Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Not Ready to Endorse Bernie Sanders for President

Rising Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not ready to endorse her idealogical pal Sen. Bernie Sanders for president in 2020.

“We’ve been in active conversation,” Ocasio-Cortez told NY1 in an interview on Monday. “I’ve been speaking with him and several other of the 2020 candidates and I think they have really understood and respected the fact that I think that I want to wait until we get a little bit closer.”

Sanders hosted his kickoff campaign rally in Brooklyn on Saturday voicing many of the same political themes as Ocasio-Cortez. But she said she would put off endorsing a candidate for now.

“I think we need to have a conversation as a party and I think that endorsing very early in this race prevents us from having that kind of conversation,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez expressed concern that endorsing a presidential candidate early might make voters not take her seriously.

“People say, ‘Oh she’s just supporting so and so and that’s why she’s saying that,” she said. “I think we have to have real conversations about income inequality about criminal justice about immigration and the environment.”

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez teamed up in 2018 to support candidates promoting their socialist ideas during the midterm elections.

In an interview with CBS, she fondly recalled her experience at a Bernie Sanders presidential rally in New York, noting that the 77-year-old senator for Vermont inspired her to run her own campaign.

“Just two years ago we were both in St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx,” she said. “I was in the crowd with thousands of other people across ages, races, creeds, incomes and to be here two years later pushing that revolution in Kansas is pretty amazing.”