Scott Starrett was craving tacos.
The 32-year-old had recently moved to New York City from Austin, Texas. So when a tiny taqueria called Flats Fix opened up around the corner from his Manhattan office, he soon became a regular with his graphic design-firm colleagues.
Because it was 2016, lunch conversation would frequently turn to the presidential race. One friendly bartender would often join in. Her name was Sandy.
"Everyone just loved Sandy," Starrett said. "She had an infectious kindness, an infectious presence."
The 26-year-old Bronx native would talk about her time interning in Sen. Ted Kennedy's office in college. Starrett would bring up his work for local candidates in Texas. Sandy started volunteering for Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign.
Then Donald Trump was elected.
Soon after, the bartender and political organizer raised some money and road-tripped out to North Dakota, where Native Americans were leading protests against the Dakota Access Oil pipeline. Starrett had lent her a camera to document the trip.
When she got back, she had a new idea. She might run for office. Starrett and his design firm got to work on branding.
They created a campaign poster inspired by the United Farm Workers of the 1960s. It could've been mistaken for a Netflix show ad.
In blaring-blue and yellow block type alongside an image of Sandy, it read ꜟOcasio!
Sandy, now better known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was running for the US House of Representatives.
Eighteen months later, she became the youngest woman to be elected to Congress.
Along the way, she beat a popular and powerful 20-year incumbent in her own party. And she's proved to be the most disruptive new Democrat in decades, striking fear in both Republicans and Democrats.
This is the story of how her climb began, and where it's going next. It's based on conversations with people who have known Ocasio-Cortez throughout her life and a recent interview conducted with the new lawmaker at INSIDER.
'Sandy for president'
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took a breath and ascended the stage. It was January 17, 2011, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Ocasio-Cortez was about to speak to her fellow Boston University students.
Onstage, the dean of students, Kenneth Elmore, asked her: "Can this be the generation that's great, Sandy?"
It was a question inspired by King.
"Let's see," Ocasio-Cortez said. She pushed a long bang behind her ear. Then she began her speech, delivering it with a preacher's cadence and an activist's confidence.
"Greatness has never been a result of circumstance or fortune," she said. "It is not an inherited trait or a function of destiny. Greatness is reserved for the delinquents, the combatants of the status quo."
Ocasio-Cortez had natural confidence when speaking to crowds. When she traveled to Niger for a junior-year semester abroad, she didn't know any French. At the end of the four months, she delivered a speech in French to the faculty.
Most every Friday afternoon on campus, she helped lead student discussions, called Coffee and Conversations. She'd listen to her peers debate the meaning of love and the Affordable Care Act, and then she'd conclude the two hours with her own thoughts.
She didn't play it safe.
"It was always a little bit edgy — she wasn't afraid to take us to the next level," Bruna Maia, a BU classmate, said.
Ocasio-Cortez also led BU's Alianza Latina and held meetings with college students across the city to discuss student debt and economic inequality. Yet she didn't think of herself as an activist.
"I didn't understand why people called me an activist," she told INSIDER. "I felt like I was just saying things that were very common sense. I would just say, 'Hey, kids in the Bronx should have a good education.' And they'd be, like, 'Oh, she's an activist.'"
"And I was, like, why is it when I say these things I'm an activist, but when this person says these things they're just a responsible parent or auntie or whatever?"
Maybe people said it because they were inspired. Maia says that when it came to Ocasio-Cortez, their friends joked about her aspirations.
"We would say 'Sandy for president' because we were, like, 'Yes, you're speaking my truth right now.'"
A scrappy army
Ocasio-Cortez's father died of lung cancer when she was a sophomore in college. He was 48. Her Puerto Rican mother cleaned houses to support her two kids. But the money wasn't enough, and she had to fight off foreclosure.
After Ocasio-Cortez graduated from college, she wanted to help, so she moved home to the Bronx and supplemented her nonprofit jobs by waiting tables and mixing drinks at night.
She made the most of the service-industry work, befriending customers and building a support network of colleagues.
"I got really, really, really good at listening to people, and I got really good at understanding people's needs, beyond just food and drink," she said. But she also had to grow a "really thick skin" to deal with rude customers and harassment.
"You get used to people putting themselves above you all the time," she went on. "You really start to realize that a person who's treating you badly is really just expressing a problem with themselves."
Soon after Election Day in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez's younger brother, Gabriel, sent her name to Brand New Congress, a Bernie Sanders-inspired group recruiting candidates for the House and Senate.
When she got home from her North Dakota trip, a leader of BNC called her out of the blue with an ask: Will you run for US Congress in New York's 14th district?
BNC cofounder Saikat Chakrabarti said the group wasn't looking for anyone to challenge the district's 10-term Democratic incumbent when they reached out to the 27-year-old.
But after a few calls and a meeting with Ocasio-Cortez, Chakrabarti thought, "Holy crap: You're an incredible candidate."
It took a few months of convincing, but Ocasio-Cortez, still moved by what she saw at Standing Rock, said yes.
The congressional campaign began with a handful of volunteers, living-room stump speeches, and a coalition of local progressive support.
They proposed big ideas: a universal jobs guarantee, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, and tuition-free public college.
Justice Democrats, another Sanders-inspired group that Chakrabarti founded, gave Ocasio-Cortez media and policy training. Volunteers led an aggressive canvassing operation.
Ocasio-Cortez quit Flats Fix in mid-February 2018. Chakrabarti moved home to New York in early 2018 to cochair the campaign. Ocasio-Cortez's press secretary, Corbin Trent, left his wife, kids, and food-truck business in Tennessee to sleep on Chakrabarti's couch. Alexandra Rojas, now the 23-year-old executive director of Justice Democrats, led the last six weeks of the campaign's text- and phone-banking effort.
The crew was unconventional and politically inexperienced.
Then a pair of 20-something socialist filmmakers from Detroit produced a polished, low-budget ad that framed Ocasio-Cortez as a courageous working-class underdog.
The two-minute spot went viral. Donations jumped, hundreds of new volunteers turned out to the field offices, and Vogue published a glowing profile.
The ad's central message: Economic inequality is the issue of our time.
—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 4, 2019
(Disclaimer: Aaron Taube previously worked as a reporter for Business Insider.)
