AUGUST 24 — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked on ABC’s This Week whether she could see herself running for president in 2028.

“I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she said.

No campaign announcement. No declaration of ambition. But for the first time, Ocasio-Cortez is openly leaving the possibility of a presidential run on the table.

In June 2018, Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old political newcomer, a former bartender and democratic socialist, challenged Joe Crowley — a 10-term congressman and one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington.

She won 57 per cent of the vote.

The political establishment was stunned. Her campaign had been built on grassroots volunteers and small donations, against a far more powerful political machine.

That was the beginning. She arrived in Congress in 2019 with little money and no political machine behind her.

Today, her campaign committee has reported more than US$32.6 million in receipts between January 2025 and June 2026, almost all from individual contributions.

Eight years later, Ocasio-Cortez is arguably the leading progressive voice in America and the leading Democratic choice in a recent New Hampshire poll for president.

As a freshman, she took on Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, in a hearing that put Trump’s finances under the microscope. Her questions were precise and relentless, pressing Cohen on payments, financial statements and whether Trump had directed him to provide false information. It was an early demonstration that the new congresswoman was prepared to use the power of a hearing to extract facts from one of the most politically consequential witnesses in Washington.

Later that year, she turned that same focus on Mark Zuckerberg. Questioning the Facebook founder over political advertising, she pressed him on whether Facebook would allow politicians to run false advertisements.

Bluntly she asked: “So you won’t take down lies, or you will take down lies? It’s a pretty simple yes or no.”

She has served on major House committees, fought over legislation and budgets, faced repeated elections and built a national political operation.

Then came the appointment that put her on one of Congress’s most powerful committees: the House Energy and Commerce Committee in January 2025.

Ocasio-Cortez recalled that it oversees about two-thirds of the American economy — healthcare, energy, technology and trade.

And then her phone never stopped ringing.

“The day I was named to this committee, my office’s phones rang off the hook and our inboxes were flooded by every corporate lobbyist under the sun. They all wanted to be my best friend.”

She then made her own position clear:

“I have never taken money from lobbyists or corporations. And I never will,” she promised.

She was not in Congress long before becoming one of its most recognisable voices. Her questioning was direct and closely focused, and she was willing to take on powerful figures in public.

In another highly visible moment at the 2021 Met Gala, she arrived in a white gown emblazoned in red with the words “Tax the Rich.” The dress became an instant media sensation.

And behind this increasingly visible political figure was a very different beginning.

“I come from a working-class family. My mom cleaned houses. My dad worked to start a small business.

“When I was a teenager, my dad was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away before I was even 20 years old. And the rug was pulled out from us all in the middle of the 2008 recession.”

“One accident, one bad day, one piece of bad news away from our lives falling apart.”

At a Los Angeles rally with Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez addressed a crowd of about 36,000. But she did not present the current political moment as something that had appeared overnight.

“This moment did not come out of nowhere. It has been a long time coming.”

She linked the erosion of rights and democracy to years of growing wealth inequality and the increasing influence of corporate and dark money in American politics.

She framed the choice starkly: “Oligarchy or democracy, but we cannot have both.”

“We can either have extreme wealth inequality with a toxic division and corruption that it requires to survive. Or we can have a fair economy that guarantees health care to all for working people along with a democracy and freedoms that uphold it.”

Speaking about members of Congress and elected officials trading individual stocks, she added: “It must end and we must ban it.”

Her influence now extends beyond her own campaigns. She has begun using her national profile to endorse and campaign for other candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. After his victory, Ocasio-Cortez described the Democratic Party as being in “a time of renewal.”

And she sees that renewal as generational.

“Millennials are not punk kids anymore. We’re grown adults with mortgages and kids. We’re taking the reins,” she declared.

There is another, more personal dimension to the choices Ocasio-Cortez has made.

Her decision to publicly discuss freezing her eggs made that painfully clear.

She could have kept the decision private. Instead, she chose to talk about it — including the practical realities and the political risk of making such a personal matter public.

She has argued that women in public life face questions about marriage, children and family planning in ways men generally do not.

The point is not whether one agrees with her decision. The point is why a woman’s reproductive choices can become a subject of political judgement at all.

Beyond elections, she says, the answer lies in something more basic: community.

“Beyond elections, LA, our task is to build community. Block associations, volunteer groups, church organizations, PTAs, activist organizations because community is the most powerful building block we have to defeat authoritarianism and root out corruption.”

“It will always be the people, the masses who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes who are the last and strongest defence of our country and our freedoms.”

She has not announced a presidential campaign. Her immediate priority, she says, is the 2026 midterms and returning to Congress.

But she is no longer treating the question as impossible.

She also spoke about the danger of fear — and what happens when people become afraid to speak up.

“The fear of speaking up, the deeply bitter and toxic division is the crumbling of our rights and protections,” she made a universal declaration.

Happy Women’s Day Malaysia.