"We've just never had someone who matches both our demographics and our politics."
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman Democrat representing New York's 14th Congressional District, takes a selfie with Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, D-N.H., right, and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., on the first day of the 116th Congress on Jan. 3, 2019.J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Jan. 20, 2019, 7:39 AM EST
By Alex Seitz-Wald
WASHINGTON — Less than three weeks after being sworn in as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already has more Twitter followers than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, more interactions than Barack Obama, one of C-SPAN's most-watched congressional floor speeches of all time and a ubiquitous nickname that doubles as her Twitter handle — "AOC."
Democrats want to learn from her, Republicans want to destroy her and many in Washington fear being "dunked on" by her. The 29-year-old House freshman from New York is showing her older peers what the future of politics might look like once the digital natives like her take over, for better or worse.
"We've just never had someone who matches both our demographics and our politics," said Waleed Shahid, who worked on her campaign and is the communications director of the left-wing group Justice Democrats. "Bernie (Sanders) matches our politics, but he doesn't match our demographics."
Democrats were not exactly thrilled when Ocasio-Cortez ousted the veteran lawmaker in line to be their next speaker in a Democratic primary last year and marked her first day on Capitol Hill by joining a sit-in in Pelosi's office. But increasingly, if begrudgingly, they seem to have concluded, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Party leaders tapped Ocasio-Cortez to lead a social media training for her House colleagues last week, and presidential candidates seem to be cribbing from her cooking-while-Instagraming playbook, broadcasting themselves cracking beers in their kitchens, getting a dental cleaning and other vignettes of their daily lives.
"This shift is exciting to us as it demonstrates an understanding by these campaigns that the more authentic and native their digital content feels, the more online audiences are likely to engage with it," the Democratic digital firm ACRONYM wrote in a newsletter alerting subscribers to the trend of "the 'casual' campaign video."
After all, politicians are in a sales business. Their product is themselves and their ideas but many voters aren't buying it because of the carefully controlled way they've been pitched for years.
"People have exquisitely well-developed bullshit meters," said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., who helped led the social media seminar with Ocasio-Cortez last week. "Almost every real tweet is going to involve a little bit of risk. It's going to be a little bit of opening the kimono into a member's private life, because a little bit of risk is authentic."
Himes, a white 52-year-old Goldman Sachs alum who chairs the centrist New Democrat coalition, looks and sounds very different from Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx-born Latina Democratic Socialist.
Incoming Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez waits for a House of Representatives member-elect welcome briefing on Capitol Hill on Nov. 15, 2018.Yuri Gripas / Reuters file
But Himes said he and Ocasio-Cortez, who did not respond to an interview request, both offered similar social media advice to their colleagues, whom he acknowledged have a lot of catching up to do.
"We were both trying to hammer home this message of, 'Speak like yourself, be a human,'" said Himes. "Anything you can do to close the gap between the blow-dried, poll-tested, bullet-pointed politician and the people."
That doesn't mean mimicking Ocasio-Cortez — "You don't need be hip, in fact it's probably disastrous to be hip," Himes quipped — but rather, as the age-old dating advice goes, being yourself.
So while Ocasio-Cortez posts videos of herself dancing and switching from flats to heels on the subway, Himes shares photos of him tapping maple trees for their syrup and sampling his home brewed mead.
John Dingell, the 92-year-old former Michigan congressman, and Chuck Grassley, the 85-year-old current Republican senator from Iowa, have both built followings on Twitter by leaning into their get-off-my-lawn personas. Grassley once declared to the world, "I now h v an iphone," while Dingell pondered the Kardashians.
