AOC Should Run for President NOW- to Build the Anti-Trump Grassroots Resistance
Such a campaign could support grassroots efforts everywhere, force DC Dems to take stronger anti-Trump leadership & build progressive infrastructure to stop any future Trump getting elected
When asked this week what Democrats were doing to fight Trump’s agenda, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries challenged the question, saying “What leverage do we have?”
The statement enraged large numbers of Democrats because they have watched for decades as Republicans undercut Dem power under Clinton, Obama, and Biden. And that power of the minority was not fancy parliamentary tricks or even the filibuster - even though the thin GOP majorities make those tools powerful now for Democrats in D.C. - but the dedication of GOP and conservative leaders to mobilize their base at the grassroots to attack incumbent legislators to delay and even kill large chunks of Dem agendas.
Trump himself has spent most of the last ten years - whether during campaigns or as President - constantly stirring up his base to build the power to intimidate elected leaders across the political spectrum, from D.C. down to local town halls.
In the words of Minority Leader Jeffries, that is the leverage Democrats need as well.
Which is why AOC - Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez - should launch a Presidential campaign NOW.
Just as Trump was transformed from a shitposting Twitter personality into the focus for mobilizing the whole disparate MAGA voter base once he declared himself a Presidential candidate, a Presidential campaign by AOC could help build an opposing army of progressive, woke, pro-labor activists.
For good or for bad, many voters only engage with politics through electoral campaigns, so a Presidential campaign instantly gives a chance to connect and mobilize people against Trump who otherwise are zoned out or alienated after the loss in 2024. For the media, it also would give them the personalistic mano-to-mano narrative that they prefer, since they are largely allergic to dealing with the actual harms Trump’s policies are inflicting.
The advantages of an AOC Presidential campaign, if structured to support and mobilize people against Trump’s wide ranging attacks on our communities, would be fourfold:
First, it would help focus the campaign to build a grassroots resistance to Trump’s agenda
Second, she could take on the MAGA toxic penetration of the online world and create a progressive alternative
Third, it would create a media narrative and point of resistance to MAGA media manipulation
Fourth, it would pressure the DC Dem leadership to step up their own resistanc to Trump
Lastly, it could build the long-term, 50-state progressive organizing structure to ensure a Trump would never happen again.
Building the Grassroots Resistance to Trump
The model here is not Bernie but Jesse Jackson, who coming off a significant but limited success in the 1984 Democratic primary, would spend the next four years making his campaign an ongoing challenge to Reaganism and the corporate attacks on working people. If there was a protest or a union picket line, Jesse would be there and around his campaign emerged a network of activists that Jesse dubbed the Rainbow Coalition, which was designed not just to support him but support ongoing organizing in every state to battle Reaganism.
As Reaganism promoted union-busting through a gutted NLRB, Jackson crisscrossed the midwest to support strikes, most famously at the Minnesota Hormel strike, memorialized in the 2001 Academy-award winning documentary, American Dream
Notably, Jackson made not only labor rights and civil rights and women rights a centerpiece of a campaign, but was also the first modern political campaign to make LBGT+ rights part of his regular speeches across the nation. He would co-lead the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights as part of his campaign work.
At a time of shell-shocked Democrats, the Rainbow Coalition breathed new life into local political coalitions acoss the country- and would shock the nation when Jackson won 11 states in the 1988 primary, including large portions of the white vote in many states he had visited criss-crossing the nation for four years.
Similarly, an AOC Presidential campaign could center its work on supporting grassroots groups and campaigns across the country fighting Trump nationally and those resisting implementing Trumpism locally.
Unusually, among elected leaders, she understands grassroots organizing, since she won her seat by organizing an almost unprecedented grassroots campaign in 2018 that unseated the third-ranking Democrat in the House, as detailed in the documentary Knock Down the House.
Even before taking office, she gained immediate notoriety for supporting the climate justice Sunrise Coalition during their sitin in incoming Speaker Pelosi’s office, as she would continue to balance her support for grassroots activism while building relationships with the Dem establishment.
And she would continue to use her public position to directly support grassroots organizing. In NYC, as Covid hit in March 2020, AOC raised money for the immigrant rights group Make the Road NY, New York Immigrant Freedom Fund, and the labor group Amazonians United among others. Later that year, she would get national attention playing Among Us online on Twitch to raise funds local food banks, eviction defense funds, and other community organizations.
Her fundraising increasingly supported groups across the nation. In 2001, when Texas passed its draconian anti-abortion law, AOC helped raise $185,000 for local Texas abortion rights groups. Earlier that year, she had helped raise over $1 million for food banks and anti-homeless groups when the state was hit with a massive power outage, creating national headlines contrasting her actions with Ted Cruz’s flight to Cancun.
She would continue to support grassroots groups across the country, raising over $11 million for grassroots organizations and non-federal local candidates, but AOC also supports vulnerable national Democratic politicians - and not only her own progressive Squad network as her financial spending highlights - and gave $260,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this past year to try to retake control of the House and specifically assist voter registration and litigation to protect voting rights.
I detail all this to highlight that AOC has already been doing large-scale support for grassroots work for years, but a run for President would automatically let her raise far more funds and take this work to the national scale we desperately need to build resistance to Trump across the country. This is particularly critical since, as the NY Times reported this past Sunday, big-dollar donors to liberal groups are pulling back support out of both fatigue and fear of retribution from Trump.
An AOC campaign for President could become a focal point for reversing grassroots donor and activist fatigue to raise funds that in turn could help a wide range of local organizing channel that energy into political rallies, union organizing drives, voter registration, corporate boycotts, eviction defense mobilization, support for organizing in churches, and building a 50-state neighborhood precinct election infrastructure.
And AOC Campaign Would Build an Effective Online Infrastructure to Counter Trump’s
Along with supporting on-the-ground organizing, AOC has demonstrated the unique skills needed to build a more robust and coordinated online organizing infrastructure for progressive groups and Democratic electeds. What is true is Democrats have learned to build effective online networks of activists that have done powerful organizing over multiple election cycles, from Dean’s primary campaign in 2004 to the Obama for America organizing networks to Kamala’s massive Zoom affinity groups.
But what’s been missing - and what the Trump MAGA movement seems to have more effectively mastered - is reaching the less explicitly political populations stretching out across the online world. Joe Rogan is possibly the most prominent symbol of this population, one reason the Harris campaign scrambled in its last days to land an interview with Rogan and try to hold off a Trump endorsement.
Rogan is just the leading edge of the freewheeling online Reddit groups, discord servers, Twitch streams, and podcasts where a whole toxic stew of racism and misogyny flourished and which the Trump campaign was able to tap into its campaigns. In fact, many analysts see the Trump campaign rooted in particular in the legacy of the toxic battles in the video game world that was broadly called “gamergate” a decade ago, as this Wired magazine article details
This is why AOC’s particular skill in engaging the online gaming world, including her gaming online with VP nominee Tim Walz, which became an SNL punchline, is symbolic in showing a pathway to undercutting that MAGA advantage.
What is needed is for Democrats and progressives to build a year-round, 24-7 organizing campaign that builds capacity workplace by workplace, church by church, neighborhood by neighborhood, as well as reddit group by reddit group and twitch stream by twitch stream. This needs to be a priority now and AOC is the candidate who already brings the skills to make this happen.
AOC is a Media Personality to Counter Trump Media Dominance
As we live in the 24-hour cycle of the media following every insane tweet and pronouncement of Trump, the reality of the last decade is that Trump’s personality and persona has BEEN his message to his followers. He was more known for his reality TV gig on The Apprentice and he conducts his campaigns and Presidency with the same drama he honed on that show.
The media thrives on narrative, so they love Trump for the advertising clickbait he delivers, drowning out alternative messages from an opposition Dem leadership that just can’t deliver the same personality-driven narrative.
On the other hand, since even before AOC was sworn into office, she has been able to capture the media’s attention, whether it’s jumping on a table in a protest at the Capitol, revving a crowd at a union hall, roasting an Oversight Committee witness during cross-examination, giving a dramatic speech at the Democratic Convention, going head-to-head with a rightwing pundit on CNN, entertaining hundreds of thousands of fans in an online game, or giving an intimate Q&A stream on her own feed.
No one else on the Democratic side has so effectively mastered all of these modes of communication - and no one else is so completely the perfect media foil for Trump: young to his old, a woman to his misogyny, a Latino to his racism, economically left against his rightwing corporate fascism.
She almost effortlessly trolls the head of ICE and forces him to rissue empty threats to investigate her, while highlighting the agency’s unconstitutional attacks on the rights of immigrants.
Top Dem leaders may want to only discuss the price of eggs, but the messaging reaching voters is about the scourge of criminal immigrants - and you either engage that narrative or you leave any opposition voices out of the media story.
An AOC Campaign for President would create a daily narrative where every Trump action could be countered- and combined with mass mobilization of protests supported by the campaign, those protests would then get coverage as part of the AOC media message.
We may not like the need for personality-driven politics - god know I don’t - but Trump has proven that dominance of the media, including social media, is an overwhelming reality of wielding power in the modern political landscape, and we need a singular personality taking on Trump on a daily basis that can effectively dominate the media narrative as well as he can.
An AOC Campaign Would Force DC Dem Leaders to Step up Their Opposition to Trump
While there are a lot of great Democrats giving interviews and joining rallies in opposition to Trump and Musk’s brutal actions in D.C., many people are frustrated that there is so little coordination in the response and the top Congressional leaders are silent on so many of the racist and corrupt actions by the administration, even as they continue to often blandly call for a more “bipartisan” approach.
As just one example, more than half a dozen Republican prosecutors resigned their jobs in protest of the corrupt deal between Trump and New York’s Mayor to drop charges in exchange for Mayor Adams enforcing Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. In a drama comparable to the Saturday Night Massacre that was a centerpiece of Watergate, the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has posted NO condemnation in social media of the deal or the terror being inflicted on his own city’s immigrant population. Schumer in the Senate has been marginally better in denouncing Trump in the Senate, but both their communication efforts have largely been inside-DC affairs with little effort to mobilize their national constitutencies for mass action.
The declaration by AOC to launch a Presidential campaign would instantly focus that DC leadership on either mobilizing a national opposition to Trump or ceding that role to the AOC campaign. Instead of huddling in D.C. office buildings, they might feel the pressure to get outside and rally the public to demand Trump and Musk stop gutting agencies and stop the fascist takeover of our nation.
And as AOC began investing campaign resources in districts across the country, it will hopefully focus the DNC, DCCC and DSCC campaign committees to actually start building the 50-state operation that has been promised for decades. In September 2024, the party heralded a “historic” effort to invest in all 50-states - with an investment that amounted to just $2.5 million spread across all the states. That this tiny amount was heralded as “historic” highlights how grassroots party operations in large parts of the country have generally been left to rot for decades.
If others auditioning for the 2028 nomination also stepped up their activities and investments in grassroots organizing, that would also help build the resistance to Trump and the infrastructure for Democrats to regain ground in 2026 and 2028. A four-year campaign where candidates demonstrate who can deploy resources most effectively to support communities under attack by Trump - and help build the anti-Trump resistance - would be a far better version of a nominating campaign then we have often seen in the past.
Win or lose, if an AOC campaign helps force early grassroots political investments by Democratic leaders in local communities across the country to support anti-Trump mobilizations, that would be a victory unto itself.
Building a Long-Term National Progressive Infrastructure to Ensure a Trump Doesn’t Happen in the Future
If there was a signal failure of both the Jackson and Bernie campaigns (aside from not winning the nominations), it was that the incredibly vibrant grassroots organizational activity that grew up around both campaigns was not converted into long-term organizations to continue building progressive capacity across the country. Both campaign structures largely faded away once their campaigns ended, many of the newly energized activists drifting off to other organizations in useful ways, but a large opportunity to build an ongoing progressive instructurue was lost.
Part of this was their personalities - both Jesse and Bernie by nature were one-man bands, often seeing their roles more as moral prophets than institution-builders. Bernie’s role in the Senate is literally being a party of one, a socialist who belongs to no socialist party but also refuses to officially join the Democratic Party, somewhat fulfilling Groucho Marx’s joke that he would not be a member of any club that would have him.
AOC on the other hand is an institutionalist and a copious joiner and supporter of multiple organizations. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in her first campaign (even if that relationship is currently strained) but has also became a key fundraiser for Democratic Party candidates. She has invested heavily in the Justice Democrats, which supported the so-called Squad members of Congress, but also worked closely with the Working Families Party, which itself is building progressive infrastructure across the country. And the millions of dollars she has raised for immigrant rights, abortion rights, and other community groups detailed above highlights her commitment to and belief in the need for building grassroots progressive capacity.
That is strong evidence that she would have a commitment to ensuring that the internal grassroots built by any AOC campaign would be sustained beyond any individual campaign - and ideally become the core institution revitalizing the progressive left in our nation. A side benefit of a strong AOC-supported left would be the marginaliation of the idiotic sectarians that have tended to step into the ideological gap left with outsized voices due to the absence of a broader democratic left institution in our country.
In the ideal, the road show AOC and UAW leader Shawn Fain did campaigning together at the end of the 2024 campaign would become the nexus for uniting progressive labor leaders, community leaders and progressive elected leaders like AOC into a permanent political structure to reach into every neighborhood, every workplace and every social network in the country to ensure that no voter in the future would buy into the propaganda of the next Trump-like figure.
Fight Trump Now, Fight for the Future
Ultimately, we need to defeat Trump’s attempt to create a fascist state now, since we won’t have real elections at all in the future otherwise. But we also need to not just fight the current battle but also be proactive in fighting for a different future or all we will fight forever is rearguard battles to fend off disaster.
An AOC for President campaign would be one of the best ways to do both at once: activating people for immediate action and breaking people out of any leftover fatigue from 2024 precisely by exciting them by a vision for a way towards a better future.
