Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Underdog Campaign Takes Center Stage In New Netflix Documentary

When then-28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emerged last year to challenge incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in New York's 14th Congressional District, not a lot of people thought she had much chance of winning. But that didn't stop documentarians from following her and three other women (Amy Vilela, Cori Bush, and Paula Jean Swearengin), who were running for Congress around the country during the 2018 midterms. While the other three didn't win their races, AOC did, and became a national phenomenon whose every utterance seems to send Republicans into a white hot rage.

And her underdog campaign has been preserved for history in the Netflix documentary Knock Down the House, which will be released on the streaming network on May 1st. You can check out the first trailer for it below, which logically puts AOC front and center. "If I was a rational person, I would’ve dropped out of this race a long time ago," she says to start it off with typical disarming charm.

AOC's predilection to call out other politicians and fight for her big policy ideas (like the Green New Deal) has elicited pushback from more moderate members of own party (from people like Speaker Nancy Pelosi) and frenzied outrage from the right. On Sunday, the NY Post reported that a mysterious, unnamed multimillionaire donor is gearing up to support Republican challengers to AOC.

“There’s definitely national energy and money on this race,” Bronx Republican chairman Mike Rendino told the Post about the donor they described as "hell-bent on getting AOC tossed." He wouldn't reveal their name for some reason, but said he is "worth over $200 million, plus [has] connections to raise money in Manhattan."

The Post names three people as either committed or exploring campaigns in the district: Egyptian-American medical journalist Ruth Papazian (the only one of the three who has formally announced), former NYPD Officer John Cummings, and conservative talk radio producer Rich Valdes. All three criticize AOC in the article for putting so much energy into her national presence and neglecting her local one, but the entire article reads like city Republicans are just desperate to drum up any excitement or momentum for a campaign in a heavily Democratic district (within a heavily Democratic city).