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24 March 2025 - 6:30pm
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not yet on her way to becoming the Democratic Party’s next presidential nominee. But the 35-year-old New York congresswoman is positioning herself well for a run. Bernie Sanders, the 83-year-old Vermont senator who was the standard-bearer for the party’s Left wing in 2016 and 2020, has all but officially designated Ocasio-Cortez his heir. Under the banner of “Fighting Oligarchy”, the two have been holding rallies together which draw crowds of impressively presidential proportions. On Friday, more than 30,000 people turned out to hear them in Denver.
Sanders, of course, fell short of winning his party’s nomination on the two occasions that he ran for president. At the time, his fellow Democrats believed that his Left-wing brand of populism would bring defeat. Is Ocasio-Cortez now giving them a reason to change their minds? Still in her mid-thirties, she would bring much-needed youthful vigour to a decaying party, but her prospects for 2028 depend less on whether she’s a better messenger than Sanders than on whether the time has come for their message.
Donald Trump showed what Right-wing populism can achieve. Should Democrats have faith that Left-wing populism can do as well or better? Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris both lost to Trump by running as anti-populists, upholders of elite respectability in the face of a challenge to the establishment. Joe Biden campaigned that way, too — and won. But in retrospect, his success in 2020, not Trump’s in 2016, appears to be the exception.
In fact, populism, broadly understood, has an impressive record and in recent decades has twice rescued Democrats from their doldrums. Bill Clinton styled himself as a populist when he defeated President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Barack Obama’s political inexperience wound up being a strength, rather than a liability, when he took on Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and subsequently won the White House. In short, Americans like political outsiders.
What they don’t like, however, are ideologues. Rather than subscribing strictly to any particular ideology, many voters simply dislike much of the country’s leadership class in politics, business, and culture. Campaigning against those leaders is therefore a good starting point. Voters want more economic opportunity for themselves, so populists who promise not only to make the country richer but to share the wealth more widely tend to receive an eager hearing. Given how off-putting undiluted Left- or Right-wing ideology is for the average American, though, populism cannot afford to be too philosophical. After all, too much consistency in applying abstract principles leads to political positions which strike the average American as perverse.
Trump understood all this intuitively. He denounced the leadership of both political parties and much of American society, not even sparing the military. He promised to bring back jobs, and this promise — rather than the fine details of how it would be fulfilled — was what voters responded to.
With Republicans now in power, Democrats have an opportunity to stand as an anti-establishment party. If Ocasio-Cortez can convince voters that her economic message is based around common sense rather than ideological Leftism, she may be able to outflank the 2028 Republican nominee, who will be in the position of having to defend whatever condition the economy is in by then.
The final lesson of successful populism will be the most difficult for AOC, however. Not only must she avoid the extremes to which Left-wing theory leads — on gender, immigration, and defunding the police, for example — she also must be seen to rebuke the ideologues on behalf of ordinary people, the way Bill Clinton rebuked the anti-cop “Sister Souljah” wing of his party and Trump often defies the strictures of movement conservatism.
Without the good luck of a bad economy and an appeal to voters’ common sense, AOC is unlikely to go any further than Bernie ever went. Yet she’s young and knows the road back to power for Democrats begins with denouncing establishment politics and promising Americans a better deal. And if Ocasio-Cortez is too much a prisoner of progressive ideology to capitalise on the opportunity she recognises, someone else — seeing what works for her as well as what doesn’t — will soon enough become the Democrats’ answer to Trump.
