AOC's First 100 Days, With Bernie Sanders as VP: The Scenario

Hero photo: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at SXSW 2019 — nrkbeta / NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

01 The premise: she polls first, he polls sixth — and that is the point

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leads the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire 2028 Democratic primary poll at 22 percent, a point ahead of Pete Buttigieg, with Senators Mark Kelly and Gavin Newsom trailing. Senator Bernie Sanders — who won that same primary in 2016 and 2020 — polls sixth, at 6 percent, and will turn 87 a few weeks before the election. He has acknowledged he will not run for president again. She has not ruled anything out: “I can't say that I've ruled it out,” she told Politico in July.

So the ticket this scenario assumes is not a fantasy pairing — it is the natural endpoint of a decade-long alliance. She volunteered for his 2016 campaign as a 28-year-old bartender before her upset win over Joe Crowley. He has been “deeply humbled” by her rise, in the words of the tour; she calls him her political teacher. Their Fighting Oligarchy tour drew over 300,000 people across 21 states, in venues chosen deliberately in red and purple territory. When she beat JD Vance 51–49 in a head-to-head poll, she quote-tweeted it with one word: “Bloop!”

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction — built strictly from her stated positions, his Senate record, and the actual tools of the office. The governing question is not whether they would try to move fast. It is which of their promises can move in 100 days without Congress, which need the Senate, and which collide with the Constitution they would swear to preserve.

02 Days 1–14: the executive-order blitz

Ocasio-Cortez has told The Lever, in September 2026, that Democrats “must use the tools of the office” rather than “falsely handcuff ourselves” after Republicans expanded executive power. That sentence is the roadmap for the first two weeks. The day-one to day-fourteen agenda is almost entirely reversible Trump actions: reinstating Schedule F protections for civil servants (undoing the reclassification that stripped union rights from federal workers), reviving the trans service ban reversal — restoring the roughly 1,000 service members separated under the 2025 ban, with back pay as the article of faith she has already co-sponsored — and reversing the Trump executive orders on labor, climate permitting, and regulatory review.

The tools: the same ones Trump used — executive orders, signing memoranda, agency directives, and the “we must use the tools of the office” theory of the unitary executive that she simultaneously says she wants to rein in. That tension is the first honest note of the scenario. Her answer to The Lever was explicit: “We need to put a lot of guardrails back in place, and also we cannot allow that to hamper us from doing everything in our power to guarantee healthcare in America, raise wages, strengthen unions, and more.” Day one of an Ocasio-Cortez presidency would be the largest single-day reversal of a predecessor's executive orders in modern history — and day two would begin the fight to make sure no future president can do what she just did.

03 Days 1–45: the bully pulpit, taken literally

This is where Sanders as vice president stops being a curiosity and becomes an instrument. The Fighting Oligarchy tour proved the pair can draw crowds in places Democrats had stopped visiting — 12,000 in Nampa, Idaho; 11,000 in Greeley, Colorado; 36,000 in Los Angeles — speaking to independents and, by Sanders' own count on the Kara Swisher podcast, “many Republicans.” A VP's constitutional portfolio is thin: break Senate ties, preside over the counting of electoral votes, and wait. This vice president would be dispatched as the administration's traveling salesman — a 100-day tour of the districts and states whose Democratic senators and representatives hold the votes for the agenda.

The message discipline is already built. Medicare for All, a wealth tax, union rights, housing. The book is written: Fight Oligarchy. The stump speech has been tested in front of 300,000 people. What changes is the ask: not “rise up” but “call your senator, because we need 60 votes — and if we can't get 60, we need to talk about why 60 is the threshold.”

04 Days 15–100: Congress, the filibuster, and the hard math

Everything durable in the agenda runs through the Senate. Medicare for All, a $17.50 living wage, the PRO Act, DC statehood, a wealth tax, Supreme Court expansion — all of it is legislation, and all of it faces the filibuster she has promised to abolish. The 100-day scenario does not require guessing her position: she has called for ending the filibuster explicitly, and Sanders has spent a Senate career on record against it.

The math is the story. Even a favorable 2028 map — the one that put her ahead of Vance — leaves the Senate at best narrowly Democratic. The scenario's most likely day-100 outcome is therefore a budget-reconciliation strategy: cramming what survives the Byrd rule (healthcare subsidies, tax changes, energy credits) into one reconciliation bill, while the filibuster fight is teed up but not won. Sanders' Senate seat is a real asset here — a sitting vice president who spent 30 years in that chamber, whipping votes by name — but also a limit: the same moderates he would be courting are the ones who just watched their caucus nominate a 36-year-old democratic socialist.

05 The military ledger, again

DutyStation readers know this piece of the map from the previous scenario analyses: a president Ocasio-Cortez inherits the Iran war, a Pentagon that has never passed an audit, and a defense topline she has voted to cut by 10 percent in every one of her NDAAs. Sanders as VP changes the tone of that fight more than the substance. His record on veterans' benefits and his instinct for reading ledgers aloud in speeches means the war accounting becomes a primetime production: cost per strike, contractor overruns, the interceptor stockpile drawn down by two-thirds in the Iran conflict, all read into the record.

The 100-day military agenda follows her documented positions: the trans service restoration with back pay on day one by executive order; the Schedule F reversal restoring civil-service protections to the 700,000+ DoD civilian workforce; a war powers resolution she signs rather than filibusters; and a defense budget request that cuts from the $891 billion topline while explicitly protecting pay, housing, healthcare, and the accounts the military community actually feels. The risk ledger is equally documented: a rushed drawdown under a blockade, munitions shortfalls that take years to refill, and a joint chiefs slate that would test any president's civilian control.

06 Days 30–100: labor, wages, and the NLRB

The agenda item with the fastest 100-day payoff is the one the pair can do with appointments rather than legislation. The National Labor Relations Board flips with a simple majority of confirmed board members. A President Ocasio-Cortez would nominate a pro-union NLRB majority on day one; a Vice President Sanders would campaign for the confirmations in the states of wavering senators; and by day 100 the board would be moving on the union-busting cases that piled up under the previous administration — the same cases she grilled witnesses about in the Oversight Committee.

The minimum wage is the purest Sanders signature in the scenario. The Fight for $15 was his demand before it was the party's; her living-wage framing (“$17.50 indexed”) is the current position. Neither passes the Senate in 100 days without the filibuster falling first. What the scenario delivers is the same budget-reconciliation attempt every Democratic president since 2021 has tried — with the same likely ruling that a wage hike is policy, not budget, and the same fallback: wage provisions attached to federal contractors by executive order, covering millions of workers without a single vote.

07 The institutional fights she has already promised

The positions that make this scenario genuinely radical rather than merely progressive are the ones that change the rules of the game itself, and she has put each on the record. DC statehood: co-sponsored. Abolish ICE: supported since 2018. Supreme Court expansion: “we need to expand the Supreme Court,” she has said, in the same interviews where she calls for ending the filibuster. Medicare for All remains the flagship. None of these moves in 100 days. All of them start moving — with the vice president, who would hold the Senate's gavel for tie-breaking votes, installed as the administration's institutional-fights coordinator.

Sanders' role in these fights is the scenario's most interesting variable. He is the only politician in the country with the standing to tell a rally crowd of 36,000 that the revolution will take more than one election — and the only one whose endorsement of the ticket would make its radicalism feel like a restoration rather than a rupture. His age is the permanent asterisk: 87 at the election, one heartbeat from the presidency, in a country that just watched two consecutive presidents face cognitive scrutiny. The scenario's honest answer is that this ticket would be elected as a two-person presidency by design — and the 25th Amendment's machinery, untested in practice, would be the quiet background hum of every one of the 100 days.

08 The verdict

Read strictly from the record, the first 100 days of an Ocasio-Cortez presidency with Sanders as VP look like this: a two-week executive blitz reversing a predecessor's entire EO corpus and restoring the trans service members; a reconciliation package that passes maybe a third of the economic agenda; a filibuster fight that is joined but not won; an NLRB and a war accounting that deliver visible wins to labor and to military families; and a traveling vice president turning 36,000-person rallies into pressure on individual senators by name.

For the military community the first-100-days ledger is the same double-entry the previous scenarios found, with one addition: a vice president who has spent 30 years reading defense budgets aloud into the congressional record. The restoration of discharged LGBTQ personnel with back pay moves day one. The audit moves immediately. The cuts come with the same promise she made on the House floor — that they come from “obsolete weapons” and contractor margins, not from troops. Whether a Congress of either party lets her keep that promise is the first hundred days' real test, and the scenario's honest unknown.