Normally, a primary win is just the first half of a campaign. But, in a deep blue metropolis like New York, where roughly 80 percent of the electorate votes on the Democratic line, Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Crowley made her a presumed congresswoman. The long-shot win combined with her youth and the sharply opinionated, made-for-social-media quality of her campaign ignited a political supernova.
Throughout the rest of her election and her first year in office, liberal and conservative media elevated her into a main character in the ongoing political soap opera. She did the late-night talk show circuit and made the cover of Time magazine. Clips of her grilling witnesses in congressional hearings racked up millions of views online.
By the fall of 2019, Ocasio-Cortez’s star had not stopped rising. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the man who helped inspire her campaign, was at a low point.
After his electrifying 2016 primary campaign and Clinton’s humiliating general election defeat, the left had high hopes Sanders would run again. “Bernie,” as his armies of online supporters insisted, “would’ve won.” It became a recurring taunt to the Democrats who had denied him the nomination.
Sanders and his supporters believed it would be different this time. All the fundamentals had changed. His prior run had made Sanders one of the most famous people in the country. He had legions of fans who knew the core parts of his platform; “Medicare for All,” elimination of student debt, and an aggressive desire to take on the “millionaires and billionaires.” Sanders’s ideas were no longer radical and he was not just some eccentric outsider. He was a familiar and popular figure with new allies all over the country. Most importantly, his 2016 campaign proved that his vision of funding a White House bid with millions of small-dollar donors could work.
By late 2018, Sanders was pulling together his staff and getting ready to fire up that record-breaking fundraising machine once again. His team was confident. They had momentum and had learned from the mistakes of 2016. Sanders officially announced his second run in February 2019 and came into the race with high expectations.
But Sanders spent that September polling behind Joe Biden and another progressive, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, in Iowa. And Pete Buttigieg, the young, moderate, Midwestern mayor, was gaining on him. What could Sanders do to make a difference—to win some headlines—besides continuing to shake hands, give speeches, and raise cash? His campaign needed an injection of energy. He needed an endorsement from the most visible star on the left.
The Sanders campaign pressed Ocasio-Cortez’s office on the subject. And some on her staff—which now included multiple veterans of both Justice Democrats and Sanders’s operation—were eager to have her give him public support. But important fall weeks clicked by with no action.
The benefit to Sanders was obvious. The youngest and most famous woman in Congress could offer a vital boost. This election wasn’t like 2016, when it was essentially just a one-on-one race between Bernie and Hillary, democratic socialism versus the centrist party establishment. In 2020, Sanders was mired in third place while competing against an ideologically diverse field of candidates, many of whom had adopted at least some of his ideas.
For Ocasio-Cortez, the value proposition wasn’t quite so apparent. With her surging national profile and seat in a staunchly blue district, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t appear to need Sanders. Nevertheless, some on her team reasoned that his support was crucial. If Ocasio-Cortez did ultimately want to run for higher office, she might need to win statewide in New York, which included tens of thousands of square miles of relatively conservative suburban and rural areas. In these purple and red counties, and across the country, Sanders had much more pull than the new congresswoman.
“Bernie brought a lot to the table for her. Period,” a former Ocasio-Cortez staffer said. “She brought lots for Bernie. It was a very mutually beneficial connection.”
Surprisingly, Sanders also had stronger support than Ocasio-Cortez among Latinos. Despite her Puerto Rican roots, Latinos—particularly older men—were an unexpected and persistent soft spot for the congresswoman in her own district.
A member of her team drafted a strategy memo arguing that, not only should she endorse Sanders, but it should be a central theme of her own 2020 reelection campaign. Ocasio-Cortez remained unconvinced.
Part of the issue was Ocasio-Cortez’s desire to stand out. Before her arrival, Sanders had been the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. He also was a core part of her story. In most of her retellings, Ocasio-Cortez’s political life began as a volunteer on Sanders’s campaign in 2016. Between her own work and Justice Democrats’ ties to his campaign, Ocasio-Cortez’s links to Sanders’s movement were foundational and undeniable. Now, she was eager to cement her own separate legacy.
Warren’s presence in the race also complicated any potential endorsement. Sanders’s decline had come just as Warren was surging, briefly sprinting into first place in Iowa.
Both Sanders and Warren wanted single-payer health care, both wanted to attack income inequality, both sought an aggressive, comprehensive approach to climate change, and both, in their own ways, proposed seismic overhauls of the American system. For Sanders, it was a “revolution.” For Warren, it was “big structural change.”
Along with her progressive platform, Warren had a strong relationship with one of “the Squad” members, Ayanna Pressley, who was also from Massachusetts. Pressley, one of Ocasio-Cortez’s closest allies, would soon endorse the senator from Massachusetts and become a co-chair of her campaign. And, of course, Warren had something Sanders never did. She was running to be the first woman in the White House. All of that made it fraught for Ocasio-Cortez to stand in Warren’s way.
Wasn’t it time to shatter the glass ceiling? There were so many bad feelings when Sanders contested Hillary Clinton’s attempt to break that barrier in 2016. Hadn’t Bernie already had his chance?
Ocasio-Cortez knew some of her supporters—particularly women—hoped to see her back Warren. And, at times, sources close to her said she was genuinely leaning in that direction. Yet, a former staffer on Warren’s campaign said they didn’t actively court Ocasio-Cortez. For Warren and her team, it would have been enough if she simply stayed neutral.
In the end, a brush with death tipped her to Sanders.
Sanders was on the road extensively in September 2019 with over thirty appearances in nine states. He finished the month doing four rallies in one day in New Hampshire. On October 1, he flew to Las Vegas. There were two events scheduled that day. The final one was a fundraiser at a Middle Eastern and South Asian restaurant in a shopping center a few blocks off the Strip.
The event was set to be a question and answer session. Sanders was speaking at a lectern on a small stage in the dining room. Bulbous modernist lamps hung down from exposed pipes on the ceiling. Mismatched metallic statues lined the walls.
According to the restaurant’s owner, Raja Majid, Sanders kept noting that it had been a “long day.”
“He looked tired. His voice was breaking,” Majid told a newscaster for FOX5 Las Vegas after the event.
Sanders got about four questions in before stopping. Arm outstretched, Sanders called for his aide, Ari Rabin-Havt.
“Ari, could you do me a favor? Where’s Ari?” Sanders’ voice cracked. “Get me a chair over here for a moment.”
Sanders plopped down and took a deep breath. He then returned to the question he had been answering. But Rabin-Havt could tell something was wrong. He cut the fundraiser short and got the senator back in the car.
On the road back to their hotel, Sanders began complaining of tightness in his chest. His team scrambled to find an urgent care clinic. Once there, doctors confirmed Sanders was having a heart attack. Within hours he was having a blocked artery cleared at the hospital.
The health scare subsided quickly. Sanders was back on his feet within a couple of days. Nevertheless, it shook a campaign that was already struggling to gain traction.
“People don’t remember that we were circling the drain in September,” Tyson Brody, Sanders’s director of research, recalled in an interview for this book.
Sanders’s poll numbers were plummeting and he was in danger of losing his third-place spot. The race was entering the home stretch, and Sanders was fading.
“We had a long summer where we were never the exciting thing. And then Bernie literally has a heart attack,” Brody said. “We weren’t certain what was going to happen those few days.”
While Sanders was in the hospital, his team held its breath. Events were canceled, Facebook ads were paused, and a slate of television commercials was delayed. Sanders’s wife, Jane Sanders, and his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, rushed to Nevada to be by his side. Shakir would get flashbacks of these moments for months. They feared the harsh realities of biology would abruptly end the dream.
But Sanders was undeterred. By the time Shakir landed in Vegas, Sanders was sitting up in his bed eager to get back to work. He wanted one more shot in front of the voters. He needed to convince them of his vision.
The heart attack gave Ocasio-Cortez a vision of her own. She had nearly lost the man who was so foundational to her career. Ocasio-Cortez realized there might not be another chance to stand with him. She called Sanders and told him he had her support.
“Bernie’s in the hospital. She talks to Bernie,” a former Ocasio-Cortez staffer told us, and the new message was: “Okay, we’re going to do it.”
“She had the epiphany when he had the heart attack,” the staffer added.
But soon after the endorsement, her doubts allegedly began to creep back in.
Sanders’s team wanted to have a huge event for Ocasio-Cortez to make her formal, public endorsement later that month in her district. There was an outdoor park in Queens with a stunning view of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and Manhattan skyline. Thousands of people would show up. But soon, Ocasio-Cortez’s inner circle started to worry the congresswoman was getting cold feet.
“We had planned to have this Bernie rally in Queens in October,” the former Ocasio-Cortez staffer said, adding, “There starts to be this sort of feeling they’re going to delay the event right? ‘Let’s not do October; let’s wait.’ … I’d been through this before and what ‘let’s wait’ means is it probably isn’t going to happen.”
The delay led to drama behind the scenes. Corbin Trent, who had become the communications director in her House office, even threatened to quit. He remembered a “big argument” with the congresswoman about delaying the event in Queens. “I was a prick, I’m sure,” said Trent.
A member of Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional team said the idea she had any reluctance to support Sanders was “heavily overstated.”
“To the staffer in question, her endorsement may have felt ‘late’ but she endorsed in the fall of 2019—months before the first primary states,” said the Ocasio-Cortez aide, who requested anonymity and added, “This was also her very first year in Congress, so she had other very legitimate things to focus on like setting up her office and figuring out the ropes of legislating.”
While some of those close to Ocasio-Cortez believed her reticence about campaigning for Sanders stemmed from concerns about optics, there was something else too. Ocasio-Cortez was still dealing with her discomfort with crowds. And for months Trent and Chakrabarti, who was now her chief of staff, had been pushing her in front of every audience they could. That dynamic was a constant source of tension.
Trent and the team were consistently booking major events and media appearances. For an introvert like Ocasio-Cortez, the spotlight was taxing.
“She would be so pissed off,” Trent said of Ocasio-Cortez. “The person who put her in that position in her mind was me, so she’s pissed at me.”
Ocasio-Cortez ultimately agreed to attend the massive “Bernie’s Back” rally in Queens in October 2019. Yet even after that initial endorsement, Trent said she repeatedly balked at adding more Sanders campaign events to her schedule.
Just a year after her own election, Ocasio-Cortez was uncomfortable wielding her newfound fame. She was also intensely protective of her nascent brand. With one wrong move, Ocasio-Cortez feared she could lose megastardom as quickly as she gained it. She felt at once incredibly powerful and fragile. Trent recalled her openly worrying about being outshined even as she agreed to campaign for Sanders.
Nevertheless, she hit the trail for him in November 2019. Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders for two on-stage events in Iowa. Their first stop was a community college gym in Council Bluffs, a small city on the banks of the Missouri River.
“Who here is ready for the revolution?” Ocasio-Cortez asked as she bounded onto the stage. “I know I sure am.”
The crowd roared. They always did that for her now. Only a year after being elected, Ocasio-Cortez was arguably the most famous woman in politics. Her upset victory had vaulted her to the kind of celebrity status that comes along once a decade, at most. Her face graced countless magazine covers, TV screens, and T-shirts. And here she was, live, on the western edge of Iowa, standing under banners for fifth- and eighth-place sports teams in a junior college arena.
According to the Sanders campaign, the pair drew a crowd of 2,400 that was “the largest rally in Iowa” at that point in the primary. The gym’s bleachers had been folded away for the event, leaving the audience standing shoulder to shoulder on the basketball court. The crowd, a mixture of old hippies and bright-eyed kids that reflected the nearly fifty-year age gap between Sanders and the young congresswoman, beamed up at her on stage.
An unusually large pack of photographers crouched down in front of the lectern with their long lenses upturned. Shutters hissed each time she moved. Editors in New York and DC knew it was worth the price of a flight to capture scenes from Ocasio-Cortez’s first trip to Iowa. This was a generational political talent stepping onto the traditional proving ground for presidents.
With her trepidation about crowds, rallies weren’t Ocasio-Cortez’s strong suit. In more intimate rooms, her small frame radiated power. Ocasio-Cortez translated that energy into social media broadcasts, making online audiences of hundreds of thousands feel as though they’re sitting beside her.
It’s hard to capture that same electricity alone in front of a large audience. Nevertheless, her speech had a smooth delivery, tight message, and magnetism that most politicians can’t hit on their best night.
Ocasio-Cortez paced the stage wearing a tan motorcycle jacket over all black. Her hair was in a tight ponytail and she sported her signature bright red lipstick, a nod to her Puerto Rican roots. As Ocasio-Cortez talked, her eyes and smile grew wide. She transitioned seamlessly from her life story as “the daughter of a housekeeper” who waited tables to put herself through college into a stream of memorable calls to action. Slogan-worthy sound bites spilled from every few sentences of her speech.
“We don’t watch the polls. We change the polls,” she said, punctuating each point with her hands. “This is not a movie. This is a movement.”
The room fell into reverent silence as she spoke. When she’d land on an idea, the crowd cheered approval and waved their blue and white “Bernie” signs. The applause bounced off the hardwood and echoed around the arena. It was exactly the response any campaign would want from a stump speech. But Ocasio-Cortez didn’t seem to have rehearsed. All of a sudden the remarks took on the confessional familiarity of her livestreams. At one point, after declaring, “Here’s the deal,” she began to sputter.
“I’m—you know—and what is also—and so the deal is. Sorry,” she said, bent over and slapping her thigh as the words failed to come.
She stood up and composed herself, deftly turning the moment into an opportunity to forge a closer bond with the thousands in the packed gym.
“I’ve got so much going on in my mind, because I’m just talking to you all this evening,” she said.
“I was trying to prepare some remarks on the plane,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. Then she dismissed the idea of a scripted speech with a wave of her hand. “I was like, I’m just going to talk to them. OK?”
The crowd was hooked. Then she picked up where she left off.
“The deal is that we have to stitch ourselves together. We have to connect ourselves to one another.… Our destinies are tied,” Ocasio-Cortez said, reaching a crescendo.
“All of us need health care! … All of us need college! … All of us need to save this planet!” she shouted.
Her soliloquy about shared struggle and solidarity culminated with an introduction of the man of the hour.
Ocasio-Cortez called Sanders her “tío,” Spanish for uncle. It was a phrase she had used as she endorsed him on video the month before. The Sanders campaign had it printed on shirts that they debuted during the Iowa trip. This was a moment that merited dedicated souvenirs.
“I want to introduce to you all my tío, our tío, but also the senator who has paved the path for us to talk about this today who has helped create the space,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Sanders strode out with a tight smile. His standard entrance music blared, “Power to the people, right on!” Sanders had none of Ocasio-Cortez’s finesse. He dropped the file folder containing his typed-up stump speech as they shared a quick hug. Ocasio-Cortez quickly ducked down to recover it for him. When she popped back up, he grabbed her wrist, held it aloft like she’d won a boxing match, and waved both their hands to the crowd.
The press and the public gave their endearing odd-couple performance rave reviews. The New York Times called it an “Iowa Buddy Movie.” Twitter and Instagram overflowed with hearts and gleeful emoji.
Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders were basking in each other’s reflected glow. Many of the people in attendance, Iowans who understand the significance of a trial mission to a key early primary state, were envisioning the day she might mount a White House bid of her own.
“I think it’s just a matter of time,” Kacey Davis, a nurse, declared after Ocasio-Cortez’s second appearance with Sanders in Des Moines. “I think definitely she’ll run for president.”
Ocasio-Cortez was still just twenty-nine years old, too young to make a White House run. The Constitution requires a commander in chief to be at least thirty-five when they’re sworn in. But 2024 was another story. Some of the people watching her in Iowa pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez’s thirty-fifth birthday would be exactly one hundred days before the inauguration. They were in awe. Another bit of destiny was on her side.
Even members of Ocasio-Cortez’s team were overwhelmed by the weight of the moment. Aaron Taube, the DSA activist, who was now a staffer on her campaign, fainted backstage at one of her events with Sanders. He attributed the swooning to “being in the presence of the two giants of the resurgent US left.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s early November Iowa trip lasted two days and included three events, immediately boosting Sanders’s poll numbers. By the start of 2020, Sanders had surged to the head of the primary pack.
But it wasn’t all smiles, laughs, and excitement. Behind the scenes, Ocasio-Cortez remained deeply conflicted about pulling too close to Sanders. In fact, she almost didn’t make the trip to Iowa at all.
In January 2020, Ocasio-Cortez returned to Iowa during the weeks before the caucus. Sanders had been pulled off the campaign trail by the first Trump impeachment trial, and she was his most powerful surrogate. Yet at an event in Iowa City, Ocasio-Cortez gave an entire speech without mentioning Sanders by name.
Her omission was glaring enough to provoke a handful of news stories. The member of Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional team, who requested anonymity to discuss the issue, insists that she “didn’t intentionally leave out Bernie’s name.”
All of the attention on the missed mention might have seemed frivolous. After all, Sanders had only called into the event. Yet Corbin Trent, who accompanied her to Iowa that second time, said Ocasio-Cortez had taken some deliberate distance from Sanders.
“That’s not an accident,” Trent said.