Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most recognizable Democrats in the country, and that visibility is now becoming a liability. As November closes in, candidates who were happy to have her at their side during the primaries are now finding very good reasons to keep their distance.
AOC spent months stumping for Democratic candidates across the country this year, showing up in the rain for rallies, endorsing Senate hopefuls, and lending her name to races she believed in. The general election has introduced a different set of priorities for some of those same candidates.
The clearest case is Sam Forstag, a House candidate in Montana who flew AOC out to campaign for him in the rain just months ago. By September, her endorsement had quietly disappeared from his campaign website.
Asked why AOC would not be joining him, Forstag kept it short: “I don’t intend to be having a lot of folks from out of state campaigning with me over these next 40 days.”
Sam Forstag in Montana who rallied with AOC in May en route to winning the primary, suggested that he doesn’t want her to campaign for him.
“I don’t intend to be having a lot of folks from out of state campaigning with me over these next 40 days,” he told Axios when asked about…
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) September 28, 2026
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Party officials have been candid, at least off the record, about what the numbers show. “The polling is atrocious for her,” a senior Democratic strategist told Axios. “She’s a lightning rod.” Some candidates have gone further than simply not inviting her, with certain campaigns having explicitly asked her team to stay away.
AOC sees it differently.
Speaking to ABC’s Jonathan Karl earlier this year, she said the party is experiencing “a time of renewal” and insisted Democrats are “unifying.” “We understand that our priority is the working class of this country, and we have to make the case that we’re here to make people’s lives better,” she said. “The Republican Party right now is jacking up prices, making housing impossible to afford, and we are focused on everything from healthcare to your grocery bill.”
That framing has not translated into universal enthusiasm from candidates who need swing voters to survive November.
Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook declared Sunday that a Democratic House takeover is a “done deal,” projecting the party will gain roughly 20 seats and could flip the Senate. His analysis attributed the wave largely to voter frustration with Trump, not attraction to Democratic candidates themselves. In that environment, every association carries real electoral weight.
AOC has spent recent months walking back some of her most controversial positions.
She publicly walked back past support for abolishing prisons and defunding the police, telling Karl that Covid-19 lockdowns made everyone “a bit kooky and willing to humor extreme ideas,” and argued those positions should not be held against Democratic candidates in 2026. The repositioning has had limited effect on how colleagues view her usefulness outside New York.
The 2028 picture gives all of this a longer shadow. At the end of 2025, AOC still had more than $13 million in a campaign account. Ari Rabin-Havt, who served as a deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders in 2020, told Axios that she “has earned her place as the top dog” among liberals, adding: “and if she does run, she obviously becomes the biggest star and sucks up the oxygen in that lane.”
The New York Times polling aggregation from September 25 placed her fourth in the Democratic field, well behind Kamala Harris.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
