NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed in a new interview that she wasn’t sure she’d run for re-election this year—and isn’t sure if she'll stay in politics.
The 31-year-old Democrat, who easily won re-election on Nov. 3 to represent parts of Queens and the Bronx, made the comments in a post-election interview with the New York Times on Saturday in which she said Democrats have been “hostile” to party progressives like her.
When asked if she’d consider a Senate run in a couple of years to counter that, Ocasio-Cortez said, “I genuinely don’t know.”
“I don’t even know if I want to be in politics,” she said. “You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.”
She said there are multiple reasons she's reconsidered a future in politics.
“It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez said progressive Dems have been winning and getting a lot of support “externally” but that “internally” the Democratic Party has been “extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.”
“I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them,” she told the Times.
She added: “But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.”