Is She a New Star or Just Young and Naive Politician (CAUTION: LONG TEXT)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born and raised in the Bronx. Her father was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican family and became an architect, while her mother was born in Puerto Rico. She built her program on an ultra-left program: state health care (Medicare) for everyone, guaranteed jobs and housing, control over the sale of arms, the dissolution of the U.S. immigration policy, tight regulation of Wall Street. Ocasio-Cortez made a preelection video in which she was born in a working-class family that her Zip code determines fate that people like herself have no chance of even trying to get elected. The video quickly gained immense popularity.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez focuses on the areas where there is a more mixed population and she gains success in the places that are in the process of being gentrified, where newer people are moving in. Like Trump, she is elected to support vulnerable segments of the population - without higher education, the working class, many without work, barely making ends meet. Only Trump voters are White America of the Rusty Belt and Midwest, while Ocasio-Cortez has Hispanics, Blacks, and Emigrants. Her voters are young generation with strong desires to help the environment. Socialist initiatives form the core of the Cortez program. In her opinion, “a system that allows people to become billionaires is immoral.”

Cortez used to work in Social Media, she knows how to speak to the young generation. Cortez, who, unlike her older colleagues, discovered Twitter about the same time she came to politics, understands the power of social media. If war for the presidency is not won in them, then influence is gained. 2.6 million are now following Cortez on Twitter and about 1.8 million on Instagram and even if you subtract inactive users and bots, the audience will still remain not much lower than the television - and not working with it is simply shortsighted. More importantly: Cortez knows who he is talking to and in his rhetoric, he easily turns pop-cultural links. She mixes politics, policy and humor in her posts.

Statistics show that three-quarters of American Democrats, both party and non-systemic sympathizers, would readily vote for Ocasio-Cortez in the presidential election. This survey is purely speculative: due to her age, Alexandria cannot take part in either the next election or the next (she will turn 35 years old only in October 2024). But it shows that a solid part of the electorate was hungry for a new type of politician - even if he did not share all their ideas.

 Some journalists claim that she has a superpower in Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too young to be vulnerable to the traumas of the 1980s and 1990s, so she shows the evolution of democracy after them. Not only is she not afraid of an attack from the Republicans, she seeks to defend policies such as one-payer health care and significantly higher taxes for the wealthy, even though she knows that Republicans will react in horror. She is quite decisive and even aggressive toward the existing political elite, which is in opposition to the views of Alexandria Cortez.

She is quite young, she has been in the House of Representatives for only a few months. I’m not sure that she fully understands how work is organized in such a social institution as Congress. She knows how to communicate with her constituents, copes well with Social Media, but can she compete for power with experienced congressmen who hold their posts for several terms in a row. Speaking of competing for power, I do not mean the struggle for voters and popularity among the population. We are talking about informal latent connections, instruments of pressure within the institute. It's hard to say now that she knows how to influence the rest of the congressmen so that they vote for the required bills?

She does a great job in committees and subcommittees, but work in parliament requires close cooperation both within her party and with a competitive party. She had not yet made close contacts with the experienced congressmen, interest groups, lobbyists who have been working for Congress for many years, and know which congressmen can be trusted and which cannot. Also, in my opinion, it may be more difficult for her to make such contacts since she is not a graduate of the Ivy League, was not part of the aristocratic political and economic elite from childhood or youth, like some parliamentarians. She came to politics not from business or because of family, she came from civil society, from that part of civil society that does not have a lot of support from laws or business. So far, she presents too radical ideas. Perhaps they are popular among the population, but for lobbyists and interest groups it is quite dangerous since it has too strict principles. Those political and economic forces that are struggling for influence in Congress are used to negotiating, compromising, and sometimes playing a double game.

         

           To conclude, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a very strong politician in perspective. I think she will gain a lot of popularity in the future. Some people already call her an heir to Bernie Sanders. She knows how to achieve popularity among the population. He knows what topics need to be discussed, he knows how to present information and his ideas in the way necessary for the voter. However, to conduct a successful game in Congress is not enough. She did not get enough acquaintances on Capitol Hill to allow her to promote the bills she needs.