Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (; born October 13, 1989), also known by her initials as AOC, is an American democratic socialist politician and activist. She became the U.S. Representative for New York's 14th congressional district in 2019. This includes the eastern part of the Bronx and parts of north-central Queens in New York City. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic Party's primary election on June 26, 2018, when she beat Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley. Her victory was a surprise and many saw it as an upset victory. In November 2018, she would go on to win the general election. She beat Republican nominee Anthony Pappas.
At age 29, she became the youngest woman to become a member of the United States Congress. She is well known for her use of social media. She studied international relations and economics at Boston University. She worked for Bernie Sanders's first presidential campaign as an activist. She also worked part-time as a waitress and bartender before running for Congress in 2018.
Ocasio-Cortez is one of the first female members of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to Congress. She is a progressive and supports Medicare for All, federal jobs guarantee, a universal basic income, and the Green New Deal. She also supports ending the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, free public college and trade school, and a 70% marginal tax rate for incomes above $10 million.
Early life
Ocasio-Cortez was born into a Catholic family in the Bronx borough of New York City on October 13, 1989. She is the daughter of Blanca Ocasio-Cortez (nee Cortez) and Sergio Ocasio. She has a younger brother named Gabriel. Her father was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican family. Her mother was born in Puerto Rico. She lived with her family in an apartment in the Bronx neighborhood of Parkchester until she was five. Her family later moved to a house in suburban Yorktown Heights.
Ocasio-Cortez went to high school in Yorktown Heights. She graduated in 2007. In high school and college, she was known as "Sandy." She came in second in the Microbiology category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Her microbiology research project was about the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of the nematode C. elegans. MIT Lincoln Laboratory named a small asteroid after her because of her science project. In high school, she took part in the National Hispanic Institute's Lorenzo de Zavala (LDZ) Youth Legislative Session. She later became the LDZ Secretary of State while she attended Boston University. Ocasio-Cortez had a John F. Lopez Fellowship.
In 2008, while Ocasio-Cortez was a sophomore at Boston University, her father died of lung cancer. After he died, Ocasio-Cortez had many legal problems to settle his estate. She has said that the experience helped her learn how attorneys are corrupt. She said that they make themselves rich while their clients, like families, were being ignored.
During college, Ocasio-Cortez was an intern for U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. She said that she was the only Spanish speaker at the office. Ocasio-Cortez said that because of this, people would talk to her about ICE and deportations.
Ocasio-Cortez graduated cum laude from Boston University with a BA in 2011. She majored in international relations and economics.
Early career
After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx. She began working as a bartender and waitress to help her mother pay for their home. She later created Brook Avenue Press, a publishing company that printed positive stories about the Bronx. She also worked for the National Hispanic Institute.
During the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Ocasio-Cortez volunteered for Bernie Sanders's first presidential campaign. After the general election, she traveled to places like Flint, Michigan, and Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota by car. She spoke to people affected by the Flint water crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline. While in Standing Rock, she said her trip there was an important reason why she ran for Congress. Before that, she believed that the only way to run for office and win was to have money and power. In North Dakota she saw others "putting their whole lives and everything that they had on the line for the protection of their community". This was the reason for her to begin to work for her own community. One day after she visited North Dakota, she got a phone call from Brand New Congress. They were looking for progressive candidates. Her brother had nominated her soon after the 2016 election.
2018 campaign
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.
Primary victory and reaction
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.
General election
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.
Media coverage
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 September 2021, Ocasio-Cortez went to the 2021 Met Gala. Ocasio-Cortez wore a long white dress with the phrase "Tax the Rich" painted in red on the back of her dress. As an elected official in New York City, she was a guest of the museum and she did not have to buy a ticket, which costs at least $35,000. Many people, both conservative and liberal, criticized Ocasio-Cortez for attending an event where guests were not required to wear masks.
2020 campaign
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%.
United States representative, 2019-present
Time in office
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.
Ocasio-Cortez is a member a group of new progressive members of Congress called "The Squad" along with Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). In July 2019, President Donald Trump attacked the Squad in a tweet, saying that they should "go back and help fix" the countries they came from instead of criticizing the American government. Ocasio-Cortez replied that "the President's words [yesterday], telling four American Congresswomen of color "go back to your own country," is [the] language of white supremacists. We don't leave the things that we love, and when we love this country, what that means is that we [find] the solutions to fix it."
Trump falsely said that she called "our country and our people 'garbage'"; she had actually said that Americans should not be happy with average ideas that are "10% better from garbage." Trump also falsely claimed that she said "illegal immigrants are more American" than Americans who tried to keep them out. She actually said that "women and children on that border that are trying to [find] refuge and opportunity" in America "are acting more American" than those who tried to keep them out.
In January 2020, Ocasio-Cortez created a political action committee called Courage to Change. Courage to Change was created to help progressive candidates running for office.
In February 2021, Ocasio-Cortez helped raise money to give food, water, and shelter to Texans affected by the power crisis. She was able to raised $2million on her first day of raising money and $5million by February 21. The money went to organizations such as to state and local food banks. Ocasio-Cortez also traveled to Houston to help volunteers with recovery.
On November 5, 2021, Ocasio-Cortez was one of six House Democrats to vote against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, because she did not support the Build Back Better Act.
In 2023, Ocasio-Cortez was among 56 Democrats to vote in favor of H.Con.Res. 21, which directed President Joe Biden to remove U.S. troops from Syria within 180 days. Ocasio-Cortez was among the 46 House Democrats who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.
Arrival
In November 2018, on the first day of congressional orientation, Ocasio-Cortez was part of a climate change protest outside of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office. Also that month, she supported Pelosi becoming Speaker of the House. She said would support Pelosi if Pelosi "remains the most progressive candidate for speaker." She also said that all the other candidates for speaker were more conservative than Pelosi was. Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives after the Democratic Party gained the majority.
In December 2018, Ocasio-Cortez went to an event for new members of the House hosted by the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She wrote on Twitter about the effects of business interests by groups such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies: "Lobbyists are here. Goldman Sachs is here. Where's labor? Activists? Frontline community leaders?"
In January 2019, when she made her first speech on the floor of Congress, C-SPAN tweeted the video. Within 12 hours, the video of her four-minute speech set the record as C-SPAN's most-watched Twitter video by a member of the House of Representatives.
Hearings
Ocasio-Cortez questioned the ethic regulations that both the president and members of Congress had during a congressional hearing in February 2019. She said that no laws that stop politicians from taking money from rich business people. With more than 37.5 million views, the clip became the most-watched political video posted on Twitter.
When President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen was at a Congressional hearing in February 2019, Ocasio-Cortez asked him if Trump rose property values for bank or insurance purposes. Cohen said that Trump may have done tax evasion and fraud in his personal and business tax returns and real-estate documents. The New York Times supported her because she asked specific questions for a specific answer.
Media coverage
According to reports in March 2019, Ocasio-Cortez continued to get media coverage early in her congressional career similar to a 2020 presidential candidate. She was called one of the best known Democratic politicians and one of the most talked-about politicians in the United States. Between July 8 and July 14, 2019, she had more social media attention than any of the Democratic presidential candidates, with news articles on Ocasio-Cortez had 4.8 million views, while no Democratic presidential candidate got more than 1.2 million.
Ocasio-Cortez has been talked about many times on Fox News, being mentioned every day from February 25 to April 7, 2019, for a total of 3,181 mentions in 42 days. CNN found that from January to July 2019, she had nearly three times as many mentions on Fox News as on CNN and MSNBC. In a CBS News poll of almost 2,100 people found that more Republicans talked about Ocasio-Cortez than Democrats. She was very unpopular among Republicans and very popular among Democrats.
In March 2019, PolitiFact reported that she is "one of the most targeted politicians for hoax claims, despite the fact that she just entered Congress as a freshman." Fake quotes, fake photos, and false rumors about her have spread on social media.
On July 18, 2019, Charlie Rispoli, a police officer from Gretna, posted on Facebook a threat to shoot her. He called her an "idiot" who "needs a round, and I don't mean the kind she used to serve" as a bartender. Rispoli posted the comment in response to a "fake news" article that falsely quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying "We pay soldiers too much." Rispoli was fired for his post and his Facebook account was deleted.
Green New Deal
On February 7, 2019, Ocasio-Cortez wrote her first piece of legislation, the Green New Deal, and sent it to the Senate. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts supported the deal, laying out the main ideas of a 10-year economic plan that would slowly remove fossil fuel use. The plan would create jobs and boost the economy. The first version of the Green New Deal wanted the completely stop using fossil fuels. The plan set a goal of having the United States "creating 'net-zero' greenhouse gases in 10 years." Ocasio-Cortez said that "We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren't sure that we'll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast."
Ocasio-Cortez wanted a marginal tax as high as 70% on income above $10 million to pay for the Green New Deal. Tax experts said in The Washington Post, that this tax would bring in more money of $720 billion every ten years. She used the Modern Monetary Theory as a reason for higher deficits to pay her agenda. She said that the Green New Deal needs a large amount of money like President Franklin D. Roosevelt's original New Deal during the Great Depression.
Not one Republican supported the Green New Deal. The plan had support from some Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker. Other Democrats, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not support it. Pelosi called it "the green dream, or whatever they call it."
On March 26, Senate Republicans called for an early vote on the Green New Deal without letting anyone talk before the vote. Senator Ed Markey said Republicans were not being serious about voting for the Green New Deal. In protest, Senate Democrats voted "present" or against the bill, resulting in a 57-0 defeat on the Senate floor. In March 2019, a group of activists, inspired by Ocasio-Cortez, in the United Kingdom wanted the Labour Party to create a similar plan, "Labour for a Green New Deal."
In May 2020, Ocasio-Cortez was picked by then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to be in charge of his climate task force. Ocasio-Cortez would help Biden's campaign talk about climate change related problems and solutions.
Name calling incident
On July 21, 2020, Republican Representatives Ted Yoho and Roger Williams had angrily yelled at Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the Capitol. Yoho called her "disgusting" and told her, "You are out of your freaking mind". They were mad at Ocasio-Cortez after she said that poverty and unemployment were the reasons for an increase in crime in New York City during the coronavirus pandemic. Ocasio-Cortez told Yoho he was being "rude". A reporter who heard the conversation said that as Ocasio-Cortez walked away from Yoho into the Capitol, Yoho called her a "fucking bitch".
When asked about the incident, Ocasio-Cortez said, "That kind of [event] hasn't ever happened to me ever... I've never had that kind of abrupt, disgusting kind of disrespect [aimed] at me". Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did not support Yoho's actions and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that Yoho should apologize publicly.
On July 22, Yoho talked about the event on the House floor and, without naming Ocasio-Cortez, said he had not addressed the "offensive name-calling words" to any congress members directly. He apologized for the conversation and said "having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I'm very [careful] of my language".
On July 23, Ocasio-Cortez responded to Yoho's comments. In a speech she criticized male privilege, sexist behavior and culture, and violent language against women. She also criticized Yoho for "hiding behind his wife and daughters" in his speech the day before.
2020 Democratic National Convention
In early August 2020, two weeks before the 2020 Democratic National Convention was to be held, people began to say that Democrats were not going to let Ocasio-Cortez speak at the convention. On August 10, the Democratic National Committee said that she would speak at the convention on the second day on August 18. The same day, she formally nominated Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Online harassment from Paul Gosar
In November 2021, Representative Paul Gosar shared a video parody of the opening for the anime series Attack on Titan on social media. He had edited with the faces of Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Biden, and himself on the show's characters, showing Gosar attacking them with swords and killing Ocasio-Cortez. Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted the U.S. House to investigate it as a threat. Pelosi said that the video is "a danger that it represents to everyone in the country".
When Republican House members did not want to criticize Gosar or the video, Ocasio-Cortez said that she believed the video was "part of a pattern that normalizes violence". She gave a six-minute floor speech, saying, "This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar. This is about what we're willing to accept". The House voted to censure Gosar, in doing so it became the first time the House censured a Representative since 2010.
Committee assignments
Committee on Oversight and Accountability (Vice Ranking Member, 2023-present)
Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services
Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs
Committee on Natural Resources
Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources (Ranking Member, 2023-present)
Political views
Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and supports the democratic socialist name of the group as part of her political beliefs. In an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, she said that democratic socialism is a "part of what I am. It's not all of what I am. And I think that that's a very important [difference]." During an interview on PBS, she was asked if democratic socialism would to end capitalism, and she answered: "we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see a [change] in our economic system of an [unknown level], and it's hard to say what direction that that takes."
Ocasio-Cortez supports progressive policies such as single-payer Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and trade school, a federal job guarantee which would make sure states would hire unemployed workers, the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion student debt, supporting family leave, ending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private prisons, creating safer gun-control policies, and energy policy that would use 100% renewable energy. She told Anderson Cooper that she supports policies like those in United Kingdom, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.
Ocasio-Cortez supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential election and appeared with him at campaign rallies. In January 2020, she and director Michael Moore replaced Sanders at a rally at the University of Iowa while he was at the Senate's impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
Ocasio-Cortez wants more environmental politicians in Congress. She called climate change "the single biggest national security threat" for the United States and the world". With the United Nations saying that the effects of climate change cannot be fixed until carbon emissions are slowed down in the next 12 years. She said that the younger generation would suffer from the effects of climate change.
Ocasio-Cortez supports ending the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. She compared the agency to the Patriot Act and to a paramilitary-like agency. In June 2018, she said she would support ending the agency and she would rather "create a pathway to citizenship for more immigrants through decriminalization." She later said that this does not mean ending all deportations. Two days before the primary election, she went to a protest at an ICE child-detention center in Tornillo, Texas. She was the only Democrat to vote against H.R. 648, a bill to fund and reopen the government, because it would give more federal money to ICE.
Ocasio-Cortez supports moving to a single-payer health care system. She said that medical care is a human right. In September 2019, she created an anti-poverty policy proposal that would make the cost of childcare, health care, and "new necessities" like Internet access when measuring poverty. The proposal would stop rent prices going higher and create better ways for people with convictions and immigrants to have social welfare programs.
Ocasio-Cortez is a supporter of LGBTQ rights and equality. She has said she supports the LGBTQ community and thanked its members for their role in her campaign. In January 2019, she gave a speech in support of laws needed to keep LGBTQ rights in jobs and everywhere in the country. She also supports transgender rights and said that "trans rights are civil rights".
Ocasio-Cortez has been supportive of Puerto Rico. Ocasio-Cortez did not approve of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to Hurricane Maria. She believes the federal government should pay more attention to Puerto Rico.
Awards
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory named the asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez after her when she was a senior in high school because she finished in second-place in the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. She was named the 2017 National Hispanic Institute Person of the Year by Ernesto Nieto. In 2019, She received the Adelle Foley Award. She was named as one of the 2019 BBC 100 Women.
Personal life
After the death of Ocasio-Cortez's father in 2008, her mother and grandmother moved to Florida because of money problems. She still has family in Puerto Rico, where her grandfather was living in a nursing home before he died during Hurricane Maria.
Ocasio-Cortez talked about her Catholic faith and why it is important for her life and her campaign for criminal justice reform in an article she wrote for America. At a December 2018 Hanukkah celebration in New York, she said that she has Jewish ancestry, although she does not practice Judaism.
During the 2018 election campaign, Ocasio-Cortez lived in Parkchester, Bronx, with her boyfriend, web developer Riley Roberts. In April 2022, Ocasio-Cortez became engaged to Roberts.
In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez was named as one of the 2019 BBC 100 Women.
In 2020, Ocasio-Cortez was a guest judge on an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race.
In February 2021, Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she is a sexual assault survivor while responding to how she felt during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol. That same year in May, Ocasio-Cortez said that she has been in psychotherapy because of the events of the United States Capitol. She said she "did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive".
In March 2021, Ocasio-Cortez was name one of the least wealthy members of the Congress, with a net worth of $30,000.
Electoral history
2018
2020
2022
Notes
References
Other websites
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez official House website
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's file at Politifact
1989 births
Living people
United States representatives from New York (state)
American political activists
American progressives
American socialists
Democratic socialists
American Roman Catholics
BBC 100 Women
American columnists
American LGBT rights activists
Writers from the Bronx
Politicians from New York City
Democratic Party (United States) politicians
21st-century American politicians
Twitch (service) streamers
Socialists