DSA members float AOC for president — though some question if Bronx Dem is enough of a lefty

The DSA can't even agree that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is left-wing enough for them, which tells you everything about where that organization has drifted. This is the same congresswoman who campaigned as a democratic socialist, who has spent six years pushing the Democratic Party leftward on everything from the Green New Deal to Medicare for All. And now the people who helped launch her career are sitting in a convention hall wondering if she's gone soft.

The Israel litmus test is the real story here, though. These are activists debating out loud whether they could ever support any candidate, including one of their own, who doesn't meet their standard on a foreign policy issue that has nothing to do with the domestic agenda they claim to care about. That's not a coalition building power. That's a purity contest with no winner, because the goalposts move every time someone gets close enough to touch them.

Democrats should pay attention to this, not because AOC is going anywhere near a 2028 ticket seriously, but because it shows the gravitational pull she and her wing still have on primary politics. The party keeps telling itself the socialist fringe is a manageable minority. Meanwhile that fringe is out here auditioning presidential candidates and deciding the sitting congresswoman from the Bronx isn't radical enough.

What this really exposes is a movement eating itself. When your own most famous member can't clear the bar, the bar was never about winning elections. It was about ideological loyalty tests, and that's a strategy that keeps handing Republicans easy contrasts to run against.