In the summer of 2018, almost no one thought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could beat Joe Crowley. Crowley was a 10-term incumbent, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, a man some thought would one day be speaker. A 28-year-old former bartender and democratic socialist was the longest of long shots to succeed him. But ever since she did, the political establishment has been trying to decide whether to take her seriously.

For a while it decided not to. The Missouri representative Emanuel Cleaver said the Democratic caucus did not need her “sniping”, while the then senator Claire McCaskill dismissed her as a “bright and shiny new object”. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to enjoy the response. Asked on 60 Minutes whether she wanted people to underestimate her, she said: “Absolutely. That’s how I won my primary.”

American socialism has produced dazzling individuals before. A little more than a century ago, Eugene Debs won nearly a million votes for president, while his socialist party sent Victor Berger to Congress, elected more than a thousand of its members to office and ran city halls from Schenectady to Milwaukee. Then it was gone, broken by wartime repression and its own splits, and eventually absorbed into a New Deal coalition that adopted parts of its program while denying it an independent political role. At best, it has been honored as a tradition of noble campaigners, a moral compass for the country rather than a contender for power. As Senator Ted Kennedy said of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) founder after his death in 1989: “Michael Harrington never believed that we could not do better and never stopped urging us to try harder.”

Ocasio-Cortez never seemed content to be solely a voice of conscience, however. On Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, she made herself the most visible defender of the Berniecrat program and built a mass following among young Americans. In parts of Europe, the anger of a downwardly mobile generation hardened into support for the populist right. In the United States, Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez won a good part of that generation for the left instead.

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Some of the people who once formed the base of the left had split their tickets or stayed home, and she was one of the Democrats willing to walk toward them instead of writing them off

A majority of Americans under 35 and of Democrats overall now tell pollsters they view socialism favorably, and the DSA has grown to more than 120,000 members. Yet unlike the socialism of Debs, which was a movement of miners, garment workers and machinists, today’s socialism is built disproportionately by the young and the credentialed. Like the Democratic establishment they loathe, the left’s candidates have run strongest among college-educated professionals in cities and weakest among non-college, older and manual workers, especially those in more rural areas.

It hasn’t always been clear that AOC could help broaden the left’s existing base rather than just deepen it. Her early trouble largely involved language and communication. Sanders moved people with plain talk about millionaires and billionaires. Ocasio-Cortez, despite being inspired by him, would sometimes drift into the dialect of the progressive non-profit and academic world, using terms more familiar in seminar rooms than union halls.

In 2022, she scolded Democrats who objected to the use of “Latinx”, a term used by 3% of Hispanics. She offered “Latine” as an improvement, a fix to a problem most Latinos didn’t know they had.

Or take the language of the Green New Deal resolution she introduced in an attempt to bridge the gap between environmentalism and the old producerist politics of the left. That resolution promised to repair the historic oppression of Indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, elderly people, unhoused people, people with disabilities, and youth. Of course, nobody on that list is un-wronged. But itemizing members of the same economic class as discrete interest groups was the opposite of how the 2016 Sanders campaign spoke, and of how the left traditionally has. It was the scholarly language of intersectionality, not the commonsense solidarity she was trying to inspire.

Nor were her loyalties as fixed as her admirers assumed. Ryan Grim’s reporting in his book The Squad shows that in 2019 she gave consideration to Elizabeth Warren, who had courted her and believed her backing would settle the nomination. After Bernie Sanders’s heart attack, however, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed the ailing senator at his most perilous point and became the most effective surrogate he had. The left had sometimes faulted her for how she weighed confrontation against getting along inside the Democratic party. In that moment, it got the version of her it wanted.

The direction she has traveled since has been encouraging. After Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, AOC went to dozens of her constituents who had voted for both her and Trump and asked them why. She wanted to understand them rather than lecture them. Their answers – that she and Trump both read as outsiders, that both sounded like they were on the side of working people – informed her politics in the months to come. Some of the people who once formed the base of the left had split their tickets or stayed home, and she was one of the Democrats willing to walk toward them instead of writing them off.

In going to them, she was approaching one of the central questions of our era. In 1992, nearly two-thirds of working-class voters backed Bill Clinton for president. By 2024, the Democratic share of working-class voters was 45%, while among middle- and upper-class voters it had climbed to 68%. The lines crossed. The party of Roosevelt has become the party of the diploma, and its strategists have made peace with it, betting on affluent suburbanites and young professionals to sustain the party’s future.

The math might work for those looking to win elections with 51% of the vote, but not for those looking to create a majority for sweeping change. In his long career and in his first run for president, Sanders offered a glimpse of how such a majority might be built. He held Vermont’s rather conservative Northeast Kingdom for decades and ran well ahead of his party among independents nationally in 2016, and a good deal of that rested on the sharp line he drew between himself and the Democratic establishment. Ocasio-Cortez will have to draw that same line despite being far more of a Democrat than Sanders ever was, more embedded in its caucus, and more implicated in its choices.

The evolution of her rhetoric shows that she might be up for the challenge. On the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Sanders through 2025, she was talking to parts of the country the Democratic party had long since abandoned. More than 12,500 people turned out for a rally in Nampa, Idaho, a bigger crowd than the number of registered Democrats in the entire county. Twenty thousand came out in deep-red Utah. Whatever the tours’ ultimate efficacy, the US’s two most prominent leftists were showing their 50-state ambitions.

Crowds are not a party, but Ocasio-Cortez has both. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, part of its socialists-in-office bloc, and that affiliation ties her to a concrete worldview, to an ideology and a history, even if she has at times seemed a less-than-enthusiastic member of an unruly organization. But DSA has plenty going for it, including thousands of talented organizers and a roster of hundreds of elected officials that includes the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

There are other capable progressives weighing a run in 2028, such as the California congressman Ro Khanna. However, none of them can do the two things AOC can do at once: run a serious national campaign as one of the most recognized figures in the country, and pull an entire movement into being behind it. The last time the left had a standard-bearer with her reach, in Sanders, it expanded the largest socialist organization the country had seen in generations. A credible Ocasio-Cortez campaign would do more, and perhaps be a part of building a leftwing infrastructure rooted in working-class life and built to outlast any one candidate.

The only thing left is for Ocasio-Cortez to announce her campaign, and to announce early. She should remember the lesson of 2015. Sanders got in as a protest candidate, with no national organization and no expectation of winning. He spent a year building what he needed to compete, and by the time he had it, Hillary Clinton had the nomination sewn up.

Ocasio-Cortez should move decisively to consolidate the left behind her and ward off potential challengers. But consolidating the left is the easy part. To win, and to transform the country, she will have to speak to people’s anger and draw workers of every background into her coalition. That’s the longest of long shots, and it’s worth taking.

Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist. He is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality