Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used an Instagram Live session to walk followers through how House Democrats choose a speaker, explaining that the real decision is made by secret ballot weeks before the public vote on the House floor and saying she is not seeking the job herself.
“I am not running for speaker,” the New York Democrat said. “It is not my ministry.”
The livestream came days after Democrats won control of the House and the Senate in the Nov. 3 midterm elections. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has announced he will run for speaker, and his senior leadership team is expected to be elected without opposition.
“There’s a lot of rightful discussion about the speaker’s race,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a caption on the video, describing the speakership as the third most powerful position in the United States. “In order to influence outcomes, we have to know how the selection process works in the first place. I break it down in today’s live.”
She opened by celebrating the results and thanking supporters. “We had a historic night, both in the Senate and in the House,” she said. “We won one of the largest House majorities.”
“Everyone who showed up, everyone who voted, everyone who was active, even if you can’t vote, people who encouraged and organized other people to vote,” she said. “Really just amazing.”
Viewers in the chat included journalist Don Lemon, whom she greeted by name. “Hi, Don Lemon. How’s it going?” she said.
Newly elected members will not be sworn in until Jan. 3, she noted, so Republicans keep their House and Senate majorities through the end of the year.
A name, not a yes or no
Ocasio-Cortez said she wanted to explain the process because no one explained it to her when she arrived in Washington.
“This place unlocks when you know the key, where all the keys are, and when you know what the lay of the land is,” she said. Yet when she first arrived, she added, “people don’t ever tell you what a speaker actually does, like the actual functions of that job, the actual responsibilities.”
The central point, she said, is that a leadership race is a choice between candidates rather than a referendum on one person.
“It’s not this person, yes or no. It’s this person or it’s what person,” she said.
Voters at the polls do not get a yes or no choice either, she said. “When you vote at the polls … your ballot doesn’t look like Greg Abbott yes or no. Your ballot looks like Greg Abbott or Gina Hinojosa, and you have to select who you want your candidate to be,” she said, referring to the Texas governor’s race. “It’s the same thing with an internal caucus election.”
“And right now, both of these races are uncontested,” she said. “… Don’t be mad at me. I’m just reporting what the facts are, right?”
“It’s not Hakeem Jeffries, yes or no. It’s not Chuck Schumer, yes or no,” she said later, also referring to the Senate Democratic leader. “It’s the name of the person you want to be speaker.”
Getting into a caucus race is simple, she said. “You just put your name forward. There’s no qualification process.” Candidates typically write a letter announcing their candidacy and send it to the entire caucus, she said.
She urged followers to keep the timing in mind. “It doesn’t happen in January,” she said of the caucus vote. “It happens in three weeks.”
What a speaker does
Ocasio-Cortez sketched the job on a whiteboard that appeared mirrored on camera, forcing her to write letters backward.
“The speaker’s job is not television,” she said. “… The speaker’s job is both legislative and political.”
On the legislative side, the speaker runs the whip operation. “A whip operation means both knowing how all of your members are going to vote on a given bill,” she said. “And if you know how all of your members are going to vote, then you know what bills will have a majority of your caucus.”
That work can mean “wrangling all and convincing all of your members” in a caucus with a broad range of views, she said. “There are moderate members. There are conservative members of the Democratic caucus.”
“Your political job is about keeping your majority,” she said, and “the extension of that political job is fundraising.”
The speaker is chosen by lawmakers, not by voters. “The speaker is elected by the members of Congress that have been elected,” she said.
The floor vote that airs on television is not where the decision is made, she added: “The real election happens before them and it happens behind closed doors via a secret ballot.”
The same process applies to the whip, the caucus chair and committee chairs. “All of these are elected and contested elections are secret ballot,” she said.
When she arrived in Congress, members voted on paper and dropped their ballots into “gorgeous wooden boxes” watched by tellers and observers, she said. The voting is now digital.
Why she is not running
Ocasio-Cortez said the speakership is mainly an internal job that would pull her away from the public.
“I’m with the people. I am an organizer, and there are internal facing jobs and responsibilities and leadership positions, and there are external facing responsibilities and leadership positions,” she said. “For me to be speaker, I would have to give up my public platform, I would say, or it’d be much harder.”
She said the money the job demands is beyond any one member. “I am a strong fundraiser thanks to you all … but even with all of that strength, even I would not be capable of the hundreds of millions of dollars this requires in order to try to protect this entire majority and help people afloat,” she said.
She said she endorsed and gave money to candidates including Angie Nixon, Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson, who won Maine’s Senate race.
“I supported them, not just politically, but also financially,” she said. “And there’s this huge conversation about candidates that were underinvested in. And I wish I had the money to navigate this myself, but even I need help. We have to do this all together and work as a team.”
Later, asked whether the speakership depends on donor money, she said raising the hundreds of millions of dollars that campaigns need is a job of party leadership. “Just look at what happened with Angie Nixon,” she said. “If Angie Nixon had just had a little bit of that support, that outcome could have changed.”
Lessons from her Oversight race
Ocasio-Cortez drew on her own run for a leadership post. In December 2024, she lost a secret ballot contest to become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee to the late Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, 131 to 84.
“I had to make 212 phone calls. Well, more than that, I had to have 212 conversations,” she said. She added that she “basically lived on a couch, just talking on the phone, making my case to every member of the Democratic caucus.”
She said she was challenging “a very established order in the way that Democrats make decisions, which is historically, whoever’s been here the longest gets it in terms of committee chairs.”
“I lost this race, but it was one of the most illuminating experiences that I learned so much from,” she said.
The vote did not break along ideological lines, she said. “There are a lot of progressive Democrats that voted against my candidacy,” she said, while she won support from “a lot of moderate Democrats that I never expected in a million years to support my candidacy.”
“The constituencies are not just left and right,” she said. “You have identity caucuses. People vote on geography.”
She described the Congressional Progressive Caucus; the New Democrat Coalition, which she called the “more pro-business corporate wing”; and the Blue Dogs, who she said “are definitely still in the conservative flank of the party.” She said New Democrats outnumber progressives in the incoming Congress.
The floor vote and committee seats
After the caucus picks its nominee, the full House votes in January, and members must say a name aloud on the floor, she said.
“Politics is a repeating game,” she said. The speaker vote comes first, she explained, and “after the speaker vote happens, that’s when committee assignments get doled out.”
Members can vote against the nominee on the floor, she said, but with no challenger the protest would likely be symbolic. “If we have a massive majority, which we do right now, it likely will not change the outcome,” she said. “There’s no alternative.”
“I’m just letting you know how this works, right? I’m letting you know the incentive structure that people operate within,” she said.
A member who breaks ranks, she said, may “accept your assignment for the next two years, possibly being in a place of obscurity.” Then she corrected herself: “I shouldn’t say that. Every committee matters.”
She said she was “just transmitting information about how this functions” and that such details often stay private “because people tend to shoot the messenger.”
Ocasio-Cortez joined the Energy and Commerce Committee in January 2025 after years of seeking a seat. “I sit on a committee now, Energy and Commerce, that has jurisdiction over approximately 60% of all of the legislation that passes through the House of Representatives,” she said.
She recounted an earlier round in which party leaders passed her over for the panel. “In the room where it happened, there were people standing up and giving vigorous arguments against me getting this seat,” she said.
The seat went instead to what she called “a very pro-corporate Democrat,” who she said later cast the deciding vote against legislation to let prescription drug prices be negotiated down and then retired that same term. She did not name the lawmaker.
“That’s not a story about me. That is a story about hundreds of millions of people in America … having more expensive medication because of that one difference of that one outcome,” she said.
“That person was there to do one job, and it was in alignment with lobbyists,” she said. “And so these decisions do have consequences.”
Before joining Energy and Commerce, Ocasio-Cortez served on the Oversight and Financial Services committees. “When people ask what has she done, my outcomes have been largely through investigation from this period of my time rather than legislation,” she said.
She cited an investigation she said helped pressure a drug company to release a generic version of the HIV prevention drug PrEP at least a year early, and she credited her questioning of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, with starting a fraud investigation.
When a viewer said the Oversight panel may be especially important in the coming years, she agreed. “Oversight is a very desirable perch,” she said.
Past speaker fights
Ocasio-Cortez pointed to January 2023, when a small group of Freedom Caucus members held out against Republican Kevin McCarthy through 15 rounds of voting. He eventually won, she said, because the holdouts had no candidate of their own.
“There was no other candidate and they couldn’t do it,” she said.
Republicans later ousted McCarthy and elected Mike Johnson, the current speaker. “Mike Johnson, that guy didn’t know what he was doing at all,” she said. “In fact, I think one of the reasons why there was such a dramatic underperformance in the House was in no small part also due to his leadership, which was awful.”
She said a push to elect a progressive speaker would be worthwhile but difficult. “I think electing a progressive speaker is an absolutely worthwhile endeavor, it also takes a massive undertaking,” she said.
She called speakership politics “Bene Gesserit territory,” a reference to the secretive sisterhood in Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novels, and said campaigns for the job “often begin years and years in advance.”
When some Democrats opposed Nancy Pelosi’s return as speaker after the 2018 elections, she said, “people started this campaign after the election happened.” Winning the job, she said, depends on relationships built over time. “It’s about who helped in building that majority,” she said.
Asked why more members do not run, she said, “It’s a really hard job.” The speaker, she said, “is not this person that comes from the sky and makes a unilateral decision that is imposed on everybody else.”
“I have voted against my party’s recommendation plenty of times,” she said. “I think I have a certain degree of influence because I’m not connected to big money. I don’t fundraise from big donors.”
“If we want a progressive shift in what the party does, we have to elect a broad caucus of more progressive Democrats, which I believe our generation has been doing,” she said.
A bigger majority
Asked what she looks forward to in the new Congress, Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the size of the Democratic majority. “We have not had a House majority of this size in decades,” she said.
Narrow margins, she said, meant “much more conservative Democrats could hijack a process, or I would say more pro-corporate members could hijack a process, bundle their votes and threaten to tank it.” She acknowledged that progressives can do the same but said “more pro-corporate Democrats hijack the process way more times than the left.”
She cited the Build Back Better package, which included universal child care, money for public housing and climate provisions. “You had Joe Manchin kill the whole thing at the end,” she said of the former West Virginia senator.
“Historically the argument has always been this margin is so small, we can’t risk it, we have to play small ball and we have to play short ball, and now I think this really opens up the creativity of this process and structure,” she said.
Orientation week
New members were arriving in Washington for orientation, she said. Within 24 to 48 hours of winning, she said, they receive a FedEx envelope with “one piece of paper inside” inviting them to the capital.
“I’m flying to D.C. tomorrow and I’m going to meet a lot of the people who just won their elections,” she said.
The official sessions, run by the Committee on House Administration, are “very basic like college orientation, here’s where the dorm is, here’s where you do your laundry,” she said. An optional orientation at Harvard was illuminating, she said, though she sensed “some private influence” there.
A second official orientation, either the week before or the week after Thanksgiving, is when the leadership ballots happen, she said. Some committee races are contested, she said, including the Small Business Committee, which she said is open because of the retirement of Rep. Nydia Velázquez of New York.
For races that have not been called, both candidates are invited. “I have been in the room when they flew out people whose race hadn’t been called yet and they called the race in the room,” she said.
Money, consultants and PACs
The Democratic National Committee focuses on presidential races, while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee focus on the House and Senate, Ocasio-Cortez said. “These three things often do not coordinate and they probably should, but they don’t,” she said.
She criticized Washington political consultants. “I think that a lot of these people … scam a lot of people and a lot of campaigns out of a lot of money,” she said. “Not all of them are bad, but a lot of them are bad.”
She said consultants are “almost completely unaccountable when they get things wrong.”
Ocasio-Cortez said she does not accept money from political action committees. “I don’t take any PAC money,” she said.
She said she has never taken money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, and that after her 2018 election the group approached her campaign and offered “something like a hundred grand.”
“I said no,” she said.
“Everyone tries to buy influence,” she said. The effect is subtler than people assume, she said, because lawmakers spend hours on the phone with people who can afford to give $5,000 at a time. “It’s almost like inception,” she said.
“It’s not a charity. They’re giving you money because they want to buy a relationship and they want to buy the ability to have their meeting taken and have you show up to their reception and to have a conversation,” she said.
Staying human
Asked how she stays human “around so many climbers and mercenaries,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “Staying human is my one contract with myself in this job.”
“I am fundamentally not a transactional person. And I am in a highly transactional place,” she said, adding that the culture “can really erode your humanity if you yield to it.”
She credited her background. “I was a waitress and I got elected by the grace of God in my community,” she said. Later she added, “I don’t have it in me to sell out. I just don’t.”
She said she is “probably one of the lowest net worth members of Congress.” “I haven’t traded a single stock. I don’t own individual stock,” she said, noting that she carries legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
She said party leaders were “horrifically cruel” to her when she first arrived. “I’m not talking about even current leadership,” she said. “Everybody took a swing at me and some people took a swing to my face.”
“I don’t know if it’s something about Puerto Rican women. I don’t know if it’s something about us, but we find out everything,” she said.
“People think that I am less capable, less skilled, less knowing, and less strategic than I am,” she said.
Asked whether the attacks thickened her skin, she said, “Totally. It strengthened me,” because “I had to develop an entire apparatus outside of the establishment.”
“We need more progressive candidates. We also need more progressive chiefs of staff, campaign managers, communications directors,” she said.
Questions from viewers
Asked to prioritize affordable insulin, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Yes, and also I’m adding inhalers to that category as well.” She described a drug company that “patented the little plastic dongle that keeps the inhaler cap attached to the pump” to extend its patent and keep prices high.
“When we break up the mechanisms through which they are price gouging us, that is the actual way that you knock over the domino,” she said.
On artificial intelligence, she said her main bill is a moratorium on data centers that asks Congress “to have a plan for this before we let it rip on mass layoffs in the economy.”
Asked about eliminating the Electoral College, she said, “I’m all for that,” and traced it to compromises over slavery. “People can call it woke if they want to,” she said.
When a viewer wrote that they had voted for Trump three times, she said, “Welcome to the fold, welcome to the fold. Never too late to change.”
To a viewer who called the session grandstanding, she said, “We just need to lay out the strategy. That’s all what this is.”
When another viewer asked whether a protest vote would cost Democrats influence, she said, “This is not an endorsement. I’m just laying out the field here.” She added, “The question is who you vote for.”
She congratulated a Brazilian lawmaker who joined the stream and praised the organizing of Brazil’s left. “The left in the United States should be learning from the left in Latin America, not the other way around,” she said. She said the U.S. left can be culturally “punitive” and that “it needs to be like a house party.”
When a viewer said the process sounded like the reality show “Survivor,” she agreed. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen ‘Survivor’ and I’m like, this is my job,” she said, adding that in Congress “there is no handbook on anything.”
She warned viewers about a TikTok account charging a $9 subscription in her name. “That’s bad,” she said. “I guess we’ll try to look into it.”
She also explained her new look. “My hair is jet black right now because there was a last minute urgent situation developing right before the election,” she said, explaining that she left a hair gloss in for 90 minutes while making urgent phone calls. “I’m now in my Halloween era.”
Sanders, the South and the world
Ocasio-Cortez, who has toured the country with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, called him “such a close friend.” She recalled seeing him on television while she was waitressing, saying health care should be a right for everyone.
“I had internalized that I didn’t … have health care because I didn’t deserve it,” she said. She ran for Congress after doing field organizing for his 2016 presidential campaign.
“I think it’s because he’s from Brooklyn and I’m from the Bronx,” she said of their friendship.
To a viewer who said they had grown disillusioned with the country, she said, “I think there are a lot of good guys in our country.”
She said her team supported Justin Pearson, a candidate in Memphis, Tennessee, with money and volunteers. “We recruited volunteers. We bused people down. We launched field operations,” she said. “It also did not have the investment that it deserved, but it came within the tiniest of margins.”
She said the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act “creates an opening for us to finally be able to put the investment in the South.”
Ocasio-Cortez said she argued at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year that progressive and anticorruption movements around the world are connected. She described meeting a young woman in Berlin who later “won the seat to become mayor of Berlin on an affordability agenda.”
“If an ascendant fascist movement is going to be international, so must a working class popular movement,” she said.
She closed by thanking viewers. “I always say it’s always darkest before dawn,” she said. Dark times can make it feel like things will never get better, she said, but “Tuesday is just an example … that the sun rises and that sun is you all.”
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