Team Of Virals

A new breed of Democrats is giving fans an all-access backstage pass to the political sausage-making. Is this transparency, or TMI?

- Tim Murphy

ON HER FIRST morning in Washington, DC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old democratic socialist from the Bronx, was doing a much needed load of whites. “The thing that most people don’t tell you about running for Congress,” she told me, looking mock-furtively over her shoulder to indicate the secretive, insider nature of what she was about to say, “is that your clothes are stinky all the time.”

With that, Ocasio-Cortez, who knocked off then-House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley in last June’s primary and was elected without much difficulty in November, shut the washing-machine door, pushed her quarters into the slot, and bid me farewell. In a few hours, she’d leave for her first day of orientation for members of the 116th Congress, a three-week crash course in civics (and the usual HR paperwork) she called “Congress camp.”

I didn’t say goodbye, because I wasn’t there; I just follow Ocasio-Cortez on Instagram. Since her stunning upset last summer, she has been a proudly disruptive force in Democratic politics. Before she’d even taken her seat, she joined climate activists in a protest inside Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office and made noises about backing primary challenges against some of her new Democratic colleagues.

But how she’s doing this is almost as radical— in 15-second snippets and live-streamed confessionals, all crafted for an audience that couldn’t care less about Meet the Press. On her Instagram feed, Ocasio-Cortez pulls back the curtain on Washington in ways big and small, fielding questions while prepping mac and cheese in her Instant Pot or pausing in a quiet moment to explain why she joined that protest in the speaker-to-be’s office.