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DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSWOMAN ALEXANDRIA Ocasio-Cortez has given another hint that she’s considering a 2028 presidential run.

A poll from the University of New Hampshire last week somewhat surprisingly put her as the preferred presidential nominee among Democratic candidates, just ahead of Joe Biden’s transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.

With voting underway in the primaries for this November’s House and Senate elections, Ocasio-Cortez gave an extensive interview to ABC News over the weekend where she said she hasn’t “ruled out the possibility” of a 2028 run.

But she said her focus is on the November elections, and she has a responsibility “to remain focused on the midterms and not on our individual aspirations or plans”.

The 36-year-old was also asked if she’d consider a Senate challenge to long-time Democratic senator Chuck Schumer.

The Congresswoman was coy in her response, saying “anything is possible at this juncture”.

Self-described democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the faces of the progressive wing of her party since she beat the odds to get elected to the House in 2018.

2028 will be the first year she is eligible to run for president, having turned 35 in October 2024.

Since Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, there has been growing divides within the Democrats between the more progressive wing of the party and the more traditionalist, capitalist side.

Ocasio-Cortez, along with incumbents progressives Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders, has long been the face of a new movement within the party.

That movement expanded last year with the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor.

In this year’s democratic primaries, some challengers to long-serving democrats in the House and Senate have emerged, most notably Abdul El-Sayed who pulled off a historic feat to become the democratic senate nominee in battleground state Michigan.

Ocasio-Cortez endorsed El-Sayed as he ran in the primary, and she told ABC News that his primary victory showed the party is in a “time of renewal”.

She said these young progressive candidates are injecting “a new energy” into the party and that it showed “the party is unifying”.

She put this down to a “generational tidal wave” of younger people that is “starting to be decisive at the polls”.

She also heavily criticised the Republicans for being out of touch with younger people in the US, especially with cost of living.

Over the years she has also taken aim at the Trump administration for eroding women’s reproductive rights, something which she said led her to publicly share the decision to freeze her eggs.

She announced this on social media and told ABC that she believes it’s important “leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country, and normalise them”.

Given her prominence in the party, prospective democratic candidates can be heavily boosted by an endorsement from the Ocasio-Cortez.

However, the congresswoman has become more cautious in her approach to endorsements over the years.

When asked why she hasn’t waded into some of the more controversial races or backed some of the more socialist candidates that the likes of Mamdani have she said “politics is also a workplace, and we’re all in different positions”.

Whether this more cautious strategy is indicative of her ambitions to have a wider appeal for a presidential run remains to be seen.

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