Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared at David Axelrod’s Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago this week, drew an enthusiastic reception from undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, characterized the American Revolution as a revolt against the billionaires of its time, and declined to rule out a presidential run in 2028, saying her ambition is bigger than any title or seat and that her goal is permanent structural change including single-payer healthcare, living wage legislation, and expanded workers rights.
Joy Pullmann, executive editor of The Federalist and author of False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss what AOC’s continued rise reveals about the political moment and what Republicans need to do about it.
Pullmann said the phenomenon of voters being simultaneously drawn to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump reflects a real underlying economic grievance that neither party is fully addressing. The middle class is being hollowed out, home ownership is increasingly out of reach, and healthcare costs are catastrophic for working families, with many paying twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars a year for insurance that delivers minimal actual benefits. She said this economic pressure is what gives AOC’s socialist rhetoric genuine traction, and that Republicans who dismiss it without offering their own substantive solutions are making a significant political miscalculation. She acknowledged that many people who have accumulated enormous wealth have done so through genuine value creation, but said a significant portion of Americans are correctly aware that substantial wealth and power are also accumulated through proximity to government and the extraction of political rents, a game in which she said Democrats are superstars and Republicans play a junior partner role.
The Indiana state Senate primary results, in which Trump-backed challengers ousted incumbent senators who voted against redistricting efforts, were the topic of Pullmann’s recent Federalist piece and a significant portion of the conversation. She said the press framing of those results as a story about Trump’s grip on the Republican Party missed what the voters were actually doing, which was punishing elected officials who prioritized their own comfort in their existing safe districts over the party’s interest in winning competitive races heading into the midterms. She said the Tea Party revolt under Obama more than a decade ago was rooted in exactly the same frustration, Republicans given power by voters and then using it to serve their donors and comfortable incumbency rather than the people who sent them to office. That dynamic has been building for over ten years and is now producing primary results that establishment Republicans are scrambling to understand.
She applied the same analysis to the Save America Act and the Senate filibuster debate, saying the filibuster argument is largely a fake excuse being used by senators who do not want to do the hard work of governing. She said the Save Act does not actually require eliminating the filibuster to pass. It requires Republicans in the Senate to demand a traditional talking filibuster, meaning opponents would have to hold the floor continuously rather than simply filing a procedural objection. She said requiring senators to physically do their jobs more than two and a half days a week would likely be sufficient to tire out the opposition and move the bill. The real issue, she argued, is that too many Republican senators are more comfortable with procedural arguments that allow them to avoid action than with the difficulty and political exposure of actually using power on behalf of their voters.
The Virginia redistricting case, where Democrats attempted to use a constitutionally questionable referendum process to seize control of congressional map-drawing, provided a sharp illustration of the asymmetry Pullmann and Proft discussed. Democrats will reach for power they do not legitimately have and face consequences only when courts stop them. Republicans consistently refuse to use power they legitimately possess and face no internal consequences for that refusal. She said voters are entirely and justifiably sick of that dynamic and that the danger is not just electoral defeat in the midterms but a broader collapse of trust in the idea that elections produce real consequences for Republican voters.
She closed by noting that Trump’s endorsement record in primaries is uneven, and that his team needs to be more strategic about when and whom to endorse rather than continuing to back incumbent Republicans who are working against the coalition’s priorities. She said the stakes are high enough that the party cannot afford to keep losing ground to establishment inertia while AOC and her ideological allies are building the organizational infrastructure for a long-term transformation that they explicitly say does not depend on any single election cycle or any particular candidate reaching the White House.