WASHINGTON — “Squad” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez privately gushed that if Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed wins his race, the floodgates will be open for lefties in contests across the country.
“What we do is that we break open the entire political calculus in America — period,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said at a fundraiser for El-Sayed on Monday, per multiple outlets.
“Because if you can win, if Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.”
The democratic socialist’s darling’s private remarks come as she is mulling her 2028 move and whether she should run for the White House, Senate, or House again.
“We are in a long-term — I’m being very open right now, right? — about our generational project that we have ahead of us,” the Bronx and Queens rep added. “Generational. We are here to break the map.”
“We are up against not just an ascendant and fascist right wing in this country,” she later said. “But we are also up against people with extremely small imaginations about what is possible in America.”
Ocasio-Cortez had endorsed El-Sayed during his bruising primary contest against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and has carefully worked to elevate hardcore lefties in their primaries without alienating the establishment too much.
Currently, she is polling fourth among the top speculated 2028 Democratic presidential contenders, behind former Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls.
El-Sayed is currently locked in a tight race against Republican Mike Rogers and has a 3.6 percentage point edge over him, per the latest RCP aggregate.
For his part, the Michigan Senate hopeful also mused about the implications of his race for the 2028 contest.
“What does it say about what America really wants, needs and deserves if our state bucks all of the pundits and all of the pontificators who think that this is not possible?” he pondered, per multiple reports. “What does it tell them? It tells them just how big America is and exactly what we want.”
El-Sayed described his race as being “for all the marbles” and predicted it would have a significant “ripple effect.”
The Michigan Senate race is seen as a key test of the far-left’s appeal outside a Democratic stronghold. But some pundits have underscored that Democrats are expected to surf the blue wave this election cycle and warned against reading too much into the results on Nov. 3.
“Why would you draw this inference from someone being able to narrowly win Michigan in a year with a D+9 generic ballot?” Matthew Yglesias remarked on X.
Over the weekend, comedian Bill Maher raised similar concerns about Democrats misinterpreting a potential 2026 midterm victory.
“It’s going to be a classic, historical ass-whooping,” Maher told CNN about how Republicans will fare in the midterms. “Now, 2028 is a different story. The Democrats have a crazy animal living in their house called the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] and they believe truly insane things.”
“This electorate right now is saying, ‘We will get to that issue right now; we have one piece of business in front of us,’” he said, saying voters plan to rebuke Trump. “…[Democrats] will misinterpret this, they will misinterpret the thumping Republicans get as an endorsement for the insanity that a good part of the party wants.”
