In an interview with the New York Times after the 2020 election, democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said she was surprised by the “share of white support for Trump.” Going forward, she said, Democrats would have to learn to “actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.”

There’s a clear sense in which her premise is correct. White voters who are primarily moved by fear of immigrants, for example, are going to vote for demagogues like Donald Trump. But that leaves open the question of how to disarm the Right’s appeal.

Given that AOC has been widely discussed as a possible candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination, it’s important to see how she addresses this core issue. If she’s going to be the Left’s standard-bearer, we need to know that she’ll offer a winning message.

Back in 2016, she’d gestured at one possible answer about how to disarm xenophobic appeals in her comments on Trump’s first win. While she “did not wish (nor vote) for this outcome,” she said back then, she did “seek to understand it.” And she said that the way to understand it starts with an acknowledgment that social instability “is a direct result of wealth inequality.”

In 2016, she even argued that “racism, sexism and xenophobia did not win last night.” She wasn’t denying that racism, sexism, and xenophobia were in the mix. But she said these prejudices were “attendants” to larger problems, and that the solution was to take “poverty and economic inequality seriously.”

This aligns with the historical view of the socialist left, which is that the most important way to blunt the appeal of social prejudices among the working class is to appeal to working people of all races on the basis of their shared material interests. Everyone needs health care, housing, higher wages, and more free time to spend with their loved ones. That appeal is “intersectional” in the truest sense. It intersects distinctions of background and identity, binding together the majority of members of every group.

In the 2020 interview, though, AOC gave a far more confusing answer, saying that progressives “need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country.” That makes it sound like election canvassers can somehow hold conversations at every door so “deep” that people harboring racial animus will be convinced to start working on themselves and becoming better people.

The very different things the congresswoman has said about this subject over the years are best understood less as a matter of personal inconsistency than as a reflection of different lines of thought that have exerted influence within the Left as a whole at different times.

Many of us have been torn between different approaches at different times. In New York City, for example, many of the same grassroots progressives who have embraced identity politics in the past got excited this year by the successful mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, who was laser-focused on bread-and-butter issues.

Indeed, the mayor-elect likes to brag about the tens of thousands of former Trump voters around the city who he managed to win over in last month’s election. In an appearance on MSBNC earlier in the race, he explained his theory of the case, saying that “if you have a relentless focus on an economic agenda and you welcome people back, and you turn the political instinct from lecturing to listening, you can still have people come home to the Democratic Party.”

Indeed, AOC, who aggressively campaigned for Mamdani, has often hit similar rhetorical notes this year. She spent much of the year co-headlining “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies around the country with Bernie Sanders. AOC and Sanders made a point of spending a lot of the tour in states that voted for Trump, and their message focused on uniting working-class people against wealthy “oligarchs” by emphasizing economic issues.

This approach doesn’t entail neglecting marginalized groups or being indifferent to prejudice or mistreatment. A universalist economic agenda disproportionately benefits the demographics that are doing the worst right now, often because of the effects of past discrimination.

It also creates conditions in which it’s easier for groups that might be victimized by prejudice or retrograde cultural practices to stand up for themselves today. In a less precarious and more economically equal society, for example, women are less likely to be economically trapped in relationships defined by sexist cultural norms about the distribution of domestic labor. Workers whose bosses make racist jokes at work are more likely to say something about it if they enjoy strong unions and better labor laws, so they’re less worried that standing up for themselves on the job will mean they’ll lose their livelihood.

And the history of the labor movement has often involved workers of different backgrounds who may have previously harbored prejudices about one another joining forces because of their shared interests and developing a greater appreciation of their shared humanity through the experience of shared struggle. That history suggests that appealing to people on the basis of shared interests is more likely to pay off as a first step than “anti-racist, deep canvassing.”

The good news is that, in 2025, there have been many signs that AOC is moving in the right direction. In a CNN Town Hall appearance with Sanders during the government shutdown, for example, she spoke about the young men who have been radicalized by the online right. She said that bigoted right-wing rhetoric of the kind that’s common on social media seeks to “divide us” so that “the same people who own those platforms — people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg — can continue to get away with highway robbery in tax cuts, and in order to fleece all of our pockets, cut our health care, keep our wages low, so that we remain . . . fighting amongst ourselves while they make themselves richer.”

Striking a healthy universalist note, she said that the way to “fight back against that” is to “stand in solidarity with each other” across all sorts of divisions of identity and background. Even when we don’t “entirely understand each other,” she said, we need to value one another as “fellow Americans.”

That’s a message that could defeat the Right. And if AOC decides to run for president, that’s the version of her we need to see.