She became a star without paying her dues to the city’s entrenched establishment. Now, longtime political insiders are starting to grumble.
to open a district office for her first several months on the job, relying on local elected officials for constituent service work.
“Any time I talk to someone—companies, corporations looking to do business in New York, non-profits rolling out an issue campaign, the first question they always ask me is, ‘Where is AOC on this?’” said one New York City lobbyist. “I have been doing this for years, and I have never once had a client say to me, ‘Can I get Kirsten Gillibrand to my event?’ Once or twice I guess people have asked about Chuck Schumer, but every single person wants to know about AOC.
“She is going to have to navigate and understand the differences and the various segments of the nation and this city,” Sharpton said. “I have seen people blow up before. You have to make sure that you are firm in what you believe and that every exit ramp is leading to something and not a dead end.” Grassroots organizers say otherwise—so perhaps it depends on who’s talking. Her allies that say even as her celebrity has grown, Ocasio-Cortez and her staff remain unusually responsive.
In New York, the political left can be taxonomized into four overlapping groups. There is the center-left, inhabited by Governor Andrew Cuomo, former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the pro-business Partnership for New York City: pro-business, socially liberal and keenly aware of New York’s place on the international stage. There is the mainstream left of the political clubs, African-American and Latin voters, suburban regulars and Cuomo-aligned labor unions.
That there was a new political order in town became apparent almost as soon as Cuomo uttered those words. A few weeks later, Amazon announced that a portion of Queens, near but not in AOC’s district, had been selected as the home of one of its new headquarters. The city had been courting the company for years, but after the announcement some of those same politicians who had been lobbying Amazon to come to New York abruptly switched sides.
For his part, the governor has mostly kept his distance. “He is very wary of her,” said one state lawmaker, who attributed the governor’s continued progressive evolution—and his newfound eagerness for social media—in part to her rise. “Everyone is on guard. They don’t want to come in her crosshairs.”
And the organized left wonders about her commitment to their cause, and how she is going to work with some of the infrastructure they have built through the years. Other left-leaning members of Congress such as Nydia Velazquez and Jerry Nadler have worked hand-in-glove with the WFP and labor unions to push favored candidates and causes.
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