This is a very headstrong group of freshmen.
—Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA)
Every midterm election produces at least one underdog candidate who is ignored by the political establishment and written off by the distractible and fragmented news media, addicted to chasing close races—a person whose victory on Election Day causes observers to blink furiously at a board of elections website, wondering what they missed. My favorite example from my own reporting career occurred during a 2014 governor’s race. When Larry Hogan, a Republican, was elected in the deep-blue state of Maryland, clobbering the Democratic lieutenant governor, an Iraq War veteran and the anointed gubernatorial heir apparent, I began my victory-day story with the words “Um, Larry who?” But it is hard to find a modern analogy to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose victory stemmed from a magical mélange of intense Kennedy-like personal dynamism, social- and digital-media savvy, and a singularly policy-focused campaign message that resonated with voters.
AOC’s influence on her party has no recent antecedent for a freshman House member. In her first few months in office, she got normally skittish Democratic Congress members and some presidential candidates to sign on to her Green New Deal, forced a national conversation about marginal tax rates, helped tank a plan for tech company Amazon to build a campus in Queens, and catalyzed a vast rejection of corporate PAC money for incumbents who had just a year before eschewed that plan as impractical at best, unilateral disarmament at worst.
A June 2019 poll by one of the Republican Party’s most respected pollsters found that Ocasio-Cortez had already become “the defining image of today’s Democratic Party,” surpassing Nancy Pelosi, who had served as the Republican antihero for a decade. For many Democratic House members, especially those of color, the arrival of all the new women in aggregate, with AOC leading the charge, had altered the landscape in a way they found animating and joyful. “I’ve been here a few years,” Rep. John Lewis, a longtime congressman from Georgia, told me. “Their presence has helped to lift this body. They came with passion, determination, and they are very serious. They bring life when they speak.” Many Republicans in Congress were instantly obsessed with Ocasio-Cortez, tweeting negatively about her while begging their colleagues to introduce them to her.
Stage one of post–Ocasio-Cortez politics began forthwith. She was one of a handful of progressive Democrats elected to the House in 2018, joining a group of senior progressives, like Rep. Barbara Lee of California, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, who had been toiling on the margins of the minority for several years. Her victory had injected a steroid-sized dose of energy into their ranks. At the same time, however, she was proving to be a bit of a toxin, too—for some of the more conservative Democrats who had taken over Republican seats.
These tensions would surface during the government shutdown, but they were placed in stark relief right away during an early intense discussion over how Democrats ought to address climate change and, inadvertently, over two long-awaited gun-control measures. Many Democratic House members began to fret that the far left was going to do to them what the Tea Party had done to Republicans a few years back: run them out of town, one primary at a time. Pelosi, caught flat-footed by Joe Crowley’s unexpected loss, nonetheless pooh-poohed the idea: “Nobody’s district is representative of somebody else’s district,” she said. “They made a choice in one district. Let’s not get yourself carried away.”
The party was struggling to understand what “far left” even meant now, given that Republicans had been using the term with abandon for years to describe all Democrats, except perhaps the very few remaining antiabortion Democrats in the House. The Party overall was desperately trying to woo Republican and independent voters into the tent, while at the same time taking serious internal stock of its own voters. A January 2019 Gallup poll found that from 1994 to 2018, the percentage of all Democrats who call themselves liberal had more than doubled, going from 25 percent to 51 percent, perhaps underscoring Ocasio-Cortez’s point that the party was starting to look and think more like her.
At the same time, there is ample evidence that more moderate Democrats pepper much of the party, though their positions are getting harder to define, as socially liberal but fiscally conservative now seems far too pat a notion. Rep. Max Rose, of Staten Island, a typical Democratic freshman to have picked off a Republican, is a pro-choice US Army veteran who earned a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan. He cares nothing about the deficit and is strongly against the Green New Deal.
Often, it seems that what pundits write off as regional differences in the party can be better chalked up to generational ones: younger people in both parties are by and large worried about climate change, supportive of gay rights, and skeptical of the powerful sway of corporate interests. And yet, in the 116th Congress, where the progressive and moderate caucuses both hit historic levels of membership, it seemed as if the progressives—pushing an aggressive climate-change agenda, Medicare for All, free community college and state college, and increased marginal tax rates for the superrich—were dominating the conversation and setting an agenda that may have been out of step with the broader electorate. This dichotomy would hang over the entire Democratic Party going into the 2020 election.
AOC’s victory was considerably more complicated than the postelection analysis made it out to be, focusing almost completely on shifting demographics in her district. While the narrative of her win portrayed younger nonwhite and working-class voters as her secret base, in reality Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had soundly beaten Joe Crowley in the areas of the district that were by and large whiter and wealthier, in particular parts of Queens filled with folks fleeing overpriced Manhattan. Crowley prevailed in most working-class corners of the district, including the district’s Hispanic and African American enclaves; he beat Ocasio-Cortez by more than 25 points in her own Parkchester section of the Bronx.
Journalist David Freedlander neatly summed this up in his analysis for Politico Magazine soon after the race: “Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people.” While AOC’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, continued to characterize the victory as a result of a strong multiracial coalition, this was actually more true for other triumphant female Democrats that year, notably Ayanna Pressley, who won affluent whites and young people of all races in her district. But with AOC, “It was the Bernie Bros,” one top Crowley advisor told Freelander as he surveyed the wreckage the day after the election. “They killed us.”
Before casting a single vote or sitting through a single hearing, Ocasio-Cortez had begun to make her mark on Congress. During freshman orientation, not long after the November election, she entertained her Instagram followers with videos of new adventures in Washington. In another Instagram story, she fretted—while wearing something resembling sweats, making mac and cheese, and singing along to Janelle Monáe—about the media attention. “You’re supposed to be perfect all the time on every issue and everything,” she lamented. She also openly mocked the speakers at a leadership training event, many of whom were supplied by lobbyists (but who also offered some of the practical training for new members that some later complained was lacking from the official freshman orientation).
Between the election and the seating of the new Congress, she joined protesters outside Pelosi’s office, demanding the establishment of a special panel to study and advise members on climate change. Pelosi had already agreed to the panel, and AOC’s protest struck more senior members and donors as curious and worrisome: She was inside the tent now. Was she going to continue to attack it from outside? The challenge was also met with some resistance from senior members of the leadership team, who wanted to take on the climate question the old-fashioned way, through committee work, hearings, and what is known as “regular order,” in which bills are debated and adopted individually and passed between the House and Senate.
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the incoming chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has a lot of jurisdiction over climate legislation, criticized the panel idea, and in a meeting that included incoming freshmen, Ocasio-Cortez forcefully pushed back. This type of pushback again surprised more senior members, who were used to the freshmen keeping their heads down in the early days. It would also not be unique to Ocasio-Cortez. “This is a very headstrong group of freshmen,” Katie Hill would tell me later. “We are just very unlike other classes.”
Then, in mid-December 2018, the first battle of a war that would soon engulf the new group of House Democrats began. One otherwise sleepy day, while dejected Republicans were removing their nameplates from their palatial leadership offices, and losers were cleaning out their mini fridges, Politico popped a story that AOC (which she had now made her official Twitter handle) and the progressive PAC Justice Democrats were already gearing up for primary battles in 2020. In her crosshairs, the story reported, was fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries, a well-liked rising star.
His crimes were apparently both political and interpersonal. Jeffries took corporate PAC money and, like most New York City members of Congress, was friendly with the banking industry. Ocasio-Cortez had herself started her own leadership PAC shortly after winning, and lots of folks—most, in fact—took money from industries in their districts. This notion immediately concerned many Congress members, who felt that eschewing all industry money would mean only wealthy members could run.
Jeffries’s other crime, according to Politico, was that he had also just defeated an idol of Ocasio-Cortez’s, Barbara Lee of California, in the race to be House Democratic Caucus chair, having run on the same new-blood principle that had helped AOC herself win. Lee, who was in her seventies, was of great importance to many of the new women, whom she quickly moved to mentor. An African American representing the flats of Oakland and the left-wing archipelago of Berkeley, she was one of the earliest and most passionate opponents of the war in Iraq, and she repeatedly authored legislation to empower Congress to take more control of acts of war, which years later would be embraced even by many Republicans. Some incoming members thought Lee had been unfairly disposed of, even if Jeffries was also black.
Poised to be the first black Speaker, Jeffries was popular among his colleagues and to the left of many of them—and a homegrown superstar in his Brooklyn district. Some colleagues thought the challenge from a fellow New Yorker who had yet even to be sworn in was unseemly. House Democrats had just battled their way back from eight years in the wilderness, watching Republicans dismantle President Obama’s legacy, reinstall Styrofoam cups in the House cafeterias, defeat their ranks in state house after state house, and then narrowly beat their first female presidential candidate with one Donald J. Trump. They were not eager to let their new triumph be soiled by infighting over who could be more liberal in districts as blue as the Caribbean Sea.
Roughly ten members—a group of Democrats that spanned generations, race, and geography—huddled around Jeffries on the House floor to assure him of their support. “People love Hakeem,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a sophomore congressman from New Jersey, told me. “We thought attacking one of your own was outrageous. We went up to him, and everyone said, ‘What can we do to help? We will do what we need to do.’ It was a huge tactical error on her part.”
Ocasio-Cortez limply denied the Politico story, even as Justice Democrats more or less confirmed it, and tried to put it behind her.
Shortly after she was sworn in, she got to work on promoting the centerpiece of her agenda: the Green New Deal. The deal was not a bill churned out after months and months of hearings, public comments, and legislative horse trading. In fact it wasn’t a deal at all, but more like a list of resolutions or a set of goals that included an expansive array of government-supported economic policy ideas to address climate change, job security, poverty, and income inequality in one fell swoop.
The whole notion of the plan created a divide among Democrats. Some, either eager to get a little AOC stardust on their member pins, or merely afraid of her torching them on Twitter, signed on to the deal. Others quickly raced away, knowing that the last Democrat to represent their district had been tossed out over perceived government overreach. One of Pelosi’s biggest mistakes during her first term as Speaker was when she demanded in 2009 that the Democratic majority in the House approve a controversial cap-and-trade bill to address climate change, even though she knew the Senate would never pass it. The Democrats had dutifully walked the plank. The Senate never even took it up. And several Democrats in coal country lost their seats the next year. But many of the newer members had no memory or even knowledge of this decisive failure.
The rollout of the Green New Deal should have been a slam dunk for both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her cosponsor, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, one of the most senior Democrats in Congress and long a leader on climate change. Their proposal—essentially a ten-year plan to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions through a revolutionary rethinking of the nation’s electricity and transportation systems—represented decades of research and activism that had forced a conversation on the subject, which had been dormant since the cap-and-trade debacle. But earlier in the day, before their joint news conference, a document had emerged out of AOC’s office with a whole new set of goals that had never been run by Markey’s office. They read like, according to one policy expert on the Hill, “something that a bunch of kids in a dorm room passing a big bong would come up with.” The document called for the eventual elimination of air travel, the suggestion that cows, whose belches and flatulence emit greenhouse gases, had to go, and an economic-security package for those who are “unable or unwilling to work.”
The Green New Deal had been a by-product of both offices, with the hope that it would catalyze a strong congressional climate debate, but this new document kneecapped the entire effort. Markey, having never seen it, could neither defend it nor explain it. “What about the cows?” reporters kept asking him. On the one hand, this generated a slew of news stories, helping to bring the climate debate to the fore. On the other, the new document was almost totally dismissed, often with derision. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said, making it pretty clear that the resolution would never take the form of a bill on the House floor. “The Green Dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
Then after the new climate advisory panel was formed, the one that Ocasio-Cortez had agitated for, she refused to join it, citing her commitment to other committees. Only months later, in a podcast interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, did she admit to what most of her colleagues had suspected all along: “I had made very specific requests,” she told him, “which I thought were rather reasonable, for the select committee on climate change. I asked that it have a mission to try to draft legislation by 2020, so that we essentially have a two-year mission to put together, whether it’s a Green New Deal or whether it’s some sweeping climate-change legislation, that the select committee have a legislative mission. I asked for it to have subpoena power, which most committees do. The last select committee had subpoena power, but now this one doesn’t. And I asked for the members who sit on the select committee to not take any fossil-fuel money. And none of those requests were accommodated. And so I didn’t join the committee.”
Again, colleagues were amazed by the moxie of the freshman who had both made her name on the climate-change issue, lobbied the Speaker to make sure this committee was, and whom leadership had hoped would give it some credibility in her political sphere of influence. Perhaps more importantly: when the Speaker of the House believes she has given you a piece of cake, you don’t dump it in the trash in front of her. “I think it was totally on-brand,” one Democratic staffer told me. “She is saying, ‘I won’t participate in the traditional toothless congressional efforts. I have a movement outside.’ ”
Eventually, Ocasio-Cortez conceded that the launch of the climate plan had not gone as planned. “Our GND rollout was really difficult, and it was done in a way that it was really easy to hijack the narrative around it,” she said in a Yahoo News podcast. “It was like, too fast, in some ways. I actually think the resolution itself is very solid, but between how it was rolled out—there were competing documents rolled out, some prematurely, that muddied the waters.”
One of the central components of the Democratic Party’s agenda was to pass even modest gun-control legislation, a campaign promise many congressional candidates had made. Still, the fight for the soul of the party would cast a shadow over that effort as well. Rep. Lucy McBath, who had won a close contest in Georgia, was the only freshman invited to stand next to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at a press conference early in the new Congress to announce one of the Democrats’ first moves, a universal-background-check bill they had been waiting for years to bring to the House floor. McBath looked slightly nervous as Pelosi and her team touted the measure, eight years to the day after Giffords was shot at a constituent meet-and-greet in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona.
McBath, while unknown to much of Washington, had come to town already a hero in the gun-control world and was well known among many of the black members of Congress with whom she had visited many times over the years. Her seventeen-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed in 2012 at a Florida gas station by a middle-aged stranger who said the teenager was playing his music too loud. Jordan’s life, and the trial around the crime that led to his death, would become the subject of an HBO documentary called 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets, which examined Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law.
Not long after her son’s death, McBath became a gun-control activist, working with the nonprofit organizations Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. In October 2014, as her son’s killer, Michael Dunn, was receiving a sentence of life without parole, McBath told him, “I choose to forgive you, Mr. Dunn, for taking my son’s life. I choose to release the seeds of bitterness and anger and honor my son’s love. I choose to walk in the freedom of knowing God’s justice has been served. I pray that God has mercy on your soul.”
Four and a half years later, there she was at a press conference on Capitol Hill, a new black congresswoman from a majority-white district in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, a district once held by a well-known Republican, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. McBath had squeaked into Congress, beating the Republican incumbent, Karen Handel, 50.5 percent to 49.5; Handel would immediately sign up for a rematch in 2020.
A few weeks after that press conference, the bill was ready for a vote on the House floor. I was curious about how McBath would face this day, a culmination of her activism around an issue that had so deeply divided the country for decades. (It would become the first piece of major gun-control legislation to pass in the House in a quarter of a century.) I looked at a congressional schedule and discovered that before the bill would be voted on, McBath would be sitting in a subcommittee hearing on labor and education. I waited outside the door for an hour for her to emerge, and when she finally did, she was greeted by an aide while talking on her cell phone to another aide, whom she was instructing to find a photo of her son that she had left in her office.
The journey from the hearing to the House floor was a long one, and she began it by entering the members-only elevator, there to help perpetually tardy members speed to the underground tunnels and trains to get to the votes, which in general are meant to only be open for fifteen minutes or less. I broke a (rarely enforced) rule by joining her, riding in silence on an elevator mostly full of freshmen who did not recognize me. Then Rep. Billy Long, a loud Republican and former auctioneer from Missouri, gave me an icy glare. “There are people other than members on this elevator,” he bellowed as the last few members squeezed in. “I am getting off!” Everyone packed tightly into the elevators looked around in mild shock; Ayanna Pressley raised an eyebrow in disgust. I stared at the floor, willing myself to become invisible.
When we emerged, I began, gingerly, to talk to McBath, who was swathed in an orange scarf, the color used by the movement against gun violence, as she jumped on the members-only subway. (Rep. Debbie Dingell had recently given every woman in the House four scarves—orange against gun violence; red to promote heart health; pink against breast cancer; purple in support of the Violence Against Women Act.) I followed McBath onto a final elevator that would take her to the floor to vote. She looked at a few of her colleagues. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for this,” she said, her eyes welling with tears.
Then she walked to the House floor and settled into a seat among a sea of other orange scarves, next to Jahana Hayes. This is when the trouble began.
Moments before the bill to require universal background checks was approved, Republicans offered one of those tricky motions to recommit. These motions usually fail along party-line votes. The rule: thou shalt not vote for the minority’s procedural motions! They are not subject to normal committee vetting, and surface at the last minute, a procedural practical joke of sorts. Members tend to use the short time they are debated to go to the bathroom or make a call. Most Republicans, of course, were furious with the gun bill, and added their best version of a motion to recommit, one requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be notified when an illegal immigrant tries to buy a gun. This was a double stick in the eye, since ICE was the progressive members’ most hated agency, the equivalent perhaps of the Internal Revenue Service for Republicans.
I knew that Democrats had been voting for these motions to recommit over the last few weeks, but they were being attached to meaningless bills concerning the shutdown, which went nowhere. As I watched the vote in the House gallery above the House floor, I leaned over to a fellow Hill reporter and said, “I think this thing is going to pass.”
“No way,” he said, scrolling absently through Twitter. It would be a massive black eye for the bill and not a great look for the nascent majority. Why would they allow that to happen?
House members vote with an electronic card similar to a credit card, and as they vote, their name and position lights up on a screen in the back of the gallery. We watched as Republicans quickly voted yes for their own motion, and as a handful of Democrats slowly but surely pushed the measure toward victory.
A furious scrum could be seen in the well of the House as Pelosi and others urged their colleagues to knock it off. Ocasio-Cortez went into a sea of gun-control activists who had come to watch the vote, and told them she would have to choose between voting for McBath’s, in her view, now-bespoiled bill or against the historic measure, in order to protest the ICE addition.
In the end, Democrats—and a handful of Republicans—voted for the legislation to tighten background checks. Ocasio-Cortez was among those who gave the bill the nod, but then took to Twitter to vent that she had been forced to explain to gun-control advocates after the fact that “the gotcha amendment pinned gun safety against immigration advocacy. Its intent was to divide.”
But the fact that Democrats had voted for a nuisance measure written by the minority, which was meant to be ignored, had embarrassed their caucus and forced members to choose between their dislike of ICE and a bill they supported. Most chose the latter—perhaps out of respect for McBath, perhaps because they understood the bill would go nowhere in the Senate. McBath, clutching the photo of her son, looked on ruefully. She had won, but the victory exposed a widening early rift in her party.
After the vote, I caught up with Abigail Spanberger, the former CIA officer, who was among the twenty-six Democrats who voted with the Republicans for the ICE measure. Spanberger, who had endured a brutal campaign in Richmond, Virginia, beating the Republican incumbent by roughly sixty-six hundred votes for a seat that had not been held by a Democrat in nearly fifty years, had already made it clear she would side with Republicans on a variety of security issues. The fact that members historically voted against these motions did not matter to her, she said as she dashed past the East Front of the Capitol. “I am looking at every one of them just like I would any piece of legislation.”
Dozens of gun-control activists and families had gathered on the steps to have photos taken with Lucy McBath in the freezing cold. She stood with them for a good hour, taking group shots and selfies, and hugging the dozens who had brought their own photos of relatives and friends killed in gun violence. “So many people lost their lives to get us to this point,” she said as she made it at long last back to her office. “I know why I am here. Some of my colleagues who told me to my face, ‘I’ve got your back’ in the end were not there. But I will always take the hard votes.” McBath looked out into the street, where a few activists were still straggling. Her bill, which she knew the Senate would never vote on, was tainted. Still, she said, “Today was an amazing day. I hope we have many amazing days. But they won’t all be like this.”
The next day, in an emotional meeting with Democrats, Pelosi let it be known that her tolerance for members of her party voting with Republicans on these nuisance measures was waning. She had not raced around the country helping to recruit, raise money for, and elevate all these Democrats, had not regained the gavel and stared down Donald Trump, only to be felled on the floor by a bunch of B-list vanquished Republican bros who had just overseen the biggest loss of women in their ranks in recent history. Another gun-control bill would be coming that day, one that would extend the waiting period from three days to ten for would-be buyers at gun shows who don’t quickly pass a federal background check, and she did not want a repeat of the day before. The party had to have unity, she said, even when it meant taking hard votes, as she had been pressing her colleagues to do as their leader for a decade. “This is not a day at the beach,” she snapped. “This is the Congress of the United States.”
Flexing her considerable political power, she noted that those who continued to vote with Republicans would become a lower priority for party leadership and campaign assistance in the future. Ocasio-Cortez, in this case a helpful ally to Pelosi, upped the ante, suggesting that she was on a text chain with activists and that there were lists being kept of errant Democrats who voted with Republicans, and that liberal groups, ever on the hunt for transgressive Democrats to target, would be waiting.
At that emotional moment, Xochitl Torres Small, an eloquent but understated congresswoman from a conservative section of New Mexico, decided to speak. Her smile was usually as bright as a supernova, but now her voice choked with tears. Not every Democrat in the room came from a district where the ICE measure would be unpopular, Torres Small explained. She, like others in the room, had feared a vote against it would give Republicans ammunition in the next election.
The Second Congressional District of New Mexico is roughly sixty times the size of Rhode Island, and is as rural as it is massive. The Republican incumbent, Steve Pearce, had held the seat for much of the last fourteen years, fending off Democratic challengers, election after election, before resigning to run for governor. Torres Small, a former Hill staffer, had run a traditional anti-Washington race, focusing on the specific needs of her district, where 5 percent of the residents don’t even have cell service and many live with no doctor nearby. She repeatedly suggested that DC had given the back of its bureaucratic hand to the rural Southwest. Rather than focus on the glories of the Affordable Care Act, she emphasized that health care was too expensive, and still hard to access for rural residents. In a clever ad that drew a bit of national attention to her campaign, she depicted her fidelity to the district’s public lands with a video showing her in a camo-esque blouse, shooting a gun while duck hunting.
Only the third Democrat in the last half century to prevail in her district, she eked out 50.9 percent of the vote, making her instantly one of the most vulnerable members of the freshman class. “The voices that are most often heard are not coming from districts like mine,” Torres Small told me later. “One way that AOC and I are similar is that we both reflect our districts. We just happen to have very different ones.” She added, “Being a member of Congress is lonely in all sorts of ways.”
When the second gun bill came to the floor, Republicans tacked on another measure to amend the bill—and muck it up procedurally—by excluding victims of domestic violence from the lengthier waiting period. Again, this is how motions to recommit work: The minority comes up with language that sounds too good to pass up, springs it on the majority at the last minute, and the majority, understanding the game, rejects it. Later, the minority makes videos that no one watches, which say things like “So-and-so congresswoman voted against domestic violence survivors!” Republicans, fresh from their last victory, were offering up a dare: Could Democrats stomach voting to withhold a firearm from a desperate abused wife?
Democratic leaders sent out one of their most experienced women to argue against the measure. Debbie Dingell, the Michigan lawmaker whose husband, the legendary John Dingell, had recently died, walked to the podium to speak. There were three freshman women in her state—one conservative Democrat, Elissa Slotkin; one liberal, Rashida Tlaib; and a popular middle-of-the roader, Haley Stevens—all of whom had leaned heavily on Dingell for help in their new jobs. They in turn had comforted her in her grief. Dingell recounted her mentally ill father menacing her family with a gun, but she said she feared a weapon gotten in haste by a victim of domestic violence could end up in the abuser’s hands. “I have spent more time thinking about how you keep guns out of the hands of abusers, more probably than anybody in this chamber,” she proclaimed. “I know better than most the dangers they pose. I will be honest on this floor—my father was mentally ill. I had to hide in that closet, with my siblings, wondering if we would live or die. One night, I kept my father from killing my mother. He shouldn’t have had a gun.”
Shaking as her fellow Democrats roared their approval, Debbie Dingell stood down and the motion failed. The underlying gun bill passed easily, though without Xochitl Torres Small’s vote.
Democrats were starting to see Nancy Pelosi’s point. In short: Lucy McBath and gun-control advocates had won the day, but at a cost, with one bill tainted by the ICE measure. “I was the last vote on that gun motion to recommit,” Angie Craig told me some months later over coffee in Minnesota. “I think we saw the consequences. Lucy didn’t get her big day.”
At the time, it may have seemed a mere symbolic issue, since Senate Republicans had made clear they would never even consider both of the passed bills. However, months later, after the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Midland, and Odessa, Texas, these bills would take on a new urgency.
The fight over these Republican measures would simmer down in the short term. Pelosi, aided by some freshmen, had done a good job impressing upon her group that they needed to hang together, that the point of being in power was never to give it away. But those first few weeks were not simple growing pains, they were tremors before a major tectonic shift that would affect how these newly empowered Democrats would govern—and set the stage for the critical 2020 battle for the White House.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her sort of shadow political operation was making some of her colleagues feel they were being watched and graded for sufficient loyalty to an emergent brand of progressive politics. Several members grumbled to me that her ability to challenge any of them was overstated; after all, Justice Democrats had lost every single primary race in 2018 but hers. (The PAC would later take credit for Pressley, but it had not touted her as one of its candidates until the very end.)
Over breakfast last winter in Naperville, Lauren Underwood—who, let’s remember, had bested a half dozen primary challengers and smoked a Republican in the Chicago suburbs—dug into a pancake half the size of our table at her favorite diner and talked about how many of the freshmen had done something decidedly harder than Ocasio-Cortez in her decidedly quirky New York primary contest: they won tough primaries and then went on to clobber sitting Republicans. “Most of us got way more votes in our primaries than Alex,” Underwood told me. “We are not afraid of her.”
It is technically true that Ocasio-Cortez’s power as a new member of Congress was equal only to her own vote, and she generally would prove unable to bring many colleagues along. She was, at the end of the day, no legislative force. She and her staff would soon alienate all but a handful of other offices. But playing politics was a different matter, and on that field she showed unbelievable savvy. She understood instinctively what language to use to get a message across, and whom to use it with. She was friendly and accessible to reporters, even as her staff was distant. She was disinclined to work with her New York colleagues on prosaic matters like local transit annoyances, but knew how to appeal to a mass audience on the global issues of the day.
With millions of followers on social media and an electrified base of voters unmatched by anyone else’s in the House, she had more potential to influence those running for president than any colleague she was trying to woo to support an amendment. She was an object of fascination to the political media and to the often-smaller news outlets to which her staff doled out most interviews. And her fans continued to be dazzled by her TV appearances, even as some of her fellow freshmen and senior members of the party steamed that she was hardly the spokeswoman for all House Democrats. Where was their invitation to the Stephen Colbert show?
Privately, scores of members and their staff said AOC was sharp, informed, and far more humble than her antipathetic tweets might suggest, usually keeping quiet in the weekly meetings with the entire Democratic team. But with an outsized audience and many more media demands than most new lawmakers have, she was also prone, early on, to factual stumbles, which earned her dings on nonpartisan fact-checking sites. For example, she overstated polled support for Medicare for All, the amount of money Republicans spent in certain races against her colleagues, and said, falsely, that ICE was “required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night,” and that the Pentagon had engaged in massive accounting fraud between 1998 and 2015. In the era of Trump, however, a political base is not dissuaded by the sorts of fact checks that used to hobble politicians. “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” she told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes.
From the Republican side of the aisle came fascination and derision. Ocasio-Cortez quickly learned she could leverage their obsession to her advantage. “Early on, I walked up to her on the floor to talk to her about signing on to a prescription drug bill,” longtime progressive congressman Peter Welch told me. He was elected in the last massive Democratic wave in 2006, and had found a wistful fellowship with the new class, given that most of his classmates had since been vanquished or quit. “I wanted a freshman on the bill. I told her I had a Republican cosponsor named Francis Rooney.” (Rooney is a Florida lawmaker who has long supported requiring the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices for older Americans in the Medicare Part D program.) “She said, ‘Who is he? I’d like to meet him.’ ”
Democrats sit on one side of the House chamber, and Republicans, on the other. Physically crossing over was not unheard of, but it is notable. As the freshman walked with Welch, the Republican men stared. “They were all agog,” Welch said as we stood one afternoon in the ornate Speaker’s lobby off the House floor, where members traipse through to use the restroom, chat with reporters, or sit in front of a fire to read the newspaper. “Some of them hate her. Some of them are attracted. Some don’t know what to think of her. But they all want to see her. First, she walked up to another Republican member, who she assumed was Rooney, and that member started smiling. He was very disappointed when I said, ‘No, that’s not the guy.’ ”
Finally, they got to Rooney, and as other Republicans attempted not to stare, the three discussed the Medicare bill. “I told her later, ‘That was very savvy of you,’ ” Welch said. “ ‘Do things like that and you will be very successful here.’ She showcased real political instincts in that moment.”
In the class of 2019, Welch saw the thrills of newly earned power, and the potential pitfalls down the line. “They remind me of our class, in 2007, that was also a majority changer,” he said. “When you come in and change power, it’s a real bonding experience. Of course, all my friends are now gone.”
One night, I sat in my yoga clothes watching AOC’s latest Instagram hit, the comments and heart emojis flowing by as she put together her IKEA furniture, chomped on popcorn, and talked climate policy as well as savory seasonings. “I’ve been living, like, a completely depraved lifestyle,” she said, staring at the Swedish hieroglyphics and otherworldly screws and bolts that have felled millions of American apartment dwellers. Chomp. Chomp. Too busy to put her Washington apartment together, she had been sleeping on a mattress that still had the manufacturer’s plastic on it, she confessed, while also noting that Republicans “lack moral grounding” as it pertained to cutting emissions. Handful of popcorn. “Someone asked me a similar question earlier today, just like, ‘How do you stay grounded and focused on issues?’ ” she said, as eight thousand fans watched. “I am putting these things together.” A table gets assembled. “Boom! I did it,” she said, then shared her popcorn secret: ground pepper for a “savory dimension.”
As I watched this interaction, one that would dazzle both my teenage daughters as well as most of my fiftysomething friends, I felt: (1) grateful for the man in my life who assembles all my IKEA tables, and (2) an overwhelming need to make microwave popcorn, which I then doused with black pepper and ate for dinner with a glass of white wine. Then I licked brownie crumbs off a knife. Was I living my best old-person AOC life?
For millennials and Generation Z, AOC has the magical alchemy of position and reliability, and for younger women, whose beacons of inspiration had been largely confined to people at least twice their age—Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stacey Abrams—here was one of their own: someone who has struggled with student debt, underemployment, and a collapsing natural world; someone with agility with social media and the Instant Pot and modern sketch comedy; someone who also loves Drake.
For baby boomers and the often-forgotten Generation X, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a riveting figure and, to those on the left, a ray of light pushing through the clouds of contemporary politics. She was, like it or not, the new face of the Democratic House majority. But this radically contemporary phenom, a bartender of color with working-class origins who was a former Ted Kennedy intern became a sort of symbol of the millennial generation, whose problems the older generations had helped create but whose response to them could sometimes feel baffling.
Baby boomers and Generation Xers both note that casual ageism is the one ism that does not seem to discomfit the progressive millennials’ cultural critique, and this was emerging as a divide in the high-profile workplace of Congress, too. Ocasio-Cortez and her less famous colleagues were posing a threat not just to the left-of-center policy positions that Democrats had been using as safe havens to regain power, but also to assumptions about seniority, paying dues, and the value of senior wisdom. Having waited for decades for the boomers to finally vacate their positions of power and authority, Gen Xers now had to contend with impatient and assertive millennials who wanted to leapfrog into those posts.
Colleagues saw the risks that Ocasio-Cortez posed to them, and potentially their majority, even as they understood she might herald the future of the Democratic Party. “If I am winning young people by thirty points, then that changes the way we think about policy,” Katie Hill told me. She, like AOC, had relied on younger voters to win, and as freshman leader, she was meant to be a bridge between her class and the older leadership team. She sat with the leadership in weekly meetings, offering the views and concerns of her classmates, though Pelosi at times would cast them off.
Dismissive or not, Hill said, “I truly believe the older leaders have been waiting for this. They have been looking for someone to hand things off to.” Her view was that the more conservative members of her party, whom she sometimes joined on matters like military spending and defending the police, and the left, with whom she agreed on health care and social policy, would adjust to and accept each other, as the broader Democratic Party becomes the diverse, dominant force that demography will inevitably deliver. “Let’s face it, if you look at the views of young Republican voters, the old Republican Party is dying off,” Hill said. “[Democrats] Max Rose and Elissa Slotkin will be the new conservatives. So it is AOC and Ilhan’s job to push us to the left, and our job will be to push back from our districts. We are just a new generation of leaders, and finding the middle ground is where democracy lies.” For Hill, the story would soon become more complicated.