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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a progressive fundraiser in Los Angeles in August 2018.
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the
media should focus more on her policies than whether she should run for president in 2020. - She was responding to a Vox article saying she should run, even though the US Constitution says the president must be at least 35.
- Alexandria-Cortez is 29, and wouldn't be old enough to enter the White House until 2024.
- "The whole country JUST went through an exhausting midterm election. We need a break," she said, asking people to talk about healthcare, wages, and legalizing weed instead.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the media for talking her up as a potential candidate in the 2020 elections instead of focusing on her policy ideas.
"How about... no," she tweeted on Wednesday night, in response to an article suggesting that she should run for president in the next election, despite being younger than the minimum age of 35.
"Sometimes political media is too fixated on personalities instead of policies," she wrote.
"The whole country JUST went through an exhausting midterm election. We need a break.
"Can we instead talk about healthcare, a living wage, legalizing cannabis, GND, & other issues?"
GND refers to the Green New Deal, a federal plan to address climate change by investing in infrastructure. The policy is one of her signatures, along with issues like immigration reform, fully funded schools and universities, Medicare for all, and the legalization of cannabis.
The Democratic representative-elect was responding to an article from Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias that suggested she should run for president despite not yet being 35 years old, a requirement from the US Constitution.
He said she should start a campaign regardless, and dare the Supreme Court to stop her.
Ocasio-Cortez is 29 at the moment. Under the 35-year-old age limit, her first opportunity to run would be in the 2024 election cycle. She turns 35 in October 2024, just in time for the November election and hypothetically taking office in January 2025.
Read More: An early look at the 2020 presidential contenders
In the Vox article,Yglesias argued that it was "ridiculous" to have an age limit on the presidency, and said that people younger than 29 "are routinely trusted with life-and-death situations."
"While the law prevents anyone under the age of 35 from becoming president, we currently have a septuagenarian in the White House whose frequent nonsensical diatribes and notoriously scattered Twitter outbursts repeatedly raise the prospect of mental decline," he wrote.
"Meanwhile, the top two Democrats in national polling - Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden - are 77 and 76, respectively."
Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, made history in November by becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Theodore Roosevelt is the president who took office at the youngest age, entering the White House aged 42 after his predecessor was assassinated.