New York Democrat and progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (pictured above) is being coy about future plans, leaving room for growing speculation that the youngest woman elected to Congress may have designs for higher office in the immediate future. “They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat,” AOC said last Friday at an event moderated by former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod. “My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.” While political jobs “come and go,” she said, “single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s comments come alongside a “widespread belief” that she’s “positioning herself” to run for the White House in 2028 or might “challenge her party’s leader” in the U.S. Senate, fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer, said The Guardian. In her remarks, AOC “did not rule out any future office,” said Fox News. Instead, she stressed that she can “pursue her goals from multiple places, regardless of big media’s attempts to spin her away from her ambitions.” The renewed focus on the lawmaker’s political future comes as “newer polling shows Ocasio-Cortez among top prospective Democratic contenders” for the 2028 nomination, said Newsweek. 

“You had 1,400 young people there,” said Axelrod on CNN after the event. “They cheered” at the suggestion that AOC could run for president. But they “cheered even louder” at the prospect that she might challenge Schumer in 2028. 

Democrats in Virginia and nationwide are struggling to regain their political footing after the Virginia Supreme Court ruled against a voter-approved electoral map that would have countermanded GOP redistricting efforts in other states. During a conversation this past weekend among party leaders, Democrats “vented anger at their defeat at the Virginia Supreme Court” and “spoke about a collective determination to flip two or three Republican-held seats under the existing map,” said The New York Times. They also discussed a “bank-shot proposal to redraw the congressional lines anyway.”

In a letter to the party, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) (pictured above) promised a “massive Democratic redistricting counteroffensive” to be discussed at a caucus meeting tomorrow. Jeffries’ “proclamation” signals that Democrats “intend to fight back, either in the courts, via legislation or by pursuing their own aggressive redistricting agenda,” said CNBC. But Virginia Democrats’ decision to reject a “complicated idea” that would “replace the state Supreme Court and get the case reheard” will likely “anger rank-and-file Democrats” who hoped the party would respond “aggressively” to the Virginia Supreme Court ruling, said The New Republic.

Virginia Democrats have since petitioned to have the case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is “already deeply enmeshed in a flood of redistricting taking place in states across the country,” said CNN. But any emergency appeal, slated to be handled by Chief Justice John Roberts, is “likely to be an uphill fight” for Democrats, since Virginia’s high court “resolved the case based on state, not federal law.”

The practice may be a major factor in an upcoming Supreme Court ruling