In many ways, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is more a professional fundraiser than a lawmaker.
Since taking office in 2019, her campaign committee has raised more than $37 million, and she claims on her website to have raised an additional $11 million for state-level campaigns, politically-aligned nonprofit organizations, and other causes.
However, Ocasio-Cortez has always refused to donate even a penny to the House Democrats’ campaign arm… until this month.
On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez gave an interview confirming her $260,000 donation to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
Ocasio-Cortez, a self-declared socialist, hasn’t always been a team player. She won her first election as an outspoken critic of the Democratic Party’s leadership. She scored an upset victory against incumbent Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranked Democrat in the House. During Crowley’s lame-duck period, Ocasio-Cortez even heckled incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi inside Pelosi’s own office.
Now, the socialist superstar has made a shocking about-face.
Ocasio-Cortez has defended her now-cozy relationship with the Democratic establishment by pointing to personnel changes in the House Democratic Caucus. She pointed to Pelosi’s decision to retire the House speaker’s gavel and to take her two longtime deputies with her.
“If we take a look at it, we have the entirety of House leadership has now changed,” Ocasio-Cortez told The New York Times in an interview. “We’ve exerted a lot of our power through our existing channels… Now it’s time to assert our influence in larger institutions, including the D.C.C.C.”
She also claimed to have forgiven the DCCC for allegedly establishing a now-defunct blacklist of vendors associated with her first primary campaign.
“We spent a lot of time, since first coming into office in 2019, working to change this institution,” Ocasio-Cortez said of the DCCC. “And we have successfully done so.”
Still, not everything has changed.
With some swing-state Democrats likely to refuse her donations, Ocasio-Cortez has earmarked her six-figure donation specifically for the Democrats’ Voter Protection Program. According to one review, she’s become the first member of Congress to give money to a program for poll observation and voter registration.
In other words, Ocasio-Cortez still aims to “turn out the base” instead of meeting the median voter on his or her own terms.
Plus, Ocasio-Cortez announced an even larger donation — $500,000 — intended for other self-declared socialists facing primary campaigns.
In the end, Ocasio-Cortez hopes for her $260,000 donation to go toward installing House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries as House speaker. She called this goal the “foundational element” of her new decision.
She made a point to scaremonger about current House Speaker Mike Johnson’s potential to delay the certification of election results.
“I don’t know if Mike Johnson has it in him to defend our democracy against a threat like that,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. “The entire country saw a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol that was predicated on not certifying the duly submitted results of a presidential election… And if anybody thinks that that was not a dress rehearsal for what they may try to attempt in January of 2025, I’m sorry to say, but I think that’s a very naïve assumption… This party has turned into a party of Trumpism and it has turned into a cult of personality.”
The Horn editorial team