Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made her first House Democratic campaign contribution — a $260,000 donation that marks a milestone in the New York Democrat’s long and complicated relationship with her party’s political establishment.
In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said her decision to give to the campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was driven primarily by the dire threat of Republicans staying in power. He feared that a Republican-controlled House would not certify a possible re-election of President Biden this fall.
“The entire country witnessed a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol based on the failure to certify the duly submitted results of the presidential election,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said of the uprising on January 6, 2021. “And if anyone thinks it wasn’t a dress rehearsal for what they might try to attempt in January 2025, I’m sorry to say, but I think that’s a very naive assumption.”
The transfer of capital is a symbolic moment in the 34-year-old congressman’s own evolution within the Democratic Party. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the cash transfer represented her assessment that House Democratic leadership had changed enough to be worth her money. It comes nearly six years after she first won her seat by ousting a top House Democrat in a stunning primary upset.
“If you look at it, we’ve now changed the entire leadership of the House,” he said, citing the departure of Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn from the top of the House Democratic hierarchy.
“We have exerted a lot of power through our existing channels,” he added. “Now is the time to assert our influence in larger institutions, including the DCCC”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez won her seat in 2018 by defeating one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress at the time, Joseph Crowley, who represented a diverse district in Queens and the Bronx. She arrived on Capitol Hill as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and a campaigner who protested at the office of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the fall before she was even sworn in.
Early reports that he was considering a primary challenge to another prominent New York Democrat, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is now the party’s leader, created additional friction. And he quickly became the face of a small group of progressives known as “the group” that tried to pull the party to the left politically and politically. He was a rising star on the left and mercilessly maligned on the right.
In 2019, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee created a blacklist of consultants and vendors who worked for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other candidates who challenged incumbents. She and others strongly objected, and by 2021, the blacklist was disbanded.
“We’ve spent a lot of time, since we first came into office in 2019, working to change this institution,” he said of the campaign committee. “And we did it successfully.”
In a statement, Mr. Jeffries thanked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for “helping us protect the integrity of the electoral process and take back the House in 2024,” calling her “a valuable member of the House Democratic Conference who is a strong voice for the voiceless and defender of democracy”.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the most prolific women in the Democratic Party. Her campaign committee has raised more than $37 million since 2019. She has raised another $11.1 million, according to her office, for non-federal candidates and causes, including nonprofits, food banks and rights groups of abortions.
But until now, she’s never given her party leadership a dime, even though House Democrats each have “dues” they’re supposed to pay to remain members in good standing.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s $260,000 contribution is earmarked for the party’s Voter Protection Program. It is the first time a member of Congress has given money to a program dealing with voter registration, polling and litigation.
Her PAC has another $500,000 that she said was earmarked for defending group members from party opponents, an amount she noted was larger than her carry-over on the campaign trail.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and the party know that her financial support could be used against candidates running in swing districts. But he said that with the earmarked funds, “we just tried to make that argument as ineffective as possible for Republicans.”
The “fundamental element” of her decision to give now, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, was to make sure she helped Democrats take back the House, which Republicans now only narrowly control.
He said he had little confidence that Speaker Mike Johnson, who is scheduled to appear at Mar-a-Lago on Friday with former President Donald J. Trump to make an “election integrity” announcement, he would reject any attempts by Mr. Trump to overturn. the election.
“This party has turned into a Trumpism party and it’s turned into a personality cult,” he said. “I don’t know if Mike Johnson has the ability to defend our democracy against such a threat.”
