AMES, Iowa — With Sen. Bernie Sanders largely stuck in DC in the days leading up to the first contest of the 2020 election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is storming across Iowa for his campaign and making a big name for herself in the process.



On Saturday morning, the Sanders campaign’s field office in Cedar Rapids was filled with chants of “AOC” as Ocasio-Cortez walked to the front of the room. Her reputation — driven by her Twitter presence, her role in the vanguard of a new generation of progressive Democrats, and by the prolific attacks on her from the right — had somewhat preceded her.

“I would have her be president. She’s unabashed. She’s not afraid of the political garbage that we have,” said Joe Organist, 60, at the stop in Cedar Falls. “If I were running for president, she’d be the only one I’d want speaking for me.”

He added that he’d come to the Sanders event partly because he knew Ocasio-Cortez would be there.

For other voters at the Sanders campaign events in Iowa on Saturday, however, this was their first time really getting to know her, and in some cases, the first time they’d even heard of her.

Close to two dozen voters who spoke to BuzzFeed News over the course of the four-stop day, including two with Sanders, said they were impressed with her — several adding that they would like to see her be part of a Sanders cabinet, and could see her running for president down the track. (Ocasio-Cortez, who is 30, is not yet old enough to be president or vice president.)

“I actually didn’t know anything about her. My friend told me about this,” said Dominique Eniola, 21, a student at the University of Northern Iowa. “I have heard that a lot of politicians don’t like her because she’s a woman and because she’s very ‘radical.’ I think a lot of people throw around the word radical very interchangeably because they might not like just one key thing about someone. I think it is very hard being a woman and not having people take you seriously.”

“I didn’t even know who she was, to be honest,” said Angela Hodge, 45, at a town hall in Marshalltown. “I love her. I love that she’s multicultural, being multicultural myself, I am Hispanic … I would like to see her in more politics because I think she really has a lot to say and it’s very meaningful. She has a lot of good points that she made.”

Ocasio-Cortez made her second swing through Iowa this weekend — last time she was here, in November with Sanders, her focus was on a climate forum at Drake University. In December, she spoke at a campaign stop in Las Vegas entirely in Spanish, in an event that saw young Latino Sanders supporters bring in their parents and grandparents to engage directly in their first language for the first time in the presidential campaign.

Ocasio-Cortez’s approach on the presidential campaign trail — dating back to her first New York City rally after endorsing Sanders in October — is a combination of sweeping progressive discourse tied in to very personal stories. This weekend, she talked about the “surreal” experience of sleeping on an air mattress in her first days in Congress, and then walking to work on the Hill, where she says she was “told that our lives are too politically inconvenient to fight for.”