It’s been nearly 20 years since then-candidate for president Barack Obama spoke before 15,000 people at the Taco Bell Arena on the campus of Boise State University in Idaho. In the years since, no left-leaning politician has been capable of conjuring such a groundswell in a county and a region that voted by a 70 percent margin in favor of President Trump in the 2024 election. But that all changed on Monday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spoke before a sold-out crowd of 12,500 people at the Ford Idaho Center in Nampa. The last time Sanders swung through the state, during his failed 2016 presidential campaign, he could only muster 7,000 people at the same Taco Bell Arena where Obama had rallied 15,000 years before. But with AOC by his side, Sanders shattered that number in an off-year event in a state that has come to openly embody the core tenets of MAGA conservatism.
In November 2024, the residents of Nampa, Idaho voted overwhelmingly for Republicans to retake the Oval Office. When Joe Biden visited the state as part of his 2020 presidential campaign, only 300 monied donors showed up at a private residence event in Boise. Biden chose to skip the state completely during his (admittedly truncated) 2024 campaign. On Monday, AOC stood before a capacity-crowd in the deep red state and found the sort of super-charged energy that once catapulted Obama on a historic trajectory in the late aughts.
The spirited congresswoman from the Bronx was firing on all cylinders in a performance that mirrored the high energy at multiple other sold-out events during her western swing through Trump Country on Sanders’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour over the last week. Far from the Acela corridor that Northeastern politicians both physically and ideologically represent, the pair were greeted with sold-out crowds wherever they went. Five thousand in Bakersfield, California. Eighth thousand in Missoula, Montana. Twenty thousand on a Sunday in Salt Lake City, Utah. The electric energy at each event was reminiscent of her star turn at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, when supporters chanted her name through thunderous applause inside Chicago’s United Center.
Though Sanders was the ticket’s main draw, the viral videos spreading across X following each event weren’t of the aging socialist but the woman he jokingly referred to as his daughter, AOC. Ocasio-Cortez has long been criticized as a niche politician, a loud-mouthed juvenile fronting wild policies that fail to find broad appeal outside the progressive haunts of her Bronx congressional district. But during the one-week western crawl, AOC in blue jeans and a denim button-down found her footing in true politicking. Far from the madding crowds that bustle through Washington, on the long prairie of America where policy fades, AOC’s star shone brightly for Democratic voters who feel forgotten by the DC consensus.
According to a Federal Elections Commission report filed Tuesday, AOC raised more than $9 million in the first quarter of 2025, an impressive figure for the progressive lawmaker who enjoys a safe house seat and is not a member of the Democratic leadership caucus. AOC has raised that money without receiving a single cent from the American-Israel PAC (AIPAC), which she has characterized as an “extremist organization that destabilizes U.S. democracy.” Her operation has openly rejected corporate PAC money, and 64 percent of contributions came from first-time supporters, with nurses and teachers atop a small-donor base that, on average, contributed $21 to whatever future AOC should wish to pursue. More than a quarter of a million people sent AOC money in the first three months of 2025.
Unsurprisingly, AOC is suddenly showing strength in early predictive polling of the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination race. AtlasIntel, rated one of the most accurate pollsters of both the 2020 and 2024 presidential election cycles, finds AOC with 16 percent support in a crowded field. The only Democrats to receive higher tallies are the former vice president Kamala Harris and the former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. New numbers from Yale also suggest AOC’s viability as a dark-horse candidate in 2028. In a poll that sampled 4,000 registered voters, AOC posted the highest net favorability of any Democrat in the prospective field and beat out Buttigieg for second place in a 2028 primary race. Only Harris, who has historically struggled on the campaign trail, sits ahead of AOC by seven percent in the Yale data.
Whether AOC can topple the establishmentarians on the left remains to be seen. It was a task too tall for Sanders, who had the nomination wrestled away twice by DC insiders who refused to afford an unabashed progressive the opportunity to helm the Democratic ticket. But AOC is a younger, fresher version of a man who, with his thin-rimmed glasses, distinctive Brooklyn accent, and silver hair, struggles at times to animate the broad appeal necessary to carry the nomination and perhaps the presidency.
Ocasio-Cortez, who will turn 39 in the fall of 2028, is already showing she can compete with top Democratic leaders. New polling from the liberal firm Data for Progress of the 2028 New York Senate primary suggests AOC holds a remarkable 19-point lead over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, should she choose to challenge the septuagenarian.
Whether AOC possesses the desire to shake up leadership or possibly launch an Oval Office bid is another question altogether. Her closest allies have repeatedly signaled her laissez-faire approach to ladder-mounting in a city dominated by grinders and climbers. But with Sanders aging out and a void in the progressive power structure, AOC, with her unique star power, is positioned to accelerate above a field of establishment peers in a Trump-era defined by outsiders.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
The Democratic power structure has never been weaker. As a party, the Democrats are registering historic lows in the polls, with only a quarter of registered supporters saying they hold a positive view of the party. “The Democratic Party is not in need of a rebrand,” noted Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates. “It needs to be rebooted.”
Though her path to the nomination likely lies outside the traditional norms of intraparty politicking, AOC cannot win the presidency or the Senate without the big money and power that still fuels the Democrat machine. It’s a thin tightrope, but one she has proven capable of walking, as evidenced by her unexpected support of President Joe Biden during his weakest moments. The real question now, as posed by former representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), is whether AOC actually has the desire to seek the nation’s top executive position.
“If the spirit moves her, she’ll do it—but she has to be moved by the spirit,” Bowman recently told POLITICO. If spirit is what it takes, AOC’s western tour through Trump Country could very well be the spark that lights the fire. In the deep mountains of America’s intercontinental West, a place that has largely rejected Democrats of all stripes, AOC found a distinct momentum, one that was all her own. It may just convince the New York congresswoman that the time is now.
