Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is likely the most famous member of the House. She’s also one of Congress’s most reliable fundraisers, bringing in more donations (the vast majority of them small-dollar) than any Democrat in the House save Nancy Pelosi herself. Yet her congressional district, New York’s 14th, spanning portions of the Bronx and Queens, is one of the most reliable blue seats in the entire country. Unsurprisingly, she whipped her Republican challenger, Jon Cummings by 38 points. Despite this easy win, AOC and her team treated the 2020 contest as an all-hands-on-deck situation, raising more than $18 million and spending more than $13 million as of mid-October, much of it on a digital advertising blitz that often implored her national fan base to donate lest their icon loses office.
Ocasio-Cortez’s fundraising profile is unusual for a member of the House. Nearly 80% of her money in the 2020 cycle came from donations under $200, and less than 17% of the money came from New York State. By comparison, her close ally Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts gets about half her money in small-dollar donations and more than half of her fundraising is Massachusetts-based. AOC’s campaign for reelection resembled a progressive presidential campaign in that it relied on lots of small donations from committed liberals and leftists all over the country.
To get those donations, Ocasio-Cortez’s operation relies heavily on digital advertising, especially on Facebook. (There is some irony here, given her criticism of the social media giant for running political ads that contain falsehoods.) In 2020, she spent over $4.8 million on Facebook ads. Some of these implored people to fill out the Census or donate to community aid to soften the impact of the pandemic. Others solicited money for the Squad Victory Fund, a joint fundraising operation from Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. But most asked for money directly on the congressperson’s behalf.
As early as February, Facebook ads from AOC warned that she was being primaried by nearly a dozen challengers who had raised more than $1 million. As the field narrowed to just Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, Ocasio-Cortez’s ads sounded the alarm on how much money she was loaning her campaign. After AOC easily won the June 23 primary, with 74% of the vote, her Facebook advertisements portrayed her as at risk of losing in the general. “Those same organizations and corporations who tried to take us down in the primary will soon be dumping their resources into the general election,” intoned one ad that was part of a $125,000-plus spend. Another claimed that Cummings had raised $7 million, which was a bit of scaremongering—Cummings would eventually raise close to $10 million from Republican donors motived by a hatred of AOC, but the race was never in doubt.
On the face of it, this is an oddly aggressive reelection approach for an incumbent in a safe seat. It’s also arguably a bad use of donor resources: The small-dollar donors who chipped in to defend Ocasio-Cortez’s reelection could have instead given to the many federal, state and local races that were competitive around the country. (Her campaign donated more than $100,000 to other politicians, which is still just a drop in the bucket of her overall spending.) But there are a few reasons that Ocasio-Cortez may have felt the need to pull out all the stops in her first cycle as an incumbent:
She needs to keep her donor network alive
One of Ocasio-Cortez’s many claims to fame is that she doesn’t do “call time,” the congressional practice of dialing up wealthy donors and getting them to chip in to reelection campaigns or congressional committees. She can avoid that chore because she raises more than almost anyone else through digital campaigns. Sometimes, she even makes this appeal explicitly: If enough of you regular folks donate five bucks to her campaign, it means she won’t have to ask some rich Democrat for a few thousand.
There are very few politicians who don’t want to raise as much money as they possibly can. Ocasio-Cortez’s fundraising style is more public-facing than that of most politicians. It’s one thing to swear off corporate money; it’s another thing to swear off money entirely.
She was more vulnerable than is commonly assumed
Would Ocasio-Cortez have coasted to victory if she didn’t deploy her (to quote the New York Times) “digital juggernaut?” Or was that juggernaut the reason her reelection looked effortless?
Her prominence as one of the most left-wing members of Congress made her into a target for both Wall Street-aligned local Democrats and Republicans. Caruso-Cabrera, her chief primary opponent, spent more than $2.7 million; Republican challenger Cummings spent nearly four times that amount. Cummings’s claim early in the campaign that AOC was vulnerable and disliked by a sizable portion of her district turned out to be hot air, but he wasn’t a laughingstock, and the Democrat didn’t treat him like one. “It’s the old adage that you either run scared or you run unopposed, and we’re not unopposed,” an Ocasio-Cortez spokesperson told the Times in June.
Was spending $13 million overkill? Maybe. Could it have helped other Democrats? Almost certainly. But Ocasio-Cortez is in office because the seat’s previous occupant, Joe Crowley, got lazy and overconfident enough to give an opportunity to a more energetic challenger.
She needed to make a statement
Presumably, Ocasio-Cortez would prefer not to hustle to get reelected every two years. One way to dissuade challengers in the future was to prove 2018 wasn’t a fluke and utterly destroy the competition in 2020. If AOC was seen to sweat even a little during a primary or general election race this year, it would have opened the door to more challengers—potentially more prominent and wealthy ones—in 2022 and beyond. Her fame has made her a target, but her money makes her an immovable object.
