Sanders advises Ocasio-Cortez: Keep doing what you’ve been doing

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) advised first-time House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday to keep doing what she’s doing, praising her grass-roots campaign that led to her primary victory over longtime incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) last month.

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” what advice he had for the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders replied: “To keep doing what she has done.”

“She ran an extraordinary campaign. And the reason that she won is she ran on ideas that were relevant to the working people in her district,” Sanders said.

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“She put together a strong grass-roots campaign and she worked her tail off,” he continued. “And any candidate in America who is prepared to do that, I think, has an excellent chance of winning.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who previously worked as an organizer for Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid, shocked the political world last month when she defeated Crowley, the No. 4 House Democrat and a rumored replacement for Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). 

Ocasio-Cortez, a self-declared democratic socialist, has campaigned on a progressive message, including “Medicare for all” and free tuition at public colleges. 

Sitting next to Sanders in the “Face the Nation” interview, she rejected Crowley’s suggestion a week earlier that she won, in part, because of her gender. 

“We won across demographics,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We won — we expanded the electorate ourselves. We did the work of organizing.”