Will AOC be the next leader of the Democrats?

What are we to make of an America in which David Brooks, the mild-mannered moderate of the New York Times opinion pages, calls for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to fight back against the tyranny of President Donald Trump?

It’s one in which the traditional thinking about how the Democratic party can wield power has been crushed to dust. It’s one in which voters, disillusioned by repeat defeats to Trump, have felt their hopelessness turn to rage.

Moderates, such as Kamala Harris, are not channeling that fury. Instead, it’s far-left populists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just finished a barnstorming speaking tour of the West, filling that vacuum and sketching out a roadmap for how to resist the current administration and reinvigorate a Democratic party in shambles.

The “Fighting Oligarchy” tour saw Sanders, the octogenarian Independent from Vermont who has spent the last decade bashing the Overton window of American politics towards the left one rally at a time, and Ocasio-Cortez, his 35-year-old heir apparent, speak to massive crowds from Los Angeles to Denver. They preached to more than 12,000 in blood-red Idaho, a state Trump carried by nearly 40 points. Organizers said that overall, more than 200,000 people turned out to see the odd-couple rail against income inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics.

“Democrats have lost working people,” Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders advisor, told me. “The tour is a profound message. It’s starting to resonate because it’s part of a broader, unified theory of what’s happening to our democracy. Why has our government failed for so many years to actually deliver for working people? Because our politics is captured by very wealthy interests.”

The tour has rallied the Democratic base and positioned Ocasio-Cortez as a leading candidate for the 2028 presidential election, should she decide to run (Sanders, in his mid-eighties, has less hope riding on his prospects).

Ocasio-Cortez has worked hard to shed her reputation as a far-left dilettante and has, in just a few years, burnished her bona fides as a savvy and pragmatic politician with grassroots appeal. She raised a staggering $9.6 million during the tour with Sanders, with an average donation of $21. Nate Silver, surveying polls showing her rising popularity in the party, predicted she will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028.

The organizing prowess of America’s so-called democratic socialists has put in stark relief the disarray gripping the moderate faction of the Democratic party. Gavin Newsom is podcasting. John Fetterman, once a party rising star, has seen his approval ratings plummet as he’s signaled a willingness to work with Trump. A recent poll found Fetterman to be the only Democrat in office with a net negative favorability rating, clocking in at a dismal -17.2 percent among Democrats. Ocasio-Cortez boasted a +60 net favorability in the same poll.

“It is absolutely the case, if you look at the polling right now among Democrats, that they want fighters,” Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, told me. “They do not want compromise with Trump.”

All of this revolutionary froth signals that the 2028 election will be fertile ground for anti-establishment candidates. For years, the Democratic party has gamed primaries to force out figures such as Sanders, reasoning, not unfairly, that they would be a riskier bet in the general election. Hillary Clinton was effectively coronated in 2016. Kamala Harris was handed the nomination in 2024.

How did that work out?

The Democratic party, now less popular and less powerful than it has been in decades, is hardly in a position to dictate terms to a base ready to burn it all down. “The Democratic party’s brand is in the absolute gutter,” Enten said.

The ambitions of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour extend beyond the personal prospects of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. The pair are looking to recruit nationwide candidates to the cause, and after the end of the tour made their first endorsement: Abdul el-Sayed, a progressive running for the Senate in Michigan.

El-Sayed will face a crowded primary. The contest is seen as a bellwether for what voters are looking for in the 2026 midterm elections and beyond – and whether left-wing populism aimed at a working class which feels it has been left behind can have success in competitive races.

“The reason Donald Trump gets traction when he claims the system is rigged is because the system is rigged,” Duss said. “Now obviously it’s rigged on behalf of rich folks like Donald Trump and all his oligarch buddies. But there is truth in that.”

In New York, a young democratic socialist and state assemblyman from Queens named Zohran Mamdani has mounted a promising campaign for mayor. His platform is narrowly focused on making the city more affordable, by freezing rent and jacking the minimum wage up to $30. As of March, he had raised $7 million, a healthy war chest for a socialist looking to run the capital of capitalism.

Mamdani has captured the cultural zeitgeist of New York: he’s appeared in the pages of Interview magazine, sat down with the buzzy “Subway Takes” show for a viral exchange – and is already the subject of a grassroots “Hot Girls For Zohran” campaign.

It will be an uphill climb for Mamdani, even with “hot-girl support.” A recent poll found Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor, leading by 18 points.

The showdown between Cuomo and Mamdani is reflective of a growing generational divide within the Democratic party on everything from economic to foreign policy. Nowhere is that divide felt more viscerally than on the subject of Israel, where an ascendant faction of the party – and a cohort it desperately needs to win back, younger voters – see the country as a far-flung genocidal machine propped up by US tax dollars.

“I definitely see the Democratic Party getting more critical of Netanyahu,” Tommy Vietor, who served as a spokesman for Obama’s National Security Council, told me. “It’s the human rights violations, but also the vast expenditures of money. Why are we sending this government $3 to $4 billion a year?”

The generational divide is borne out in the polling, which finds younger voters far more skeptical of Israel than older voters, as well the vast gulf between the rhetoric of the Democratic party’s geriatric leaders and the young lawmakers seeking to topple them.

“One of Joe Biden’s real blind spots was he was a genuine, sincere Zionist – but he was pining for the Israel of Golda Meir, not Itamar Ben-Gvir,” Vietor said. “The facts on the ground have changed so drastically.”

Some rising stars of party remain intensely supportive of Israel. Fetterman and Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York have adopted a strategy of backing for the government and its war.

When it comes to these thorny issues, the lefty populists have learned to translate the distant into the personal for their own voters at home. When asked about the war recently, Mamdami said, “it is hard for me to explain to my constituents, who live in the largest public housing development in North America, in Queensbridge, why they have to live in sub-standard conditions because the government refuses to fund public housing all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.”

These progressives have one other advantage over their establishment colleagues: the media carnival that followed Trump’s every move and eventually fueled his rise to the White House sees, in characters like Ocasio-Cortez, a similarly dramatic storyline.

This month alone, the New York congresswoman has been mentioned nearly 300 times on Fox News. Like Trump, it’s easy to see these crusades backfiring as the populists gain momentum. Greg Gutfeld recently jabbed Ocasio-Cortez as “braindead without having dementia” in a crack that failed to elicit laughter from his own audience.

In an era when the most successful campaign politicians are those able to cut through the noise and master the attention economy, round-the-clock flogging on a network like Fox News might be just the right fuel to propel someone like Ocasio-Cortez to the White House.