Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if she is considering a campaign against her fellow New Yorker next year, Ocasio-Cortez said she had not seriously considered it, but also stopped short of ruling out a run.
“And I know there’s a lot of people who do not believe that. But I really — I can’t operate the way that I operate and do the things that I do in politics while trying to be aspiring to other things or calculating to other things,” she said in an interview in her district in late June.
The prospect of a showdown between the New Yorkers next year has loomed over Capitol Hill for some time, but Ocasio-Cortez has not made any moves to set herself up for what would be a blockbuster campaign. And unlike other moderate congressional leaders, Schumer — first elected in 1998 — has steered clear of criticizing his party’s left flank — at home or in Washington. In New York, he has aligned himself closely with progressives and has on Capitol Hill, along with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, repeatedly called on President Joe Biden to unilaterally cancel all student debt, a top progressive priority.
But with the compromises baked into the bipartisan infrastructure deal rankling progressives, Schumer’s ability to bring home, through a party-line vote, a separate and more expensive reconciliation package demanded by progressives could make or break his standing with the party’s left flank.
“For what it’s worth, Senator Schumer and I have been working very closely on a lot of legislation and that, to me, is important,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And so, we shall see.”
The second-term House member is no stranger to longshot primary bids. In 2018, she unseated then-Rep. Joe Crowley, who had been touted as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s potential successor atop the Democratic House Caucus. Her victory touched off a string of insurgent progressive primary successes and, later on, the birth of the “squad,” the all-female group of leftist congressional firebrands.
As to whether she might have ambitions that go beyond the Senate, and all the way to the White House, Ocasio-Cortez told CNN that looking that far into the future, for now at least, would compromise her ability to do her current job.
“I struggle with this because I don’t want little girls watching or anything like that to lower their sights or anything in that direction. But for me, I feel that if that was in the scope of my ambition, it would chip away at my courage today,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think what happens a lot in politics is that people are so motivated to run for certain higher office that they compromise in fighting for people today. And the idea is that if you can be as clean of a slate or as blank of a slate, that it makes it easier for you to run for higher office later on.”
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