An aside: Anthony Rogers-Wright of the Climate Justice Alliance sees uniquely powerful opportunities now and online to broaden the movement’s base. “It’s really one of our only choices right now, so how do we use the time to reshape the narrative for everything that we want?” We can reach more of the country and develop new local leaders using the same online targeting tactics advertisers use to build a diverse grassroots movement across the country. “We’ve had three people’s climate marches and the climate crisis has gotten even worse,” he points out. “So if we can use this moment to recapture the narrative and go on offense with our narrative that’s in itself would be a tremendous win.”
Democrats will have to do much more than just defeat President Donald Trump if they want to remain in power and make a real difference for the people who need it most, says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Vanity Fair cover article published Wednesday.
In order for Democrats to deliver the change so desperately needed by so many Americans, the party and its politicians must eschew the mediocrity of incrementalism and pursue more progressive policies and actions, the New York Democrat known colloquially as AOC told Michelle Ruiz, the article’s author.
“It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better.”
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better,” the first-term congresswoman insists. “We’re not good enough right now.”
Being careful not to presume victory by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in next week’s election, the 31-year-old Bronx native warns that the country is “still in a lot of trouble” even if Trump is sent packing in January.
If “people’s lives don’t actually feel different” under a Biden administration, then “we’re done,” she says before asking, “You know how many Trumps there are in waiting?”
Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who she backed as both a volunteer in 2016 and as a key surrogate in this year’s presidential contest—Ocasio-Cortez is a proud democratic socialist who believes, to quote musician and activist Nina Simone, that “to do things gradually brings more tragedy.” Her working-class roots confer a certain credibility that permits honest assessment of Democratic policies rooted in lived experience.
“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.”
—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Take the Affordable Care Act, for example. Ocasio-Cortez unabashedly advocates for Medicare for All because she has felt the ACA’s painful shortcomings first-hand.
“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 bluntly.
“You try buying insurance off Obamacare,” challenges Ocasio-Cortez. Once a waitress and bartender, she did buy it, paying $200 a month for what she sardonically calls the “privilege” of an $8,000 deductible.
Or take immigration. “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,” she says.
Ocasio-Cortez contemptuously blasts Republicans like Trump who claim “we can’t have tuition-free public colleges because there’s no money when these motherfuckers are only paying $750 a year in taxes.” But she also admonishes Democrats to avoid the false safety of incrementalism, which won’t satisfy progressives and will elicit howls of “communism” from reactionary right-wingers no matter how moderate the change.
The question many progressives have been asking throughout her first House term is: does Ocasio-Cortez plan on taking her quest for a more equitable, peaceful, and ecologically sound country to the next level?
“Is Congress not good enough?” she jokes.
Such decisions—and their potential consequences—are no laughing matter. Rep. Ted Yoho’s (R-Fla.) misogynistic haranguing of Ocasio-Cortez on the U.S. Capitol steps earlier this year, which she deftly and permanently entered into the congressional record, was just a glimpse of the abuse she has endured.
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez has been subjected to everything from attacks on her working-class roots and (rather formidable) intellect to incessant death threats to federal officers circulating a meme depicting her violent rape and even a white supremacist plot to assassinate her. Her family and associates have also been threatened.
Ocasio-Cortez admits in the interview she has had doubts—especially given the threats and vitriol—about her ability to do the job.
“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 confesses. “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.”
“I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life [but] I don’t want to aspire to a quote-unquote higher position just for the sake of that title.”
—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
However, such threats are meant “to get you to destroy yourself so that they don’t have to destroy you,” says the congresswoman—who refuses to be destroyed either way.
“I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez tells Ruiz, but “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,” she adds. “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.”
Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortz says the 2020 election—and beyond—”is not a decision between two candidates, it’s a decision between two countries.” Democrats would be wise to remember this, and act like they do, she says, or those many Trumps-in-waiting may indeed have their day—and get their way. Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
**
AOC’S NEXT FOUR YEARS
The history-making congresswoman addresses her biggest critics, the challenges that loom no matter who wins, and what she’s taking on next.
BY MICHELLE RUIZ, Vanity Fair, OCTOBER 28, 2020
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.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, photographed in October 2020 in New York City.
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.’ ”
“IT’S NOT AN ACCIDENT THAT THE BOOGEYMAN OF THE DEMOCRATS IS A WOMAN.”
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.
Ocasio-Cortez, photographed with residents in her original borough, on the corner of Cruger and Bronxdale avenues.
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.”
“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.
LIKE RUTH BADER GINSBURG’S PRICKLY DISSENT COLLAR, OCASIO-CORTEZ’S APPEARANCE IS A STUDY IN MEANING.
“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.”
“TRUMP IS THE RACIST VISIONARY,” SAYS AOC. “BUT MCCONNELL GETS THE JOB DONE.”
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.”
AOC says dressing the part has been an unexpected struggle, but it’s also a way to connect with constituents.
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.”
— Progressives Are Going Rogue to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden
— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s “Reckless” COVID Response
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Just over 40 percent of all white adults lived in a household where someone had lost employment income between March 2020 and August-September 2020. This is a very high number, but Black and Hispanic households were even harder hit, with about 52 percent of Black households and nearly 58 percent of Hispanic households experiencing earnings losses.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/28/rise-material-hardship-among-working-class-whites-and-how-it-could-impact-2020
Missed or late rent or mortgage payments with little confidence of being able to catch-up are hallmarks of what economists call “housing insecurity.” Black and Hispanic people are much more likely to be housing insecure than white people and have seen larger increases in housing insecurity during the pandemic. At the same time, there is considerable “hardship inequality” among white people. Hardship inequality is structured by education, income, and other factors. While housing insecurity has remained relatively stable among whites overall, it has spiked among lower-income whites (under $50,000) without college degrees.
Lower-income whites without college degrees were the largest group of voters who voted for Obama in 2012 but switched to Trump in 2016. The rise in material hardship among lower-income whites without college degrees, and the Congressional GOP’s opposition to new legislation addressing it, will likely make it harder for Trump to hold on to these important swing voters in next week’s election.
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Housing Insecurity Remain Large
In an August 2020 report, CEPR documented substantial racial and ethnic disparities in housing insecurity between late April 2020 and July 2020. Other research has documented similar racial disparities in COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, loss of earnings, food insecurity, and other hardships.
These disparities remain substantial. As Figure 1 shows, just over 40 percent of all white adults lived in a household where someone had lost employment income between March 2020 and August-September 2020. This is a very high number, but Black and Hispanic households were even harder hit, with about 52 percent of Black households and nearly 58 percent of Hispanic households experiencing earnings losses.
Fewer households have experienced housing insecurity than lost earnings, but the racial and ethnic disparities are even larger. In August-September 2020, Hispanic renters were almost twice as likely as white ones to be behind on rent, while Black renters were more than twice as likely as white ones to be behind on rent. Black homeowners were 2.5 times as likely as white ones to be behind on mortgage payments, and Hispanic homeowners were twice as likely to be behind on mortgage payments.
Housing Insecurity Differences Among Whites Before and During the Pandemic
White people have benefitted from structural and institutional racism for generations in the United States, yet there is still considerable economic and social stratification among white people, including by class, education, and income. This stratification means that lower-income, white people without two- or four-year college degrees are more likely to experience material and social hardships than other white people, particularly during economic downturns.
The figures below document differences in one of these hardships, housing insecurity, among white people. Figure 2 shows the recent trend in the percentage of white adults who report experiencing housing insecurity. Before 2020, the share of white people experiencing housing insecurity was relatively stable and there were not large differences between whites overall and lower-income whites without college degrees. However, the share of lower-income whites without college degrees reporting housing insecurity spiked in 2020. In August-September 2020, among lower-income whites without a college degree, about one-in-four renters were unsure if they would be able to pay next month’s rent. Among lower-income white homeowners without a college degree, housing insecurity increased by over 60 percent from 2019 to 2020. By contrast, it has remained relatively stable, or even declined, among white homeowners overall.
Figure 3 shows the differences in housing insecurity among white people in August-September 2020, by educational attainment. White renters without college degrees were more than twice as likely as those with college degrees to be housing insecure last month. The disparity is similar for white homeowners.
Working-class whites are often defined as whites who have not attended college or do not have a post-secondary credential. However, a substantial share of whites without college degrees have high incomes and occupations that are not typically associated with being “working-class.” Similarly, CEPR’s analysis of the General Social Survey shows that in recent years, about 34 percent of whites who have not attended college self-identified as “middle-class” or “upper-class” (rather than “lower-class” or “working-class”), compared to only about 25 percent of Blacks and Hispanics in this same educational group.
Figure 4 shows how these differences in occupations and income translate into differences in housing insecurity. Among all whites without college degrees, whites with incomes below $50,000 are more than twice as likely to be housing insecure as those with incomes above $100,000. Figure 4 also presents differences in the likelihood of eviction or foreclosure. Among whites without a college degree, 8.2 percent of lower-income renters believe it is very likely or somewhat likely that they could be evicted in the next two months, compared to only 1.2 percent of all of high-income renters.
Implications for 2020 Presidential Election
Among white people without college degrees, political leanings differ considerably based on income. Higher-income whites without college degrees have been an established, unwavering part of the Republican base for decades. They tend to support conservative economic policies and oppose progressive economic policies. By contrast, lower-income whites without college degrees are more supportive of progressive economic policies. As a result, even though they have been trending away from Democrats and toward Republicans over time, they remain a major swing-voter group.
These trends are documented in recent research by political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philip Rehm. The figure below, from a 2019 New York Times article discussing Kitschelt and Rehm’s research, shows trends of how whites have voted in Presidential elections since 1952, by education and income. As seen in the left-most line graph, white low-income voters without college degrees swung to Obama in 2008 and then sharply to Trump in 2016.
Trends in White Presidential Vote by Education and Income, 1952-2016
(reproduced from New York Times)
Source: Thomas Edsall, We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is, New York Times, August 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/trump-white-voters.html.
The vast majority of white voters did not switch parties between 2012 and 2016: 47.6 percent were Romney-Trump voters and another 40.8 percent were Obama-Clinton voters. However, among the 11.6 percent of white voters who did switch parties, the largest group of vote switchers were lower-income whites without college degrees who switched from Obama to Trump. This group accounted for 4.8 percent of all white voters in 2016, and 41% of all white vote switchers. Kitschelt and Rehm attribute this result to cultural concerns becoming more salient in 2016 to lower-income whites without college degrees and their perception that Trump was less conservative on economic issues than prior, more conventional Republican presidential candidates.
If not for the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, Trump may have been able to hold on to his gains among lower-income whites without college degrees. But the spike in housing insecurity — and probably other forms of economic hardship not examined in this paper — experienced by lower-income whites without college degrees makes retaining all of these vote switchers more difficult for him.
Concern about losing too many white swing voters who have been hammered by the downturn may explain why Trump has urged the Congressional GOP to “go big or go home” on coronavirus relief and his claim that he wants a package that is “even bigger than the Democrats.” At the same time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to a deal, and prioritization of confirming conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, likely undermines Trump’s reelection bid.
Politics aside, if members of Congress want to reduce the economic hardships of America’s diverse working-class, they should support the House-passed HEROES Act, which includes provisions that boost unemployment insurance by $600 a week, extend the federal eviction moratorium for 12 months, and provides $71 billion in emergency assistance to renters and homeowners.
In short, with growing bipartisan disapproval of the way the administration is handling COVID-19, along with the Senate hindering progress for a stimulus bill that would help millions of working-class Democrats and Republicans alike, it seems increasingly likely that a substantial portion of white, working-class Obama-to-Trump vote switchers will become Trump-to-Biden vote switchers in 2020.
Methodology
The data on housing insecurity for 2020 are from weeks 13 and 14 of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS) and cover August 19, 2020 to September 14, 2020. Three survey questions in the Census HPS measure housing insecurity: (a) whether the household is currently caught up on rent or mortgage payments; (b) how confident respondents are that their household will be able to pay its next housing payment on time; and (c) for households that are not caught up on rent or mortgage payments, how likely it is that the household will have to leave its current home or apartment within the next two months due to eviction or foreclosure.
The listed answers for the second question are: no/slight/moderate/high confidence and payment is or will be deferred. We categorize answers to the second question as a dichotomous variable and define households as lacking confidence about upcoming payments if they reported no or slight confidence or if they anticipated deferring, or had already deferred, next month’s payment. The listed answers for the third question are: very/somewhat/not very/not likely at all. We define a household as being likely to experience displacement in the following two months if they reported “very or somewhat likely.”
The data on housing insecurity from 2017 to 2019 come from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). The specific question asked in the SHED is “Are you expecting to be unable to pay or only make a partial payment on each of the following bills this month?” with “rent or mortgage” being one of the listed bills.
Following Kitschelt and Rehm, people without college degrees are defined as people without an A.A. degree, a B.A. degree or any other higher degree, and includes people who may have “some college” but no degree.
Finally, it is important to note that, if anything, the housing figures reported may underestimate the share of adults who were housing insecure. The housing questions in the Census Household Pulse Survey come near the end of the survey, and a substantial number of respondents did not answer them. Respondents who did not answer any or all of the survey likely have lower levels of educational attainment and employment than respondents who did answer them, and, thus may be more likely to be housing insecure.
Mariko Lewis is an intern with the Domestic Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Yixia Cai is an economist on the domestic team at CEPR. She is a PhD candidate in social welfare at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she is a graduate research fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). Her areas of research include poverty, economic inequality and instability, low-income working families, and social policy.
Shawn Fremstad is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and a Senior Research Associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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October 28, 2020byCommon Dreams
Freedom Dreamers: The Faces of Student Debt
Millions of people don’t even know they’re being harmed by student debt, but should be dreaming of a world without it. The facts are staggering.byMary Green Swig, Steven Swig, Richard Eskow, David A. Bergeron
A shared dream is a powerful force for change. It’s time to share the dream of freedom from student debt. (Photo: YouTube/screenshot)
In a recent Instagram discussion about student debt for the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Ilhan Omar quoted Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza as saying, “We’re not freedom fighters, we’re freedom dreamers.” Rep. Omar, who has student debt of her own, went on to say: “We can all dream, and envision, and make it happen: a world without student debt.”
Who are the people dreaming of a world without student debt? Who holds it, and who will benefit if—or when—that debt (currently $1.7 trillion nationally) is canceled in full?
It’s no secret that millennials are heavily burdened by student debt. But many people will be surprised by some of the other groups who are especially harmed by student debt. They include Black Americans, seniors, Southerners, and women.
Student debt also harms people who have no debt of their own – including unemployed and under-employed workers, small business owners, and the nation as a whole. Millions of people don’t even know they’re being harmed by student debt, but should be dreaming of a world without it. The facts are staggering.
Women
We’re fortunate to live in a time when society is becoming aware of the many ways we hold women back. We are finally telling girls and young women they can dream bigger dreams. But, at the same time, we are burdening millions of them with debt for pursuing those dreams – and that debt often holds them back from achieving them.
Women hold roughly two-thirds of all student debt in this country, as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has noted.
Student debt is one way women are oppressed. Women hold roughly two-thirds of all student debt in this country, as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has noted. That comes to more than $1 trillion in women’s debt alone.
Women who take on student loans must then face a gender pay gap when they enter the workforce. That pay gap is greater for higher-paying jobs. A report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that men in high-paying fields earned from 17 percent to 43 percent more than women. As Georgetown researchers note, “Over the course of a career, the gender wage gap results in women earning $1 million less than men do.”
Georgetown researchers also found that, on average, women with graduate degrees earn roughly as much as men who only have bachelor’s degrees. And, in many – if not most – cases, those graduate degrees will result in more student debt.
The AAUW also found that Black women graduate with more debt on average than any other group of graduates, and that women who attend for-profit colleges owe much more on average than students at traditional public or private institutions.
Black Americans
Student debt makes the racial wealth gap worse. A 2016 study by the Brookings Institution concluded that “black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,400 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages).” Even worse, Brookings found that black-white debt gap quickly triples to $25,000. The report says,
“Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead to black graduates holding nearly $53,000 in student loan debt four years after graduation—almost twice as much as their white counterparts.”
Many student loan borrowers find it hard to lower the principal they owe, and this problem is especially acute for Black and brown Americans. A 2018 sociological study found that “racial inequalities in student debt account for a substantial minority of the black-white wealth gap in early adulthood and that this contribution increases across the early adult life course.”
The researchers concluded that “student debt may be a new mechanism of wealth inequality that creates fragility in the next generation of the black middle class.”
Similarly, a 2017 analysis by the Center for American Progress found that Black borrowers owed 113 percent of the original loan amount twelve years after graduation, with Latinos owing the second-largest percentage (83 percent). For these and other reasons, Darrick Hamilton and Naomi Zewde wrote:
“Only full cancellation completely protects the vulnerabilities of Black students and students in general, while at the same time establishing higher education as a universal right and offering restitution to all those who have had to rely on debt finance.”
Spouses and Immediate Family
Even the statistics don’t reveal the whole truth about the people directly burdened by student debt. Reports tell us that approximately 47 million Americans have student debt. But that figure doesn’t reflect the real number of people who carry this burden. Many of those 47 million people share their debt with family members, because they live in a household with shared financial responsibilities. The loan payments come out of a shared household budget.
In our work, for example, we have spoken with many people who found that the debt held by one or both partners weighed heavily in their decision to get married.
“For richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, with student debt or without …” Education should not come between potential spouses, or weigh heavily on the burdens of a new (or not-so-new) marriage. Nor should it weigh on multiple-generation households.
The average household size in the United States is slightly more than 2.5 persons. Student debt holders may be slightly more likely to live alone than the average, since they are younger on average. And some household members may have separate finances.
How many people are really burdened by this debt? Is it 100 million? 80 million? We can’t be certain. Even when adjusting for those factors, however, we know that the number of people directly paying for student loans must be much higher than 47 million.
Seniors
Experian reports that student debt for borrowers in their 50s went up 5.6 percent in a single year. It went up 4.5 percent for borrowers in their 60s, and 3.4 percent for borrowers in their 70s. The Department of Education reports that the number of student debt borrowers aged 62 and older increased 17 percent in 2019, the biggest increase for any age group. The second-highest increase was for borrowers aged 50-61.
The total amount or student debt held by people 65 and older grew from $2 billion in 2005 to $22 billion in 2015, a tenfold increase in ten years. In 2015, an estimated 173,000 people had their Social Security benefits garnished over defaulted student loan debts, including 114,000 people 50 years of age or older. 67,300 of them had income below the poverty line.
We have reached the point where student debt is haunting people well into their senior years.
Blue-Collar Workers
A 2018 macroeconomic study from the Levy Institute concluded that cancelling all student debt would spur economic growth and create millions of jobs over a ten-year period. Those aren’t just jobs for college graduates. They include jobs in restaurants, travel, and tourism (when those activities fully resume), and in retail, construction, and other industries.
Some blue-collar workers are almost certainly jobless because of student debt, while others could be earning more on the job.
Realtors and Builders
The housing industry, from building to sales, is also a victim of student debt. In 2019, a study by economists for the Federal Reserve found that, between 2005 and 2014, roughly 20 percent of the decline in home ownership among young adults could be attributed to higher levels of student debt. They found that a $1,000 increase in student debt reduced homeownership rates by 1.8 percent.
If more Americans were freed from the student debt trap, more would be able to buy homes. In turn, spurring more housing production and creating more good-paying jobs.
Southerners
Financial advisor Rebecca Safier looked at the areas with the highest rates of student loan delinquency. She found that 14 out of the top 15 were located “below the Mason-Dixon line.” They included Memphis, TN; Jackson, MS; Winter Haven, FL; and Daytona Beach, FL.
Student debt is often considered a problem of the coastal elites. The numbers say otherwise.
Small business owners
In a 2015 study for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, “The Impact of Student Loan Debt on Small Business Formation,” economists found that student debt depressed the formation of new small business – that is, businesses with one to four employees.
As the authors wrote, “Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy and account for approximately one-half of the private-sector economy and 99% of all businesses.”
Parents
Parents carry a heavy, and growing, student debt burden. The federal government has a program of “parent PLUS “loans who want to borrow to finance their children’s education. According to data from the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS), the number of loans issued under this program increased by roughly 13 percent between the second quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2020. At the same time, however, the total amount owed rose by nearly two-thirds, from $62.4 billion to just under $100 billion.
Parent PLUS loan terms are even more stringent than direct student loans. Unlike student-borrowed debt, interest is charged on parental debt while their child or children are still studying. Interest is charged even when payments are deferred. Parents cannot limit their payments through income-based repayment plans, as student borrowers can do for federally-backed loans. And new debts can be added onto the loan, even if the parents do not specifically request that additional disbursements be made.
Unfortunately, student loan payments for parents often persist even as retirement loom, fueling an ongoing retirement crisis in the United States. A 2018 report from the National Institute for Retirement Security says, “Even after counting an individual’s entire net worth—a generous measure of retirement savings—three- fourths (76.7%) of Americans fall short of conservative retirement savings targets …”
Student debt adds to the financial security gap for older Americans.
Young People
Many people know that millennials are the most student debt-ridden generation in history, with Generation Z gaining fast. Far fewer people know how bad their situation has become. One-third of all young adults (people under 30) have student debt, according to Pew Research, as do one in five adults between the ages of 30 and 44. More people have needed loans for their education in recent years than in previous decades. Roughly 60 percent of college seniors in the 2015-2016 school year had borrowed for their education, up 20 percent from 1999-2000.
And they’re borrowing more. The average household (two or more people) with student debt now owes $46,459, according to one survey. Experian reports that the average individual with student debt owed $35,359 in 2019, a 26 percent increase over 2014 and an increase of 116 percent over ten years.
When it comes to student debt, young borrowers have been doubly burdened. After the 2008 financial crisis, young people entered the second-worst job market in nearly a century. Unemployment and under-employment early in a career can affect a person’s entire lifetime earnings. Now, with the mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis, many more are graduating into the worst job market in a nearly a century. The promises that were made – that a college degree “pays for itself” – have never been proven in studies, and are even less likely to be true now.
We Are All Freedom Dreamers
The Levy Institute report shows that the entire US economy would grow if we cancelled all student debt. That means that everyone is being held back in some way by student debt. Not everyone is a “freedom dreamer” yet, however, when it comes to student debt. Some of us don’t even know how it’s holding them back. Others know all too well, but don’t believe that it’s possible to cancel it.
Sadly, many people even blame themselves for their student debt. They’re wrong. Society has failed them, not the other way around. They were sold a false promise: that if they took on a mountain of debt, it would pay for itself with higher wages. For many, that simply wasn’t true. For many others, education was not a financial investment, but a pursuit of higher ideals. Education benefits everyone. It should build dreams, not crush them.
A shared dream is a powerful force for change. It’s time to share the dream of freedom from student debt.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/10/28/freedom-dreamers-faces-student-debt
Mary Green Swig is a senior fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of the National Student Debt Jubilee Project.
Steven Swig is a senior fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder and President Emeritus of the Presidio Graduate School in San Franisco.
Richard (RJ) Eskow is Senior Advisor for Health and Economic Justice at Social Security Works and the host of The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow on Free Speech TV. Follow him on Twitter: @rjeskow David A. Bergeron is a Senior Fellow for Postsecondary Education at American Progress after serving more than two years as the Vice President for Postsecondary
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October 28, 2020byOtherWords
Unleashing the Power of Poor Voters
Low-income voters could decide this election. These neighborhood activists are working to make it happen.byMargot Rathke, Sarah Anderson
Voting lines in Milwaukee, April 2020 (Photo: Shutterstock)
Voter mobilization is not easy in Metcalfe Park, a majority-Black neighborhood in Milwaukee scarred by poverty, racism, disenfranchisement, and neglect.
“I don’t believe in voting,” one young Black woman told Melody McCurtis, who’s been going door-to-door to get out the vote. “The higher-ups, they’re going to pick the president. Our votes don’t count.”
McCurtis and her mother, Danell Cross, are community organizers with Metcalfe Park Community Bridges. Their tireless efforts to mobilize neighbors to overcome skepticism and other barriers to voting are captured in a new short film, Metcalfe Park: Black Vote Rising, produced in part by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
As they canvass door-to-door to reach people who are missed by digital social media campaigns, Cross and McCurtis deliver food and COVID-19 safety kits along with voting instructions. Their goal is to motivate their neighbors to vote while preparing them for potential voter suppression and disinformation campaigns — all while many of these neighbors are grappling with job loss, furloughs, and COVID-19 sickness.
During the disastrous Wisconsin primary in April, an estimated 16 percent of Black voters in Milwaukee were disenfranchised. One major problem: In the midst of the pandemic, the number of polling sites in the greater Milwaukee area was slashed from more than 180 to just five, forcing people to risk exposure and wait hours to cast their votes.
The mother-daughter duo is determined to achieve a better outcome in the general election. And their efforts could have tremendous impact.
A report by the Poor People’s Campaign shows that increasing voter participation among the poor could make a huge difference in election results. In the 2016 presidential election, 34 million poor or low-income people who were eligible did not vote.
If low-income voters had participated at similar rates as higher income voters (and voted against the winning candidate) in 2016, new low-income voters could’ve flipped the presidential results in 15 states. Single-digit increases in voter turnout among poor voters could have easily changed the results in states like Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania — not to mention Wisconsin.
In 2106, Wisconsin was decided by just 20,000 votes. Meanwhile 460,000 low-income, eligible Wisconsinites did not vote in that election. An increase of 4.9 percent of the non-voting low-income electorate would’ve equaled the margin of victory for Wisconsin in 2016.
Increased voter participation by the poor, as part of broader organizing strategies, can have an even greater impact at the local level.
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Democrats will have to do much more than just defeat President Donald Trump if they want to remain in power and make a real difference for the people who need it most, says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Vanity Fair cover article published Wednesday.
In order for Democrats to deliver the change so desperately needed by so many Americans, the party and its politicians must eschew the mediocrity of incrementalism and pursue more progressive policies and actions, the New York Democrat known colloquially as AOC told Michelle Ruiz, the article’s author.
“It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better.”
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“It’s not just that we can be better, it’s that we have to be better,” the first-term congresswoman insists. “We’re not good enough right now.”
Being careful not to presume victory by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in next week’s election, the 31-year-old Bronx native warns that the country is “still in a lot of trouble” even if Trump is sent packing in January.
If “people’s lives don’t actually feel different” under a Biden administration, then “we’re done,” she says before asking, “You know how many Trumps there are in waiting?”
Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who she backed as both a volunteer in 2016 and as a key surrogate in this year’s presidential contest—Ocasio-Cortez is a proud democratic socialist who believes, to quote musician and activist Nina Simone, that “to do things gradually brings more tragedy.” Her working-class roots confer a certain credibility that permits honest assessment of Democratic policies rooted in lived experience.
“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.”
—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Take the Affordable Care Act, for example. Ocasio-Cortez unabashedly advocates for Medicare for All because she has felt the ACA’s painful shortcomings first-hand.
“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 bluntly.
“You try buying insurance off Obamacare,” challenges Ocasio-Cortez. Once a waitress and bartender, she did buy it, paying $200 a month for what she sardonically calls the “privilege” of an $8,000 deductible.
Or take immigration. “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,” she says.
Ocasio-Cortez contemptuously blasts Republicans like Trump who claim “we can’t have tuition-free public colleges because there’s no money when these motherfuckers are only paying $750 a year in taxes.” But she also admonishes Democrats to avoid the false safety of incrementalism, which won’t satisfy progressives and will elicit howls of “communism” from reactionary right-wingers no matter how moderate the change.
The question many progressives have been asking throughout her first House term is: does Ocasio-Cortez plan on taking her quest for a more equitable, peaceful, and ecologically sound country to the next level?
“Is Congress not good enough?” she jokes.
Such decisions—and their potential consequences—are no laughing matter. Rep. Ted Yoho’s (R-Fla.) misogynistic haranguing of Ocasio-Cortez on the U.S. Capitol steps earlier this year, which she deftly and permanently entered into the congressional record, was just a glimpse of the abuse she has endured.
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez has been subjected to everything from attacks on her working-class roots and (rather formidable) intellect to incessant death threats to federal officers circulating a meme depicting her violent rape and even a white supremacist plot to assassinate her. Her family and associates have also been threatened.
Ocasio-Cortez admits in the interview she has had doubts—especially given the threats and vitriol—about her ability to do the job.
“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 confesses. “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.”
“I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life [but] I don’t want to aspire to a quote-unquote higher position just for the sake of that title.”
—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
However, such threats are meant “to get you to destroy yourself so that they don’t have to destroy you,” says the congresswoman—who refuses to be destroyed either way.
“I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez tells Ruiz, but “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,” she adds. “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.”
Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortz says the 2020 election—and beyond—”is not a decision between two candidates, it’s a decision between two countries.” Democrats would be wise to remember this, and act like they do, she says, or those many Trumps-in-waiting may indeed have their day—and get their way. Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
**
AOC’S NEXT FOUR YEARS
The history-making congresswoman addresses her biggest critics, the challenges that loom no matter who wins, and what she’s taking on next.
BY MICHELLE RUIZ, Vanity Fair, OCTOBER 28, 2020
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.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, photographed in October 2020 in New York City.
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.’ ”
“IT’S NOT AN ACCIDENT THAT THE BOOGEYMAN OF THE DEMOCRATS IS A WOMAN.”
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.
Ocasio-Cortez, photographed with residents in her original borough, on the corner of Cruger and Bronxdale avenues.
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.”
“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.
LIKE RUTH BADER GINSBURG’S PRICKLY DISSENT COLLAR, OCASIO-CORTEZ’S APPEARANCE IS A STUDY IN MEANING.
“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.”
“TRUMP IS THE RACIST VISIONARY,” SAYS AOC. “BUT MCCONNELL GETS THE JOB DONE.”
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.”
AOC says dressing the part has been an unexpected struggle, but it’s also a way to connect with constituents.
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.”
— Progressives Are Going Rogue to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden
— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s “Reckless” COVID Response
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Just over 40 percent of all white adults lived in a household where someone had lost employment income between March 2020 and August-September 2020. This is a very high number, but Black and Hispanic households were even harder hit, with about 52 percent of Black households and nearly 58 percent of Hispanic households experiencing earnings losses.
Missed or late rent or mortgage payments with little confidence of being able to catch-up are hallmarks of what economists call “housing insecurity.” Black and Hispanic people are much more likely to be housing insecure than white people and have seen larger increases in housing insecurity during the pandemic. At the same time, there is considerable “hardship inequality” among white people. Hardship inequality is structured by education, income, and other factors. While housing insecurity has remained relatively stable among whites overall, it has spiked among lower-income whites (under $50,000) without college degrees.
Lower-income whites without college degrees were the largest group of voters who voted for Obama in 2012 but switched to Trump in 2016. The rise in material hardship among lower-income whites without college degrees, and the Congressional GOP’s opposition to new legislation addressing it, will likely make it harder for Trump to hold on to these important swing voters in next week’s election.
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Housing Insecurity Remain Large
In an August 2020 report, CEPR documented substantial racial and ethnic disparities in housing insecurity between late April 2020 and July 2020. Other research has documented similar racial disparities in COVID-19-related hospitalization and death, loss of earnings, food insecurity, and other hardships.
These disparities remain substantial. As Figure 1 shows, just over 40 percent of all white adults lived in a household where someone had lost employment income between March 2020 and August-September 2020. This is a very high number, but Black and Hispanic households were even harder hit, with about 52 percent of Black households and nearly 58 percent of Hispanic households experiencing earnings losses.
Fewer households have experienced housing insecurity than lost earnings, but the racial and ethnic disparities are even larger. In August-September 2020, Hispanic renters were almost twice as likely as white ones to be behind on rent, while Black renters were more than twice as likely as white ones to be behind on rent. Black homeowners were 2.5 times as likely as white ones to be behind on mortgage payments, and Hispanic homeowners were twice as likely to be behind on mortgage payments.
Housing Insecurity Differences Among Whites Before and During the Pandemic
White people have benefitted from structural and institutional racism for generations in the United States, yet there is still considerable economic and social stratification among white people, including by class, education, and income. This stratification means that lower-income, white people without two- or four-year college degrees are more likely to experience material and social hardships than other white people, particularly during economic downturns.
The figures below document differences in one of these hardships, housing insecurity, among white people. Figure 2 shows the recent trend in the percentage of white adults who report experiencing housing insecurity. Before 2020, the share of white people experiencing housing insecurity was relatively stable and there were not large differences between whites overall and lower-income whites without college degrees. However, the share of lower-income whites without college degrees reporting housing insecurity spiked in 2020. In August-September 2020, among lower-income whites without a college degree, about one-in-four renters were unsure if they would be able to pay next month’s rent. Among lower-income white homeowners without a college degree, housing insecurity increased by over 60 percent from 2019 to 2020. By contrast, it has remained relatively stable, or even declined, among white homeowners overall.
Figure 3 shows the differences in housing insecurity among white people in August-September 2020, by educational attainment. White renters without college degrees were more than twice as likely as those with college degrees to be housing insecure last month. The disparity is similar for white homeowners.
Working-class whites are often defined as whites who have not attended college or do not have a post-secondary credential. However, a substantial share of whites without college degrees have high incomes and occupations that are not typically associated with being “working-class.” Similarly, CEPR’s analysis of the General Social Survey shows that in recent years, about 34 percent of whites who have not attended college self-identified as “middle-class” or “upper-class” (rather than “lower-class” or “working-class”), compared to only about 25 percent of Blacks and Hispanics in this same educational group.
Figure 4 shows how these differences in occupations and income translate into differences in housing insecurity. Among all whites without college degrees, whites with incomes below $50,000 are more than twice as likely to be housing insecure as those with incomes above $100,000. Figure 4 also presents differences in the likelihood of eviction or foreclosure. Among whites without a college degree, 8.2 percent of lower-income renters believe it is very likely or somewhat likely that they could be evicted in the next two months, compared to only 1.2 percent of all of high-income renters.
Implications for 2020 Presidential Election
Among white people without college degrees, political leanings differ considerably based on income. Higher-income whites without college degrees have been an established, unwavering part of the Republican base for decades. They tend to support conservative economic policies and oppose progressive economic policies. By contrast, lower-income whites without college degrees are more supportive of progressive economic policies. As a result, even though they have been trending away from Democrats and toward Republicans over time, they remain a major swing-voter group.
These trends are documented in recent research by political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philip Rehm. The figure below, from a 2019 New York Times article discussing Kitschelt and Rehm’s research, shows trends of how whites have voted in Presidential elections since 1952, by education and income. As seen in the left-most line graph, white low-income voters without college degrees swung to Obama in 2008 and then sharply to Trump in 2016.
Trends in White Presidential Vote by Education and Income, 1952-2016
(reproduced from New York Times)
Source: Thomas Edsall, We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is, New York Times, August 28, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/trump-white-voters.html.
The vast majority of white voters did not switch parties between 2012 and 2016: 47.6 percent were Romney-Trump voters and another 40.8 percent were Obama-Clinton voters. However, among the 11.6 percent of white voters who did switch parties, the largest group of vote switchers were lower-income whites without college degrees who switched from Obama to Trump. This group accounted for 4.8 percent of all white voters in 2016, and 41% of all white vote switchers. Kitschelt and Rehm attribute this result to cultural concerns becoming more salient in 2016 to lower-income whites without college degrees and their perception that Trump was less conservative on economic issues than prior, more conventional Republican presidential candidates.
If not for the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, Trump may have been able to hold on to his gains among lower-income whites without college degrees. But the spike in housing insecurity — and probably other forms of economic hardship not examined in this paper — experienced by lower-income whites without college degrees makes retaining all of these vote switchers more difficult for him.
Concern about losing too many white swing voters who have been hammered by the downturn may explain why Trump has urged the Congressional GOP to “go big or go home” on coronavirus relief and his claim that he wants a package that is “even bigger than the Democrats.” At the same time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition to a deal, and prioritization of confirming conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, likely undermines Trump’s reelection bid.
Politics aside, if members of Congress want to reduce the economic hardships of America’s diverse working-class, they should support the House-passed HEROES Act, which includes provisions that boost unemployment insurance by $600 a week, extend the federal eviction moratorium for 12 months, and provides $71 billion in emergency assistance to renters and homeowners.
In short, with growing bipartisan disapproval of the way the administration is handling COVID-19, along with the Senate hindering progress for a stimulus bill that would help millions of working-class Democrats and Republicans alike, it seems increasingly likely that a substantial portion of white, working-class Obama-to-Trump vote switchers will become Trump-to-Biden vote switchers in 2020.
Methodology
The data on housing insecurity for 2020 are from weeks 13 and 14 of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS) and cover August 19, 2020 to September 14, 2020. Three survey questions in the Census HPS measure housing insecurity: (a) whether the household is currently caught up on rent or mortgage payments; (b) how confident respondents are that their household will be able to pay its next housing payment on time; and (c) for households that are not caught up on rent or mortgage payments, how likely it is that the household will have to leave its current home or apartment within the next two months due to eviction or foreclosure.
The listed answers for the second question are: no/slight/moderate/high confidence and payment is or will be deferred. We categorize answers to the second question as a dichotomous variable and define households as lacking confidence about upcoming payments if they reported no or slight confidence or if they anticipated deferring, or had already deferred, next month’s payment. The listed answers for the third question are: very/somewhat/not very/not likely at all. We define a household as being likely to experience displacement in the following two months if they reported “very or somewhat likely.”
The data on housing insecurity from 2017 to 2019 come from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). The specific question asked in the SHED is “Are you expecting to be unable to pay or only make a partial payment on each of the following bills this month?” with “rent or mortgage” being one of the listed bills.
Following Kitschelt and Rehm, people without college degrees are defined as people without an A.A. degree, a B.A. degree or any other higher degree, and includes people who may have “some college” but no degree.
Finally, it is important to note that, if anything, the housing figures reported may underestimate the share of adults who were housing insecure. The housing questions in the Census Household Pulse Survey come near the end of the survey, and a substantial number of respondents did not answer them. Respondents who did not answer any or all of the survey likely have lower levels of educational attainment and employment than respondents who did answer them, and, thus may be more likely to be housing insecure.
Mariko Lewis is an intern with the Domestic Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Yixia Cai is an economist on the domestic team at CEPR. She is a PhD candidate in social welfare at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she is a graduate research fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). Her areas of research include poverty, economic inequality and instability, low-income working families, and social policy.
Shawn Fremstad is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and a Senior Research Associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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October 28, 2020byCommon Dreams
Freedom Dreamers: The Faces of Student Debt
Millions of people don’t even know they’re being harmed by student debt, but should be dreaming of a world without it. The facts are staggering.byMary Green Swig, Steven Swig, Richard Eskow, David A. Bergeron
A shared dream is a powerful force for change. It’s time to share the dream of freedom from student debt. (Photo: YouTube/screenshot)
In a recent Instagram discussion about student debt for the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Ilhan Omar quoted Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza as saying, “We’re not freedom fighters, we’re freedom dreamers.” Rep. Omar, who has student debt of her own, went on to say: “We can all dream, and envision, and make it happen: a world without student debt.”
Who are the people dreaming of a world without student debt? Who holds it, and who will benefit if—or when—that debt (currently $1.7 trillion nationally) is canceled in full?
It’s no secret that millennials are heavily burdened by student debt. But many people will be surprised by some of the other groups who are especially harmed by student debt. They include Black Americans, seniors, Southerners, and women.
Student debt also harms people who have no debt of their own – including unemployed and under-employed workers, small business owners, and the nation as a whole. Millions of people don’t even know they’re being harmed by student debt, but should be dreaming of a world without it. The facts are staggering.
Women
We’re fortunate to live in a time when society is becoming aware of the many ways we hold women back. We are finally telling girls and young women they can dream bigger dreams. But, at the same time, we are burdening millions of them with debt for pursuing those dreams – and that debt often holds them back from achieving them.
Women hold roughly two-thirds of all student debt in this country, as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has noted.
Student debt is one way women are oppressed. Women hold roughly two-thirds of all student debt in this country, as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has noted. That comes to more than $1 trillion in women’s debt alone.
Women who take on student loans must then face a gender pay gap when they enter the workforce. That pay gap is greater for higher-paying jobs. A report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that men in high-paying fields earned from 17 percent to 43 percent more than women. As Georgetown researchers note, “Over the course of a career, the gender wage gap results in women earning $1 million less than men do.”
Georgetown researchers also found that, on average, women with graduate degrees earn roughly as much as men who only have bachelor’s degrees. And, in many – if not most – cases, those graduate degrees will result in more student debt.
The AAUW also found that Black women graduate with more debt on average than any other group of graduates, and that women who attend for-profit colleges owe much more on average than students at traditional public or private institutions.
Black Americans
Student debt makes the racial wealth gap worse. A 2016 study by the Brookings Institution concluded that “black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,400 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages).” Even worse, Brookings found that black-white debt gap quickly triples to $25,000. The report says,
“Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead to black graduates holding nearly $53,000 in student loan debt four years after graduation—almost twice as much as their white counterparts.”
Many student loan borrowers find it hard to lower the principal they owe, and this problem is especially acute for Black and brown Americans. A 2018 sociological study found that “racial inequalities in student debt account for a substantial minority of the black-white wealth gap in early adulthood and that this contribution increases across the early adult life course.”
The researchers concluded that “student debt may be a new mechanism of wealth inequality that creates fragility in the next generation of the black middle class.”
Similarly, a 2017 analysis by the Center for American Progress found that Black borrowers owed 113 percent of the original loan amount twelve years after graduation, with Latinos owing the second-largest percentage (83 percent). For these and other reasons, Darrick Hamilton and Naomi Zewde wrote:
“Only full cancellation completely protects the vulnerabilities of Black students and students in general, while at the same time establishing higher education as a universal right and offering restitution to all those who have had to rely on debt finance.”
Spouses and Immediate Family
Even the statistics don’t reveal the whole truth about the people directly burdened by student debt. Reports tell us that approximately 47 million Americans have student debt. But that figure doesn’t reflect the real number of people who carry this burden. Many of those 47 million people share their debt with family members, because they live in a household with shared financial responsibilities. The loan payments come out of a shared household budget.
In our work, for example, we have spoken with many people who found that the debt held by one or both partners weighed heavily in their decision to get married.
“For richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, with student debt or without …” Education should not come between potential spouses, or weigh heavily on the burdens of a new (or not-so-new) marriage. Nor should it weigh on multiple-generation households.
The average household size in the United States is slightly more than 2.5 persons. Student debt holders may be slightly more likely to live alone than the average, since they are younger on average. And some household members may have separate finances.
How many people are really burdened by this debt? Is it 100 million? 80 million? We can’t be certain. Even when adjusting for those factors, however, we know that the number of people directly paying for student loans must be much higher than 47 million.
Seniors
Experian reports that student debt for borrowers in their 50s went up 5.6 percent in a single year. It went up 4.5 percent for borrowers in their 60s, and 3.4 percent for borrowers in their 70s. The Department of Education reports that the number of student debt borrowers aged 62 and older increased 17 percent in 2019, the biggest increase for any age group. The second-highest increase was for borrowers aged 50-61.
The total amount or student debt held by people 65 and older grew from $2 billion in 2005 to $22 billion in 2015, a tenfold increase in ten years. In 2015, an estimated 173,000 people had their Social Security benefits garnished over defaulted student loan debts, including 114,000 people 50 years of age or older. 67,300 of them had income below the poverty line.
We have reached the point where student debt is haunting people well into their senior years.
Blue-Collar Workers
A 2018 macroeconomic study from the Levy Institute concluded that cancelling all student debt would spur economic growth and create millions of jobs over a ten-year period. Those aren’t just jobs for college graduates. They include jobs in restaurants, travel, and tourism (when those activities fully resume), and in retail, construction, and other industries.
Some blue-collar workers are almost certainly jobless because of student debt, while others could be earning more on the job.
Realtors and Builders
The housing industry, from building to sales, is also a victim of student debt. In 2019, a study by economists for the Federal Reserve found that, between 2005 and 2014, roughly 20 percent of the decline in home ownership among young adults could be attributed to higher levels of student debt. They found that a $1,000 increase in student debt reduced homeownership rates by 1.8 percent.
If more Americans were freed from the student debt trap, more would be able to buy homes. In turn, spurring more housing production and creating more good-paying jobs.
Southerners
Financial advisor Rebecca Safier looked at the areas with the highest rates of student loan delinquency. She found that 14 out of the top 15 were located “below the Mason-Dixon line.” They included Memphis, TN; Jackson, MS; Winter Haven, FL; and Daytona Beach, FL.
Student debt is often considered a problem of the coastal elites. The numbers say otherwise.
Small business owners
In a 2015 study for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, “The Impact of Student Loan Debt on Small Business Formation,” economists found that student debt depressed the formation of new small business – that is, businesses with one to four employees.
As the authors wrote, “Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy and account for approximately one-half of the private-sector economy and 99% of all businesses.”
Parents
Parents carry a heavy, and growing, student debt burden. The federal government has a program of “parent PLUS “loans who want to borrow to finance their children’s education. According to data from the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS), the number of loans issued under this program increased by roughly 13 percent between the second quarter of 2014 and the second quarter of 2020. At the same time, however, the total amount owed rose by nearly two-thirds, from $62.4 billion to just under $100 billion.
Parent PLUS loan terms are even more stringent than direct student loans. Unlike student-borrowed debt, interest is charged on parental debt while their child or children are still studying. Interest is charged even when payments are deferred. Parents cannot limit their payments through income-based repayment plans, as student borrowers can do for federally-backed loans. And new debts can be added onto the loan, even if the parents do not specifically request that additional disbursements be made.
Unfortunately, student loan payments for parents often persist even as retirement loom, fueling an ongoing retirement crisis in the United States. A 2018 report from the National Institute for Retirement Security says, “Even after counting an individual’s entire net worth—a generous measure of retirement savings—three- fourths (76.7%) of Americans fall short of conservative retirement savings targets …”
Student debt adds to the financial security gap for older Americans.
Young People
Many people know that millennials are the most student debt-ridden generation in history, with Generation Z gaining fast. Far fewer people know how bad their situation has become. One-third of all young adults (people under 30) have student debt, according to Pew Research, as do one in five adults between the ages of 30 and 44. More people have needed loans for their education in recent years than in previous decades. Roughly 60 percent of college seniors in the 2015-2016 school year had borrowed for their education, up 20 percent from 1999-2000.
And they’re borrowing more. The average household (two or more people) with student debt now owes $46,459, according to one survey. Experian reports that the average individual with student debt owed $35,359 in 2019, a 26 percent increase over 2014 and an increase of 116 percent over ten years.
When it comes to student debt, young borrowers have been doubly burdened. After the 2008 financial crisis, young people entered the second-worst job market in nearly a century. Unemployment and under-employment early in a career can affect a person’s entire lifetime earnings. Now, with the mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis, many more are graduating into the worst job market in a nearly a century. The promises that were made – that a college degree “pays for itself” – have never been proven in studies, and are even less likely to be true now.
We Are All Freedom Dreamers
The Levy Institute report shows that the entire US economy would grow if we cancelled all student debt. That means that everyone is being held back in some way by student debt. Not everyone is a “freedom dreamer” yet, however, when it comes to student debt. Some of us don’t even know how it’s holding them back. Others know all too well, but don’t believe that it’s possible to cancel it.
Sadly, many people even blame themselves for their student debt. They’re wrong. Society has failed them, not the other way around. They were sold a false promise: that if they took on a mountain of debt, it would pay for itself with higher wages. For many, that simply wasn’t true. For many others, education was not a financial investment, but a pursuit of higher ideals. Education benefits everyone. It should build dreams, not crush them.
A shared dream is a powerful force for change. It’s time to share the dream of freedom from student debt.
Mary Green Swig is a senior fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of the National Student Debt Jubilee Project.
Steven Swig is a senior fellow of the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder and President Emeritus of the Presidio Graduate School in San Franisco.
Richard (RJ) Eskow is Senior Advisor for Health and Economic Justice at Social Security Works and the host of The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow on Free Speech TV. Follow him on Twitter: @rjeskow David A. Bergeron is a Senior Fellow for Postsecondary Education at American Progress after serving more than two years as the Vice President for Postsecondary
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October 28, 2020byOtherWords
Unleashing the Power of Poor Voters
Low-income voters could decide this election. These neighborhood activists are working to make it happen.byMargot Rathke, Sarah Anderson
Voting lines in Milwaukee, April 2020 (Photo: Shutterstock)
Voter mobilization is not easy in Metcalfe Park, a majority-Black neighborhood in Milwaukee scarred by poverty, racism, disenfranchisement, and neglect.
“I don’t believe in voting,” one young Black woman told Melody McCurtis, who’s been going door-to-door to get out the vote. “The higher-ups, they’re going to pick the president. Our votes don’t count.”
McCurtis and her mother, Danell Cross, are community organizers with Metcalfe Park Community Bridges. Their tireless efforts to mobilize neighbors to overcome skepticism and other barriers to voting are captured in a new short film, Metcalfe Park: Black Vote Rising, produced in part by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
As they canvass door-to-door to reach people who are missed by digital social media campaigns, Cross and McCurtis deliver food and COVID-19 safety kits along with voting instructions. Their goal is to motivate their neighbors to vote while preparing them for potential voter suppression and disinformation campaigns — all while many of these neighbors are grappling with job loss, furloughs, and COVID-19 sickness.
During the disastrous Wisconsin primary in April, an estimated 16 percent of Black voters in Milwaukee were disenfranchised. One major problem: In the midst of the pandemic, the number of polling sites in the greater Milwaukee area was slashed from more than 180 to just five, forcing people to risk exposure and wait hours to cast their votes.
The mother-daughter duo is determined to achieve a better outcome in the general election. And their efforts could have tremendous impact.
A report by the Poor People’s Campaign shows that increasing voter participation among the poor could make a huge difference in election results. In the 2016 presidential election, 34 million poor or low-income people who were eligible did not vote.
If low-income voters had participated at similar rates as higher income
“We know that when we vote, they’ll start paying attention,” McCurtis explains. “We have officials that are not advocating for the right jobs to come in. We have officials that say, ‘Oh, let’s open up a Family Dollar that pays $8 per hour.’ When I vote, I’m voting to keep the officials accountable — not just for me, but for the entire community.”
Margot Rathke is a Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, and is a co-editor of Inequality.org.
