Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a message for Gen Z following Tuesday’s Democratic victories: That optimistic energy they joke about as “millennial cringe” comes from the same excitement they felt Tuesday night.
In an off-the-cuff video posted to her Instagram story Wednesday, the New York Democrat compared the big win that gave Democrats control of Congress to the excitement many millennials felt when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.
“Also a note for Gen Z, if you want to understand millennial cringe, what you all call millennial cringe, this earnestness, imagine all the seats we flipped last night, that feeling plus on top of it, electing the first Black president ever, and on top of that, you did it the first time you ever voted, that hits generationally,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “You are chasing that feeling ever since.”
Ocasio-Cortez, 37, won a fifth term representing parts of the Bronx and Queens Tuesday. Her remarks came amid celebrations of Democratic gains across the country.
Democrats will control both the House and the Senate in January, CBS News projects, a rebuke of President Donald Trump and Republican control of Washington. CBS News projects Democrats holding 251 to 268 House seats and at least 54 Senate seats, with Mississippi and Alaska still too close to call.
Democrats picked up Senate seats in Texas and Kansas, states that hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in decades, as well as seats in Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maine. In the House, Democrats beat Republican incumbents from Iowa to Pennsylvania to California.
About 6 in 10 voters disapproved of how Trump is handling the presidency, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of about 80,000 voters in all 50 states.
Ocasio-Cortez was 19 a few weeks before Obama defeated Republican John McCain in November 2008, an election in which young voters played a significant role. Obama won voters under 30 by 66% to 32%, according to exit poll data analyzed by CIRCLE, a youth civic research center at Tufts University. CIRCLE estimates at least 52% of eligible young Americans voted in that election, about 23 million people under 30 and 3.4 million more than in 2004.
Former President Obama campaigned for Democratic candidates during the final weeks of this year’s election and, in a statement following Tuesday’s results, said Americans had “sent a clear message.”
On social media, Gen Z has used the term “millennial cringe” to make fun of the optimistic, earnest internet culture of the 2010s, a dig British GQ has tied to that generation’s earnestness. Recently, a TikTok trend called “millennial optimism” has made that era nostalgic.
Ocasio-Cortez said that earnestness stemmed from the early taste of victory.
“And because you did it the first time you ever voted, you’re like, yeah, we can change the world. Like, yeah, why not? Like, we did it the first time. Let’s just do it again,” she said.
Young voters leaned strongly toward Democrats this year. About 7 in 10 voters under 30 voted for the Democratic candidate in their House race, according to The AP Voter Poll. That was unlike 2024, when the youngest voters were nearly evenly split between Trump and Kamala Harris, then vice president.
Voters under 30 comprised only about 1 in 10 midterm voters, the survey found, limiting their impact. But most said their vote rejected Trump, and about half said they were angry about how things are going in the country.
Tuesday also marked another generational milestone. Melat Kiros, 29, a democratic socialist from Colorado, became the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress, CBS News reported. She joins Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, who in 2022 became the first Gen Z member to win a seat in Congress.
Ocasio-Cortez concluded her message to the newest voters with one piece of advice.
“That’s so much of it in a nutshell,” she said. “Just keep at it.”
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