Why DSA Members Should Support AOC 2028
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a DSA member and a champion of popular reforms like Medicare for All, blocking all military aid to Israel, the PRO Act, and a Green New Deal. She is also the only potential democratic socialist contender for President in 2028.
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns caused DSA to grow enormously. We saw the importance of having a left-wing candidate contest the Presidency, to spread socialist ideas and jump-start an opportunity for organizing on a big scale. Conversely we saw how demobilizing it was in 2024 to have no alternative to the centrist candidate that had been handed the nomination.
Electing a democratic socialist President would give us an unprecedented opportunity to build the labor movement and the Left through the bully pulpit of executive office, and the potential to organize for transformative reforms. We recognize that this is far from a guaranteed result but we also know that even the process of running opens up opportunities to expand the political imagination of the public.
The highly successful DSA for Bernie campaigns also show the importance of laying the groundwork for a national Presidential campaign as early as possible, even before a candidate announces they are running.
DSA members should encourage AOC to run and begin planning now how to make the most of her campaign, to grow the socialist movement. Two vehicles that we should plan in advance are Students for AOC and Labor For AOC.
Student Organizing
An AOC Presidential run could serve to organize young people and students at a rate never seen before. If YDSA leads youth organizing for AOC, we can connect young people to the Workers Deserve More program and long-term organizing as workers, tenants, and students.
In 2025, YDSA kicked off the year with just over 1,800 DSA members. This year, YDSA membership has nearly tripled. First, the campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani energized young people across the country. Students tabled with Zohran cutouts, using his campaign to connect with other students about transformative demands on our campuses. Then, with the several high-profile federal races won this year by DSAers, YDSA has grown to more than 5,000 members, and is now using its campaign for Sanctuary Campuses to organize them for the long haul.
YDSA should adopt support for AOC’s campaign as the national priority campaign for the 2027-2028 term. This would mean national YDSA creating resources and mentoring chapters. An AOC Presidential campaign would allow YDSA to do something we’ve been trying to experiment with for a long time – running a coherent national campaign with shared tactics. YDSAers campaigning for AOC would unify not only around her platform but around the Workers Deserve More program, using it to expose young people to socialist politics and organize them into the student and labor movements for the future.
An AOC 2028 campaign would be different from the other national campaigns YDSA has adopted in the past, because it would provide a popular shared goal and common organizing framework across the country. This campaign would allow us to connect with working class students across departments, social circles, identities, and interest groups to build unity on our campuses. This would allow us to expand our base into the areas of campus that may otherwise be inaccessible to young socialists.
Labor for AOC
Socialist labor activists should begin planning with like-minded coworkers now on how to build Labor for AOC efforts in their unions as soon as she announces, for three reasons: 1) early efforts will be crucial in cohering portions of the labor movement behind AOC, 2) engagement of union members in an AOC campaign can stimulate internal and external union organizing beyond the campaign, and 3) it’s an opportunity to bridge the labor movement and the socialist movement.
In 2016 and 2020, union activists built a national Labor for Bernie group that organized union members to vote for Bernie in the early primaries and caucuses. Labor for AOC could produce materials and trainings to help rank-and-filers bring their coworkers to canvasses for AOC and organize to secure their unions’ endorsement.
The efforts of some union activists in New York City around Zohran’s 2025 mayoral campaign illustrate these tactics. Rank-and-file union activists in AFSCME’s city workers union, District Council 37, organized enough members to persuade the leadership to endorse Zohran second in the ranked-choice primary. Educators for Zohran in the teachers union (UFT) were able to stop the union from endorsing against Zohran in the primary. After UFT endorsed Zohran in the general election, these rank-and-file educators made the endorsement carry weight by doing their own flyering and phonebanking turnout for official UFT for Zohran canvasses. If union activists organized at a larger scale nationally, they could bring their unions into the AOC campaign coalition early on, bolstering her campaign and engaging millions of union workers in democratic socialist politics.
Union members would be well positioned to talk union to workers they encounter while canvassing. Non-union workers reached through Labor for AOC tabling and canvassing could be connected to resources like EWOC and other worker organizer trainings to get them interested in union drives.
Finally, by giving union activists a framework to talk about socialist politics in a relevant and clear way, the Labor for AOC campaign could help bring thousands more union activists into the socialist movement. It can be hard in workplace organizing to connect specific workplace struggles with the need to move society from capitalism to socialism. A democratic socialist Presidential campaign would help bridge that gap by bringing discussions about socialism onto the national political stage, grounded in reform demands that matter to unionists, like the PRO Act, Medicare for All, and housing for all. A campaign structure gives us a framework of escalating asks to engage coworkers in politics, like coming to a Labor for AOC canvass, going to AOC-related DSA events, and joining DSA.
Ready Day One
An AOC 2028 Presidential campaign is a historic opportunity for democratic socialists to engage millions of people in our politics. DSA members should make the most of this possibility now by moving the organization to begin strategizing around an AOC 2028 campaign. Let’s be prepared on the day it launches.
