It's a good time to be a Republican. Donald Trump sprinted to the finish of a comfortable win in last November's presidential election. There are (narrow) GOP majorities in the House and Senate. President Trump has assembled a team of fired-up young hard-hitters to start putting the country to rights.
Now, the party that holds the White House has, throughout most of our history, lost seats in Congress in the midterm elections. There's a valid reason for this; the party in the minority's voters are unhappy, they disapprove of most of the administration's actions, and they are motivated to vote. One would think that this would hold true in the upcoming 2026 midterms, especially given the left's white-hot hatred of all things Trump and the legacy media and Democrats' (but I repeat myself) constant drum-beaten message: "Orange Man Bad."
But that might be different this year. Why? Because 1) the Democrats have no bench; they have no bright, energetic, intelligent young up-and-comers, and 2) the candidates they seem likely to pick are, candidly, awful. You know, like their last presidential candidate, the Queen of Word Salads, Kamala Harris.
Nobody on the Democrat side epitomizes those two flaws more than the former bartender, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - AOC. And thanks in part to her "Fight Oligarchy" tour with the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, she's making moves upward among Democrats in the polls. In fact, at least one recent survey indicates that, if she chose, she could primary and remove the current Senate Minority Leader, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
According to new survey results from the liberal polling firm Data for Progress, AOC thumped the Senate Minority Leader 55 percent to 36 percent among a group of 770 likely Empire State voters when asked who their preferred candidate would be for Senate in three years. While progressives have long fantasized about elevating an original member of the “Squad” to the Senate, the Data for Progress poll is the most concrete evidence to date that such a feat might be possible.
Whether AOC would actually challenge Schumer remains an open question. But it’s no secret that there is no love lost between the two, particularly after Schumer allowed passage of a Republican-led spending bill last month – something AOC and other progressives vehemently opposed.
That's probably a polite way of saying "They freakin' hate each other," and one would think that this might focus the former Bronx bartender's sights all that much more firmly on that Senate seat. But there are apparently also plenty of young Democrats who are crazy enough to favor her for a 2028 presidential run.
That opportunity may be even bigger than the U.S. Senate. As The New York Times reported last month, many within the party see AOC as the heir apparent to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – and presumably his presidential ambitions as well.
At 83, Sanders is almost certainly not running for president again. 20 “progressive Democrats” who spoke with the Times said AOC is the clear leader to take up Sanders’ mantle.
One wonders, if AOC "takes up Sanders' mantle," do his three expansive houses come along with that, or will she, like her daffy old commie mentor, have to come up with her own graft to produce three dachas for her to inhabit? I suspect the latter, and Democrat politicians seem to have a taste for graft.
Republicans, on the other hand, have good reason to rub their hands together and chortle with glee at the notion of AOC running for the White House.
See Also: Watch: Sen. Kennedy's Savage Remarks About AOC Being the Dem 'Leader' Are Pure Gold
Bear in mind that AOC has many flaws. Oh, she has ambition and to spare, but it's not tempered by anything approaching good sense. She is vocal but unhinged and poorly informed. She loves to be in front of a crowd but is a terrible public speaker. As a matter of fact, she seems a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, and when you put all those traits together, you get, well, pretty much a repeat of the Democrat's 2024 candidate.
Consider also - yes, I know it is early in the game to be making these kinds of predictions - that her likely opponent would be Vice President JD Vance. Imagine the presidential debates, as JD Vance is everything AOC is not: Intelligent, well-informed, calm, analytical, capable of framing an argument and presenting it convincingly. Such a debate would make JD Vance's absolute walkover of Minnesota's Governor Tim Walz look like a real contest by comparison. Unless the Trump administration was overtaken by some kind of horrible scandal, which seems unlikely at the moment as the president bounds from win to win, an election between Vice President Vance and AOC would color the map red, and if that's the case, AOC might even have some nasty reverse coattails.
This is all rank speculation, of course. Early in the 2008 election cycle, all the smart money was saying that the presidential election would be a matchup between Rudy Giuliani and Her Imperial Majesty Hillary I, Dowager-Empress of Chappaqua. It wasn't, of course. And the 2028 contest may not be anything we ever expected.
But an AOC run, should she get the nomination, would be a catastrophe for Democrats - unless, somehow, she won, which would be a catastrophe for America.
