A new poll has JD Vance leading Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by 3.3 points in a hypothetical 2028 matchup, a gap small enough to essentially call it a tie.
Quantus Insights surveyed 1,200 likely voters between August 26 and 28, finding Vance at 45.1% to Ocasio-Cortez’s 41.8%, with 9.6% undecided and 3.5% picking someone else. Narrow it down to just the voters who picked one of the two candidates, and the split comes out to 51.9% versus 48.1%. The poll’s design-adjusted margin of error runs ±3.2 points, which means the real gap could be even tighter than 3.3, or gone entirely.
That number lands oddly next to everything else pollsters have found this year.
A Zogby Analytics survey back in July had Vance up by a full 7.4 points. An earlier internal Quantus briefing from April found a completely different Democratic field altogether, with Kamala Harris leading the primary at 30% and Ocasio-Cortez pulling a surprising 14%, tied with Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker.
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Back in December, a separate survey had actually shown Ocasio-Cortez ahead of Vance outright, prompting a characteristically confident reply: “I would stomp him!”
AOC to @PabloReports on the recent poll showing her beating Vance. She rolls her eyes at such early polls but adds: “Let the record show, I would stomp him” pic.twitter.com/Mt7tBK3Nze
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) December 18, 2025
Neither candidate has declared anything, so none of these numbers actually predict much yet.
Asked directly on ABC’s This Week whether she’s considering a run, Ocasio-Cortez kept her options open. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she said, adding when pressed on a potential Senate challenge to Chuck Schumer instead: “Anything is possible at this juncture.”
Vance has been just as noncommittal, telling CBS Sunday Morning in June that he and wife Usha would figure out their family’s next step after the midterms. “I have no doubt that the president of the United States is going to be very supportive of anything that I ultimately decide to do,” he said. “But we really just haven’t talked about what that thing will be.”
He added that he didn’t want speculation about “a future job” to make him “a worse vice president.”
Behind the scenes, Ocasio-Cortez’s team has already started shifting regardless of what she ultimately decides.
Axios reported this week that longtime campaign manager Oliver Hidalgo-Wohlleben is leaving in September, with aide Fiorella Bini stepping in as interim manager. Former staffers Aya Saed and Tanushri Shankar-Ross have returned in senior roles, and chief of staff Mike Casca, a 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign veteran, has taken on a larger portfolio.
The demographic breakdown behind the 3.3-point topline reveals a much sharper divide, regardless of who actually ends up running.
Ocasio-Cortez led women 48.7% to 37.1%, voters 18 to 29 by nearly 30 points, urban voters by more than 20, and both college graduates and postgrads by wide margins. Vance dominated men, voters over 65, and those without a 4-year degree by similar spreads.
In the actual primaries tested in the same poll, Vance led his own field outright at 41%, while Buttigieg topped a fragmented Democratic race with just 25.7%, trailed closely by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff at 21.3% and Ocasio-Cortez herself at 15.3%, with nearly 1 in 5 Democrats still undecided.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
