ATLANTA — The billionaire heir and the former bartender.
Many Democrats have been in and out of the spotlight as the party looks for effective counters to President Donald Trump and his second administration. But two disparate figures, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have seen their national profiles rise by delivering messages that excite a demoralized and fractured party.
The governor, a 60-year-old heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, and the congresswoman, the 35-year-old with working-class roots, both won their first elections in 2018. Both have urged mass resistance and accused their party of not fighting more. Each has stood out enough to draw sharp retorts from Trump loyalists.
But as messengers, Pritzker and Ocasio-Cortez could not be more different. And their arguments, despite some overlap, are distinct enough to raise familiar questions for Democrats: Should they make their challenges to Trump about threats to democracy and national stability, as Pritzker has done, or portray him as a corrupt billionaire exacerbating an uneven economy, as Ocasio-Cortez does? And beyond the message itself, what qualities should the best messenger have?
What links them, said one prominent Democrat, is “assertiveness.”
“People want Trump and Trumpism to be met with equal passion and force,” said National Urban League President Marc Morial, a former New Orleans mayor deeply connected in Democratic politics. On that front, he added, Pritzker and Ocasio-Cortez “are both effective national figures –- but in very different ways.”
Pritzker was born at the bridge of the baby boomers and Generation X into a sprawling family now entrenched in Democratic politics. Like Trump, he inherited great wealth, but he lambastes the president as a poser on working-class issues.
He chaired Illinois’ Human Rights Commission before running for governor. In office, he has signed an Illinois minimum-wage increase and is an ally of unions. His family’s hotels are unionized, making them regular options for official Democratic Party events.
When Democratic President Joe Biden exited the 2024 campaign, Pritzker was floated as a replacement. He made no visible moves, quickly backed Vice President Kamala Harris and acted as the de facto host of her nominating convention in his home state.
“Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity,” Pritzker said in Chicago.
Since Harris’ defeat, Pritzker has behaved like a future candidate. One of the nation’s highest-profile Jewish politicians, he fired up liberals by comparing the Trump administration to the Third Reich.
“If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic,” the governor said his joint budget and State of the State address on Feb. 19. “All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
Addressing party faithful in the traditional early nominating state of New Hampshire, Pritzker bemoaned “do-nothing” Democrats, called for party honchos to set aside “decades of stale decorum” and urged voters into the streets.
“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now,” he said. Democrats, he added, “must castigate (Republicans) on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.”
It was enough for senior Trump aide Stephen Miller to accuse Pritzker of inciting violence. Pritzker wasted no time returning the volley, calling it “terrible hypocrisy” for Trump allies to complain given the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s pardons of the rioters.
Ocasio-Cortez is a millennial progressive who earned degrees in international relations and economics and worked as a waiter and bartender before entering politics. With support from the progressive Working Families Party, she ousted a top House Democrat, Joe Crowley, in a 2018 primary.
Like Trump, she leverages millions of social media followers. Also like Trump, she is an economic populist. But she comes from the left wing of U.S. politics and without the anti-immigration and cultural conservatism of Trump’s right wing or the alliances with billionaire business and tech elites.
She has recently headlined “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a two-time presidential candidate. The tour has drawn tens of thousands of people across the country, notably including reliably Republican states, often with overflow crowds outside many stops.
Ocasio-Cortez’s next political move seems less certain than Pritzker’s. She is seen as a potential primary challenger to Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader from New York, and she only recently became old enough to be constitutionally eligible for the presidency. But she appears poised to inherit the mantle of the 83-year-old Sanders’ movement.
She freely criticizes Trump. But she leans more heavily into broader economic and social critiques that she’s made since her first House bid and that Sanders has offered for decades.
“For years we have known that our political system has slowly but surely become dominated by big money and billionaires and time after time we have seen how our government and laws are more responsive to corporations and lobbyists than everyday people and voters,” she said in Folsom, California. She advocated for “living wages … stable housing … guaranteed health care,” and blasted “the agenda of dark money to keep our wages low and to loot our public goods like Social Security and Medicare.”
She also played up her roots: “From the waitress who is now speaking to you today, I can tell you: impossible is nothing.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Pritzker are allied against a common opponent, Trump, and not each other. Advisers to Ocasio-Cortez and Pritzker did not respond to questions.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, argues Pritzker could be more attractive as a “traitor to his class” in the tradition of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. An East Coast patrician, Roosevelt authored the New Deal’s federal expansion to combat the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“How powerful would it be if a billionaire was the one helping to lead the charge against corrupt billionaires and corrupt billionaire corporations that are trying to crack the Constitution and loot the American people?” Green said, adding that “continued silence” on “billionaire issues” should disqualify Pritzker. “We have to be speaking to the shake-up-the-system vibe that people want to see.”
Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, which typically backs centrist Democrats, countered that Pritzker could bring a “more stable” version of Trump’s argument that his wealth and success is an asset. Trump’s biggest liability, Bennett said, is “chaos” that negatively affects people’s lives.
“People are very mad at Elon Musk, but not because he’s rich,” Bennett said of the Tesla CEO who is leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. “They’re mad at him because he’s vandalizing our government and doing it in a destructive way.”
A relative of the governor, Rachel Pritzker, chairs Third Way’s board of trustees.
Ocasio-Cortez is often criticized by more moderate Democrats, including Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who has also positioned herself as a thought leader in the party. Slotkin recently suggested the word “oligarchy” didn’t resonate with working-class voters. It was an implicit rebuke of the Ocasio-Cortez-Sanders’ tour.
Shortly after Slotkin’s comments about oligarchy, Ocasio-Cortez posted on X: “Plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness.”
Bennett said Democrats who emerge as party leaders, including the 2028 nominee, will be those who offer solutions for voters’ frustration “over their needs not being met.” It’s a notion that Green insisted is indistinguishable from criticizing the billionaire class, along with the tax and labor policies that drive wealth and income gaps in the U.S.
Whatever direction Democrats choose, Bennett said, Ocasio-Cortez has secured her place as a national voice.
“She’s very good at what she does. She’s formidable,” he said. “And anybody on the center-left who denies that is just kidding themselves.”
