Her Republican colleagues had, up until then, been civil. But one day in late July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol while Representative Ted Yoho lost his shit. The Florida Republican, incensed by the New York congresswoman’s recent comments linking crime and poverty, jabbed his finger in her face, calling her “crazy” and “disgusting.” She froze. The situation felt dangerous, with Yoho towering over Ocasio-Cortez, who calls herself “five-five on a good day.” Congressman Roger Williams, a Texas Republican, bumbled next to him like a wind puppet at a used-car dealership. She told Yoho he was being rude and went into the Capitol to vote. As Yoho descended the steps, he called her a “fucking bitch.” A reporter nearby witnessed the exchange, and soon the whole world had heard the epithet.

This part hasn’t been reported: The next day Ocasio-Cortez approached Yoho and told him, “You do that to me again, I won’t be so nice next time.” She felt his actions had violated a boundary, stepping “into the zone of harassment, discrimination.” His mocking response, straight out of Veep: “Oh, boo-hoo.” Publicly, Yoho doubled down, issuing a non-apology on the House floor, citing his wife and daughters as character witnesses.

Ocasio-Cortez flashed back to one of her first jobs out of school, when a male colleague whom she’d edged out for a promotion called her a bitch in front of the staff. She had been too stunned to reply, and no one came to her defense. She wouldn’t let it happen again.

Forty-eight hours later, Ocasio-Cortez delivered one of the most eloquent dunks in political history, a “thank u, next” for the C-SPAN set, taking on not just Yoho but the patriarchy itself. She took care to enter “fucking bitch” into the Congressional Record. “I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women,” she told the House. “It happens every day in this country.” And the line that spawned headlines, T-shirts, hashtags, and memes: “I am someone’s daughter too.”

The 2020 horse race may be between two white, male septuagenarians, but it is a millennial Puerto Rican Democratic Socialist who produced a seminal political moment. Her Yoho rebuke inspired a fresh wave of awe for the youngest U.S. congresswoman in history and cemented her status as neopolitical icon—not just good on Twitter (where she schooled her congressional colleagues in a tutorial) and Instagram Live (where she gave an impromptu address on the dark night of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death), but a skilled orator with the power to move even her most cynical congressional colleagues. “They were like, ‘I didn’t know you’re that eloquent,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez says with a wry smile. “ ‘I’m so pleased and surprised by your restraint.’ ”

Ocasio-Cortez does not name Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, in a separate conversation, rejects reports of a clash, calling it media-manufactured misogyny. “Two powerful women coming from different perspectives,” she shrugs, “and there has to be a catfight.” Still, “House leadership is, sometimes, a little wary of me speaking on the floor. Not that I’m not allowed to, but it’s a little more dicey,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “I think a lot of people, including my Democratic colleagues, believe the Fox News version of me.”

Most of Ocasio-Cortez’s family and close friends call her Sandy. A few, like Representative Ayanna Pressley, go with “Alex.” But becoming AOC—and @AOC—has simultaneously vaulted her into a pantheon of triple-initialed legends and, alternately, given a handy tagline to the right’s worst nightmare. Her beatific face is commodified on twee Etsy greeting cards (“I AOC It’s Your Birthday”) and stamped alongside those of RBG and Frida Kahlo on “feminist prayer candles” and “Latina icon stickers.” Conservative attack ads depict her as socialist villainess. One especially disturbing spot shows a photo of her face on fire before cutting to a pile of skulls.

“It’s very dehumanizing in both ways, strangely, both the negative and the positive,” the congresswoman tells me one afternoon from behind the desk of her Bronx campaign office. “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “A couple of cycles ago, it was Pelosi. Then it was Hillary, and now it’s me.”

From her swearing-in in January 2019, Ocasio-Cortez became the de facto spokeswoman for the historically diverse 2018 midterm class, including a record 36 women and 24 people of color as freshmen in the House. Yoho’s outburst on the Capitol steps was a painful illustration of how some in the entrenched ruling class greeted their arrival—a finger in the face of change. AOC’s status as overnight sensation unsettled some in Washington. “I’ve never seen folks who were in the gallery get all excited about seeing a member of the Oversight Committee,” says Representative Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and friend. “Other members are jealous.”

She has demonstrated a special talent for triggering white-male fragility on both ends of the political spectrum. Three months after her 2018 primary, Andrew Cuomo dismissed her victory as a “fluke.” Ron DeSantis, a congressman at the time, called her “this girl…or whatever she is.” That demographic of politico are allowed to be wunderkinds—Joe Biden was 29 when he first won his Senate seat; Mayor Pete Buttigieg launched a presidential bid at 37, the same age as Tom Cotton when he ascended to the Senate. But “we are not used to seeing young women of color in positions of power,” says journalist Andrea González-Ramírez, an early chronicler of AOC’s rise.

Even back then, her public profile came with a threat of danger. A month into Ocasio-Cortez’s first term, a Coast Guard lieutenant and self-described white nationalist was arrested in Maryland with a stockpile of guns and a plot to kill Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Kamala Harris, Pelosi, and others. His internet search history included “where in dc to [sic] congress live.” He eventually pleaded guilty to federal drug and gun charges. Around the same time, Ocasio-Cortez came home to the D.C. apartment she shares with her partner, Riley Roberts, to find a man with a camera parked in a dark car outside. She ran to the back of a grocery store, fearing she might be attacked. The next day, a right-wing outlet published photos of her address, blurring it only after her office complained.

The death threats seem to spike in concert with Fox News rhetoric. “I used to wake up in the morning and literally get a stack of pictures that were forwarded by Capitol police or FBI. Like, ‘These are the people who want to kill you today,’ ” she says. The torrent of abuse spread to her mother, Blanca, and her younger brother, Gabriel.

“It’s the epitome of being shaken to your core,” Gabriel says. “Getting a phone call from the FBI saying, ‘Hey, don’t open your mail. They’re mailing out bombs.’ ” A designer of AOC’s Cesar Chavez–inspired campaign posters gets death threats; her former dean at Boston University, who introduced Ocasio-Cortez in a 2011 speech viewable on YouTube, regularly fields emails calling him the N-word for “training” her. When President Trump lobs one of his attacks at Ocasio-Cortez—he has called her everything from a “poor student” to a “wack job”—her offices are flooded with calls, voicemails, and emails echoing him.

The hate escalated as Ocasio-Cortez traveled to a border detention center in Texas in July 2019, just as the horrors of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy were coming to light. In a secret Facebook group, current or former U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents shared altered images depicting Ocasio-Cortez, who had called the centers “concentration camps,” in graphic acts, ProPublica reported. “Did you see the images of officers circulating photoshopped images of my violent rape?” Ocasio-Cortez later asked then Department of Homeland Security chief Kevin McAleenan at a House hearing.

Touring the center with a small group of colleagues, including Pressley and Representative Rashida Tlaib, proved traumatic. Ocasio-Cortez says she was forced to check her phone at the door, then, once inside, CBP agents snapped photos of her. Pressley remembers sitting on the floor of a cell with Ocasio-Cortez, surrounded by women in tears, speaking panicked Spanish. It was freezing and not very clean, and Ocasio-Cortez refused to leave. “We had to physically remove Alex,” Pressley recalls.

Later, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib took turns placing comforting hands on one another’s backs as they spoke at a press conference alongside an angry mob. Soon after, Trump launched a now-infamous racist Twitter tirade, urging Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Representative Ilhan Omar to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The Squad, as those four women are known, had begun with a serendipitous selfie at freshman orientation, but it is now a source of support that Ocasio-Cortez calls a “gift from God.”

“There have been many times, especially in the first six months, where I felt like I couldn’t do this, like I didn’t know if I was going to be able to run for reelection,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “There was a time where the volume of threats had gotten so high that I didn’t even know if I was going to live to my next term. Their sisterhood and their friendship, it’s not some political alliance. It’s a very deep, unconditional human bond.”

A close friend had told her that giving up would have been “the point” of the threats. “It’s to get you to destroy yourself so that they don’t have to destroy you.” That counsel helped Ocasio-Cortez reach a turning point, telling herself: “Okay, I’m not crazy. It’s not that this is too much for me. It’s that this is an environment with a very specific purpose.”

She tries to lighten the mood with a bit of black humor. “My family’s very spiritual,” she shrugs, putting on a classic New York accent. “When ya go, ya go.” She laughs often at the outrageousness of her life, maybe she has to. But for her own health, Ocasio-Cortez has tried to keep those men—and it is always men—in a faraway mental compartment. “All these dudes look the same. I got to a point where I was like, “This isn’t even helpful because it’s all these neo-Nazis….” Then, joking, “I shouldn’t say that—there’s great diversity in the neo-Nazis.”

“When I hear she gets threats, I always pray for her,” says Tim Burchett, Republican from Tennessee, who affectionately calls her “Cortez.” Yes, AOC has Republican friends. “I don’t agree with a doggone thing she says,” Burchett says, “but I respect her right to represent her constituents just as much as she respects mine.”

Exaltation weighs heavy too. Ocasio-Cortez’s charisma and raw talent are often compared to Barack Obama’s. Not three years into her congressional career, speculation abounds about a future presidential run, with everyone from Howard Dean to Cardi B rooting for it. No sooner had Kamala Harris been chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate than chatter began bubbling about a 2024 primary between Harris and Ocasio-Cortez, who turned 31 in October and would only narrowly make the 35-year-old age requirement.

“I’ve told her, I fully expect that she’s going to run one day, and that she should,” former Housing and Urban Development secretary and 2020 candidate Julián Castro told me. “She absolutely has the talent, the dynamism, and the leadership ability.”

At Ocasio-Cortez’s census awareness event in the Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park, women approach the congresswoman to cry, gush, and hug. (Pandemic be damned, AOC, in a pale blue suit, matching mask, and beige Rothys, opens her arms and indulges every selfie request.) “I can’t wait until you’re our president someday,” says one. Another, Jessica Forbes, grabs a selfie with her and tells me, “She’s going to be our Bernie Sanders.”

In 2016, Ocasio-Cortez was a volunteer organizer for Sanders in the Bronx. Three years later, she became the most crucial backer of his 2020 presidential campaign, at a time when her support was also highly coveted by Elizabeth Warren.

“She endorsed me right after I had a heart attack, and there were some people who were writing our campaign off. I’ve always been very grateful to her for doing that,” says Sanders. “There are some politicians who are very good on policy, and there are some politicians who are good communicators, and there are some politicians that have a way about them that relates very well to ordinary people,” says Sanders. “Alexandria has all three of those characteristics.”

Despite the base level of ego required to run for any office, Ocasio-Cortez seems uncomfortable with the mania about her future. “I think it’s part of our cultural understanding of politics, where—if you think someone is great, you automatically think they should be president,” she says. “I joke. I’m like, ‘Is Congress not good enough?’ ”

Her aspirations are a matter of endless speculation: New York Senate, House leadership, a Cabinet post? “I don’t know if I’m really going to be staying in the House forever, or if I do stay in the House, what that would look like,” she says. “I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life.” This is one of the few times AOC seems guarded and cautious about her words. “I don’t want to aspire to a quote-unquote higher position just for the sake of that title or just for the sake of having a different or higher position. I truly make an assessment to see if I can be more effective. And so, you know, I don’t know if I could necessarily be more effective in an administration, but, for me that’s always what the question comes down to.” She does not believe in political messiahs, nor does she see herself as a “hierarchical, power-based person.” At the beginning of her first term, her staff still called her Alex. It was only when journalists on the Hill started to follow suit that her team collectively decided to address her as Congresswoman. She blends into the crowd at Pelham Bay Park, even though she’s the only one in a suit. When a nearby gender-reveal party pops a blue confetti cannon, she throws her hands in the air and cheers. When I ask Pressley what the popular narratives miss, she cites humility. “She certainly did not set out to be an icon or even a historymaker. I think it was her destiny, but there is no calculation.”

As Ocasio-Cortez puts it, “I don’t want to be a savior, I want to be a mirror.”

The eventual champion of the Green New Deal grew up in a jungle-themed bedroom in suburban Yorktown, New York, with a monkey and a tree painted on the walls. “Sandy was always someone who was heavily into science and would nerd out at times,” says Rebecca Rodriguez, her cousin and 2020 campaign manager. The word nerd comes up often among her inner circle. The whole family is Star Trek–obsessed. In high school, AOC won an award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (something about the life span of roundworms), which led scientists to name an asteroid in her honor. Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter floats 23238 Ocasio-Cortez—according to the experts who named it, there’s “zero chance” it will destroy us.

AOC’s first taste of activism came as a 12-year-old Girl Scout who noticed the pond outside her Yorktown middle school was brown, “nasty,” and devoid of aquatic life. “Where are the frogs?” she wondered. Realizing it needed an aerator, young Ocasio-Cortez gave an impassioned presentation to the town board, alongside middle-aged men seeking backyard-deck permits. She didn’t get the aerator, she says, “but it was the first time that I realized that there’s a world outside of school that I could change.”

Her life has shaped her platform. From a young age, she detected the inequity between her nuclear family unit and the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived 30 miles south in the Bronx, where she was born. Ocasio-Cortez’s family was the only one to have a house, hosting Noche Buenas in their modest two-bedroom. She spent weekends in her old neighborhood, playing handball and buying caramels at the bodega with cousins as close as siblings, but there was a “gaping maw” between her everyday life and theirs. Her cousins walked through metal detectors at school and skirted gang turf outside.

“If you wear the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood,” Ocasio-Cortez says, “you’ll get jumped and your chain will be taken.” She blames the “insane stresses of inequality”—incidentally, the position that drew Yoho’s ire.

Believing in the dignity of working people began at home. Her father, Sergio, was an architect and small-business owner who grew up when the Bronx was burning. (“He wanted to be one of the people that helped put the buildings back up,” she says.) Her mother, who came from Puerto Rico as an adult, cleaned the homes of Yorktown’s wealthier, overwhelmingly white residents. “Ocasio-Cortez” scarcely fit in the standardized test boxes, Gabriel recalled, but hyphenating Sergio’s last name in front of Blanca’s sent a foundational message: “We started out, from the jump, seeing that our mom is equal to our dad.” Still, growing up as some of the only Puerto Rican kids in Yorktown meant Sandy or Gabe sometimes came home crying. “At the end of the day, she was a brown girl, and she didn’t have crimped hair like the rest of the ’90s kids,” Gabriel says of his sister. “She wasn’t ever going to be the sleepover house.”

Sergio’s death from lung cancer in 2008, during Ocasio-Cortez’s sophomore year at Boston University, altered the trajectory of her life. “I don’t think there’s any way to overstate how close I was with my dad,” she says. Sergio doted on Sandy, and he challenged her. “That sense of ambition to try things when the odds seem so unfavorable, that very, very much comes from my father.” Losing him emotionally devastated her. “It felt like…I didn’t just lose my dad, I also lost myself.”

But she wouldn’t let grief lay her low. “We’re not an ‘Oh, boo-hoo, this happened to me, give me attention’ type of family,” Gabriel says. A week after Sergio died, Ocasio-Cortez returned to college, laser-focused. Her GPA improved that semester. “ ‘This isn’t just about me anymore,’ ” as her close friend Jean-Bertrand Uwilingiyimana sums it up. “ ‘I need to take care of my family.’ She became an adult before any of us.” According to Rodriguez, Sergio’s death “put a fire under her.”

During the oft-overlooked pre-bartender portion of AOC’s résumé, she studied abroad in Niger, doing rotations at a maternity clinic, and interned in the late senator Ted Kennedy’s office before graduating cum laude with $25,000 in student debt. A friend says she would have been a prime candidate for an MBA or a lucrative consulting job at McKinsey. Instead, she became educational director at the National Hispanic Institute and, long before the rise of the anti-racist reading list, founded Brook Avenue Press to produce children’s books that reflected her Bronx community.

Losing Sergio had thrown the family’s finances into tumult. Their home in Yorktown was almost repossessed multiple times, sparking a protracted probate battle in local court. Blanca took a second job driving school buses, and as the AOC origin story often highlights, Ocasio-Cortez began waitressing and bartending at Flats Fix in Manhattan’s Union Square.

“It’s pretty simple, but also profound,” says Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, the upstart progressive group that first recruited AOC to run. “This is the story of a young Latina who’s trying to put food on the table for her family.”

It should not be groundbreaking for a political candidate’s life to closely resemble that of her constituents, but AOC’s rise has proved the power of proximity. When a majority of Congress members are millionaires, having lived on the edge of poverty, Ocasio-Cortez says, “makes me better at my job than 90 percent of Republicans, because I’ve actually worked for a living.” While still waitressing at the outset of her 2018 run, she changed her shoes on the subway platform and pushed a granny cart full of fliers and posters around the Bronx. She Swiffered the steps of her own campaign office and lugged in an air mattress as a makeshift couch. She stumped in a pair of sneakers by the brand & Other Stories until they were toast. (They were later displayed in a museum at Cornell University.)

Neither the financial collapse nor the fundamentally broken health care system were abstracts for Ocasio-Cortez, a vocal supporter of Medicare for All and a persistent critic of the Affordable Care Act. “The main reason why I feel comfortable saying that the ACA has failed is because it failed me and it failed everyone that I worked with in a restaurant,” she says. She would take wads of cash tips to doctor appointments. “You try buying insurance off of Obamacare,” she tells me, a line meant for her out-of-touch colleagues. (As a bartender, she did buy a plan, paying $200 per month, she says, for the “privilege” of an $8,000 deductible.) For a while after she was sworn in, even with a snazzy congressional insurance plan, Ocasio-Cortez says, she still rolled to the pharmacy and paid cash for her prescriptions out of habit. The first time she saw a doctor or dentist in years was when she became a congresswoman.

Growing up, her parents were “natural organizers” among the largely Latinx immigrant “underclass” in affluent Westchester County. “My dad would get coffee every day at the town Dunkin’ Donuts, and we would invite the cashiers over for dinner,” Ocasio-Cortez says. This background informed her persistent calls for the abolition of ICE: “The Democratic party has been, and this dates back to the Obama administration, extremely weak on developing just immigration policy because we’re scared of our own shadow.”

Critics have seized on her working-class roots, taunting her for having been a bartender while pointing at her wardrobe and D.C. rental as an attempt to expose her as bougie fabulist.

The scrutiny used to sting, to “have to announce that your mother was scrubbing toilets, that our family was struggling to do basic things, that they almost repossessed our home several times,” Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez says, “but in the long-term, it only cast further light into who we are: just decent people. Decent people are relatable.”

The irony is that the things Republicans say about her are things that she used to say about herself. Fearing she was failing to make her late father proud, “I used to, frankly, abuse myself mentally about how I’m nothing,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “I realized that I need to choose myself because if I don’t, I’m just going to waste away. I’m just going to give up.”

In her own way, Ocasio-Cortez is continuing Sergio’s legacy of building up the Bronx. “If he were around today…I think he would make fun of me incessantly and he’d be the first one to call me a Communist,” she laughs. “But he would be in my corner too.”

With a congressional salary now—$174,000, stretched over two of the most expensive cities in America—dressing for the job remains fraught. “It’s legitimately hard being a first-generation woman…and being working class, trying to navigate a professional environment,” Ocasio-Cortez tells me at our Bronx breakfast, where she wears a rust-colored suede moto jacket and a Black Panthers T-shirt. She asks for more hot sauce and never once checks her phone. “It continues to take me so long to try to figure out how to look put-together without having a huge designer closet.” Unlike the Kennedys and Bushes, she was not groomed for politics or even corporate America. No one ever conveyed to her the nuances of business casual or business formal. Which is why, unlike so many female politicians past, she’s willing to talk about her appearance with her 7.2 million Instagram followers.

AOC is the perhaps the only member of Congress who moonlights as a beauty influencer: Sharing her go-to red gloss—Stila’s Stay All Day Liquid in Beso—translated to a sales spike. “Every time I go on TV, people ask for my lipstick,” she says. On TikTok, the Yoho speech has become a popular lip sync for makeup tutorials—one young girl applies winged eyeliner while mouthing, “He called me dangerous.” But like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s prickly dissent collar, Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance is a study in meaning. The gold hoops and red lips she wore to her first swearing-in were a cosmetic Bat signal to Latina culture and a nod to fellow Bronx native Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was told not to rock bright nails at her confirmation hearings.

The Squad has claimed crimson lips as a show of strength. As the congresswomen furiously scrawled talking points before the press conference responding to Trump’s “go back” attack, Pressley called out, “Who needs lipstick?” and passed around a tube. “Now,” says Pressley, “any time we think a day is going to be especially trying, where one of us walks into a committee hearing wearing a bold red lip, we say, ‘Oh, it’s about to go down.’ ”

Ocasio-Cortez notably delivered the Yoho speech in her trademark Beso red. Afterward, Pressley said to her, “ ‘You know how I know you showed up to do business? Because you matched your lip with your suit,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez recalls. “[Ayanna] was like, ‘That’s when I knew she didn’t come to play.’ ” Ocasio-Cortez acknowledges that she had, in fact, come to the floor in bold colors to give herself a little extra confidence. “I had a little war paint on that day, for sure.”

The job leaves little time for normal life. Before taking office, she did yoga four times a week. Now, the notion of self-care is a daily struggle. Her family worries about the toll. “Her mother will, on occasion, call me and be like, ‘Is she okay? Is she eating?’ ” Rodriguez says. “We all know when she loses too much weight, it’s a sign that she is really stressed out.”

Earlier this year, Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts got a French bulldog named Deco (an ode to the architecture style) “to force myself to not live and breathe work,” she says. Dog motherhood is the only kind she can fathom at the moment. “I’m sitting here, I’m like, Do I freeze my eggs? Can I afford to do that?” the congresswoman says, laughing. “My orthodontist was telling me about how she was doing IVF, and I’m, like, asking her what her experience is like.”

As the youngest congresswoman in history, she’s in uncharted family-planning territory. “It’s important for us to talk about it, because women, we have to make these choices that men simply don’t have to make. Very few women have…” Ocasio-Cortez trails off, before pointing to Tammy Duckworth as a model. For now, she is “Titi Sandy,” a variation of tía, aunt to Rodriguez’s three children, two of whom walked hand in hand with her to her swearing-in ceremony. Staffers’ kids are welcome in her Bronx campaign office, which boasts copious snacks and a toy corner. Being around children is Ocasio-Cortez’s “happy place,” Rodriguez says. Staffers once lost track of her at a block party, only to find her sitting cross-legged on the ground with a cluster of kids.

Ocasio-Cortez seems to have found her Marty Ginsburg in Roberts, a web developer and Arizona native whom she met in college and connected with at a weekly Coffee and Conversations discussion series. “I think people see how glamorous she is, but these were not two glamorous people,” the couple’s friend Raul Fernandez says. “These were two awkward, supersmart, like-to-talk-about-issues kind of people that met through this super-wonky, nerdy thing.”

Ocasio-Cortez often delivered the final word at those Friday-afternoon talks, while Roberts raised antagonistic counterpoints for argument’s sake. In their liberal university bubble, “it becomes pretty easy for everyone to, basically, have the same thinking,” Uwilingiyimana said. “That always bothered Riley.” The weekend before Election Day 2018, Uwilingiyimana rented a cabin for the three of them in Woodstock, and they made plans for what would happen if she lost—maybe “buying this massive church that was for sale,” he says. “Or we can just start a ranch and stay up here forever.”

Roberts featured prominently in Knock Down the House, filming Ocasio-Cortez on his cell phone at debates, poring over her digital-ad strategy (in which he has played a crucial role), and crying behind his red glasses as the two gaze up at the Capitol after her primary victory. But his role in the film was uncharacteristic. Roberts is intensely private, declining interview requests, including this one, and appearing only sporadically in his partner’s Instagram Stories. (Not long ago, he ran after Deco in slow motion on the front lawn of the Capitol.) “When the camera is on her, he steps out of the way,” says Fernandez.

Those who know the couple call Roberts “good people,” a “keeper,” and “a genuinely wonderful person.” At the Sundance Film Festival premiere of Knock Down the House, Roberts was “just bawling” during scenes around Sergio’s death, Fernandez says. “I was like, ‘He really, deeply loves this woman.’ What more can you ask for?”

My interviews with Ocasio-Cortez come at a precarious moment in history—before Election Day 2020, during a series of news cycles that are stunning even by Trumpian standards. When we first sat down in her Bronx office, the New York Times had just published its bombshell investigation of Trump’s taxes. Talking about it winds up Ocasio-Cortez, her tie-dyed mask pulled down to eat a sandwich. “These are the same people saying that we can’t have tuition-free public colleges because there’s no money,” she says, “when these motherfuckers are only paying $750 a year in taxes.” Within a week Trump was in the hospital with COVID-19 and Mitch McConnell was plowing ahead with Amy Coney Barrett’s hearings. “Trump is the racist visionary,” AOC says, “but McConnell gets the job done. He doesn’t do anything without Trump’s blessing. Trump says, ‘Jump.’ McConnell says, ‘How high?’ Trump never does what McConnell says.”

“This is not about a decision between two candidates,” Ocasio-Cortez says solemnly. “It’s about a decision between two countries.” A Biden win gives her district, which is dominantly made up of Latinx, Asian, and Black people and had been the epicenter of the epicenter of the pandemic, a fighting chance. If it’s Trump, “I cannot honestly look them in the eye and tell them that they will be safe.” To that end, AOC spends the final days of October drumming up blue votes by playing “Among Us” with supporters online while more than 400,000 people watch via the livestream platform Twitch, demonstrating yet again that she is the party’s singular communicator.

But the ending of this story is the same, no matter which man wins. America is “still in a lot of trouble,” warns AOC. There is a temptation to view Trump as an aberration, she says, rather than a wake-up call to failures of American government at large.

Under a President Biden, “if his life doesn’t feel different,” she points to a cab driver whizzing by our table, “if their life doesn’t feel different,” she gestures to people walking by the beauty shop and Bengali Halal Grocery, “if these people’s lives don’t actually feel different”—now she is giving a stump speech over her omelet—“we’re done. You know how many Trumps there are in waiting?”

She is tired of incremental change, of “bullshit little 10 percent tax cuts,” she says. “I think, honestly, a lot of my dissent within the Democratic party comes from my lived experience. It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better. We’re not good enough right now.”

A new crop of AOCs is popping up across the country—young, progressive, working-class candidates of color who sought seats of power by her example. “I wouldn’t have run for office if it weren’t for AOC and the Squad,” says Jamaal Bowman, a former New York City principal.

Of the many knocks on Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most prevailing is that she drives the political conversation but lacks a substantive coalition in Congress. “They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got,” Pelosi once quipped of the Squad. But the potential addition of Bowman, fellow New Yorker Mondaire Jones, Cori Bush from Missouri, and Marie Newman of Illinois to the House would mean “the Squad just doubled up,” Bowman says. Ocasio-Cortez gets animated as she imagines the rest of this “Squad-plus”: Nebraska’s Kara Eastman and current Illinois representative Chuy García, with Sanders, Warren, and Ed Markey (“Tío Markey”) as Senate allies.

“You keep telling me I’m just four votes,” AOC says, “so I’mma go get more.”

Hair by Jimmy Paul. Makeup by Diane Kendal. Manicure by Dawn Sterling. Tailor, Jinnah Park. Set design by Julia Wagner. Produced on location by Art Partner. Special thanks to Cesar Escamilla and Upper Studio. Sittings Editor Carlos Nazario, Fashion Director Nicole Chapoteau. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Tyler Mitchell in NYC. For details, go to VF.com/credits.

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