked about in the 2018 Michael Moore documentary "Fahrenheit 11/9".
Twitter user "AnonymousQ" tried to embarrass Ocasio-Cortez when they shared a video of her dancing during her college years. Many social media users defended her, and the video inspired memes. After the video was shared, Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of herself dancing to Edwin Starr's "War".
In 2019, Elizabeth Warren wrote about Ocasio-Cortez for that year's "Time" 100. In May 2019 the documentary "Knock Down the House" came out on Netflix. It is about four female Democrats, without political experience, running for Congress in the 2018 midterms premiered. Ocasio-Cortez was the only one of the women in the documentary to win their election.
In 2020, journalist Michelle Caruso-Cabrera ran against Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic primary. After Ocasio-Cortez won the nomination, Caruso-Cabrera ran in the general election as a third party candidate. Other people running against her is Republican John Cummings, a former police officer, and Antoine Tucker, a write-in.
Ocasio-Cortez's re-election campaign was mainly focusing on workplace organizing, fighting eviction, and organizing childcare.
On October 20, 2020, Ocasio-Cortez hosted a Twitch stream of the mobile game "Among Us", with fellow congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The stream had over 400,000 viewers.
On November 4, 2020, Ocasio-Cortez won her re-election with nearly 69% of the vote to Republican John Cummings's near 31%.
On January 3, 2019, Nancy Pelosi swore in Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman to become a United States Representative.
She began her career with a popular social media, having more followers than all of the newly elected congress members combined. , she had 6.3 million Twitter followers, up from 1.4 million in November 2018. She passed Nancy Pelosi's number of followers. By July 2019 that had risen to almost 4.8 million, or about seven times the population of her congressional district. She had 2.2 million Instagram followers, and 500,000 followers on Facebook when she began. Some Representatives asked her to teach them social media lessons when she arrived in Congress.
In an interview Ocasio-Cortez said she had stopped using her private Facebook account and was not using all of her social media accounts as often. She believes that social media is not healthy for the public.