Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joked during a joint appearance at a Utah rally on Sunday that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was his daughter, praising the progressive lawmaker and highlighting her background.
“Now I want to say a word about my daughter,” Sanders said, putting his hand on Ocasio-Cortez’s shoulder.
The New York congresswoman and the crowd laughed.
“No,” Sanders said, shifting to a serious tone. “I want to say a word about Alexandria and why, why what she’s doing is so important.”
Sanders proceeded to tell the story of Ocasio-Cortez’s entrance into politics, noting the high-profile Democrat was a waitress six years ago and decided to take on an establishment Democrat in Congress. Before running for office, Ocasio-Cortez was a community organizer for Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“She looked around her, and she saw a society that was fundamentally unjust and, in many ways, ugly to the people in the community in which she lived in New York City,” Sanders said.
“She stood up and took on one of the most powerful people in the House of Representatives, and she started with almost no money against the guy who had unlimited funds, and she beat him,” he added.
Ocasio-Cortez also remarked on her background as a waitress and pushed back against Republicans who say she was unqualified to serve in Congress.
“But the fact is, many of us are far more qualified to know what real life is actually like than any of them ever will,” she said at the Utah rally. “And I tell this story not because it is special, but because of how common and normal it is.”
“While the details may differ, so many of us know what it feels like for life to be one bad day, one bad piece of news, one major setback from everything feeling like it’s going to fall apart, and we don’t have to live like this any more Utah,” she continued, advocating for living wages, stable housing and guaranteed health care.
“Oligarchy or democracy,” she added. “And we are here today because we choose democracy.”
The remarks came during a stop on Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour, during which the progressive duo has attracted thousands of attendees at rallies held in battleground states.
Sanders urged people in the audience at the Utah rally on Sunday to follow in Ocasio-Cortez’s footsteps and “go outside of their comfort zone.”
Sanders has heaped praise on Ocasio-Cortez in the past, including recently calling her “extraordinary” in an ABC News interview.
“I am so impressed by her work in Congress and her, just, she inspires young people all over the country,” Sanders said about the young progressive congresswoman, in the interview last month.
