Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.
I can't name a single issue with roots in race that doesn't have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn't have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them out and choose one is a con.
Democrats should be getting high-fives from sanitation truck drivers - that is what should be happening in America.
In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.
Campaigns are so much more expensive than people think they are. Just to keep the lights on is several thousand dollars a month.
It's really scary or it's easy to generate fear around an idea or around an -ism when you don't provide any substance to it.
People try to identify who is the most likely person to turn out, and what we did is that we changed who turns out. And that changes the whole electorate.
My mother cleaned homes and drove school buses, and when my family was on the brink of foreclosure... I started bartending and waitressing.
What we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision that people can believe in. And getting into Twitter fights with the president is not exactly where we're going to find progress as a nation.
Public schools in the late '80s and early '90s were a total mess... we felt that if I was going to have a good educational option in my life, I would have to go to a public school district that actually served its children.
There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can't do it.
There's this false notion that you have to separate and choose between issues of class and issues of race. What people do when they say that you need to separate class from race is that they are really just saying that people of color should come second.
There has almost never been a period of substantial economic growth in the United States without significant investment. And no investment pays off within the same cycle. No investment pays off within the same year - especially a governmental investment. Even businesses don't work that way.
When people feel like they are being spoken directly to, I do feel like... they'll do things like turn out in an off-year, mid-year primary.
At Standing Rock, we experienced, first-hand, people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, 'We don't want this in our community; we don't want this in our backyard,' and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process.
Rather than think of it as somewhere to run from, the Bronx is somewhere to invest.
We have to stick to the message: What are we proposing to the American people? Not, 'What are we fighting against?'
I'm used to people kind of knowing me in the community.
I see people like me, who thought someone like me couldn't be in politics, now are saying, 'Oh, wait, I don't need to take money from corporations to run. Maybe I'll run, too.'
Democrats are a big-tent party. You know, I'm not trying to impose an ideology on all, you know, several hundred members of Congress.
I was nominated at first by a group called Justice Democrats. They were trying to essentially field non-corporate candidates in the 2018 midterm election. They were looking for people with a history of community service, and my name had come across their desk, and they called.
I think - I do think that we have to have a secure border. We need to make sure that people are, in fact, documented. But that doesn't mean that we threaten people's lives.
We absolutely do need to make sure that our borders are secure. But what we need to realize and remember is that ICE was established in 2003 right at the same time as the Patriot Act, the AUMF, the Iraq War - and we look back at a lot of that time and legislation as a mistake now. And I think that ICE is right there as a part of it.
I know what it's like to access the privilege of a ZIP Code but also be born in one that could have destined me to something else.