Like all good millennials, Ocasio-Cortez reads her mentions and cannot resist the urge to engage with the occasional troll. But one thing her rejoinders have in common is that they are not exercises in watching the affirming retweets roll in; every single time, she pivots the conversation back to a substantive issue. To the guy who sneered at her thoughts on Electoral College reform, she pointed out that the Electoral College, as it stands, allocates a wildly disproportionate amount of power to small-state voters, which in turn contributes to anti-democratic outcomes in national elections.

The guy who joked that she's already looking for more vacation days offers, to her, a plum opportunity to draw attention to long working hours in the United States, and to highlight the federal government's continued failure to provide for paid medical and parental leave.

The Ohio state legislator who kept firing off gleeful chambers/branches gotcha tweets? A helpful reminder that his party does not believe that poor people deserve health care, and that its members and cheerleaders will harp on anything—even her shoes—to distract Americans from that fact.

Twitter can be a tricky medium for politicians: Its character limit precludes them from using it to engage in lengthy policy debates, and its public nature—every back-and-forth occurs in full view of supporters and opponents, and is scored in real time by volumes of hearts—can make the temptation to use it only for drags and dunks overpowering. Especially for newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had no real say in her overnight transformation into a media darling, getting ensnared in too many Twitter beefs is an easy way to allow bad-faith critics to dismiss them as unserious politicians. Thus far, she's managed to avoid this pitfall by staying doggedly, laboriously on message, and more people are familiar with her platform as a result.

One of the few politicians who is good at Twitter is Donald Trump, in the sense that it enables him to sling mud at this opponents and dictate the pace of the news cycle when doing so suits his interests. And as 2020 approaches—and as he begins launching daily "WITCH HUNT"–style fusillades at whichever Democrats threaten him the most—candidates will have to learn how to use those attacks to highlight their pitches to voters, instead of just firing off the pithiest one-liner they can think of. The Ocasio-Cortez strategy is a great place to start.