Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now the frontrunner to become the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee, according to Polymarket odds, marking the first time she has led the pack.

As of Wednesday evening, 21 percent of traders backed the New York progressive, who was trailed by California Governor Gavin Newsom at 17 percent. On rival prediction site Kalshi, the results were the same, with Ocasio-Cortez narrowly topping Newsom.

Meanwhile, conventional political polls still put former Vice President Kamala Harris at the top spot, with Newsom in second and AOC in a distant fourth.

Ocasio-Cortez has not announced a formal presidential bid, nor has she sworn one off. Right now she’s focused on helping Democrats win the midterms, she recently told The Independent.

“I think my main focus is really genuinely just the midterms right now, and we have to make sure that we win this majority,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for detailing the process of freezing her eggs on social media and reflecting on the precarious state of women’s healthcare in America.

“In the political context that we're in, in an administration that is dedicated to politicizing women’s bodies and taking our choices away from us and punishing us around decisions to be pregnant or not be pregnant — and, frankly, this administration has made pregnancy more dangerous than probably at any point in the last 30 plus years — we’re gonna take our power back,” she told her followers.

She also generated considerable discussion in political circles for branding 2020-era “woke” ideas “crazy,” reflecting that while many of the social justice-focused discussions of that era were “fruitful,” the "rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

An AOC 2028 bid would be the latest test of whether Democrats will move further to the left, in line with rising Democratic socialists and progressives such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, or whether the party will tack back to the center.

In many ways, the party is still reeling from the 2024 election, where Harris replaced President Joe Biden in the late stages of the race and lost to Donald Trump, despite the Republican campaigning under a cloud of lawsuits and government investigations.

Considerable divides remain in the party over issues including healthcare, U.S. support for Israel and immigration.

The Democrats are projected to retake at least the House in the midterms, according to polling, on the back of high gas prices and an unpopular war in Iran.