The popular New York lawmaker's absence was notable as Sanders lost his Democratic front-runner status to Joe Biden.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) turned down repeated requests from Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign to appear at events promoting the Vermont senator's candidacy in recent weeks, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
After the Iowa caucuses, Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir asked Ocasio-Cortez to stump for Sanders in New Hampshire, according to the sources. The campaign prepared a model schedule to highlight the kind of popular support she would expect if she attended, one of the people familiar with the talks said.
Ocasio-Cortez resisted the entreaties until a few days before the primary on Feb. 12. She ultimately spoke the day before the election at a Sanders rally in Durham, New Hampshire, where the rock band The Strokes performed.
"It was like pulling teeth to get her to New Hampshire," said a second person who knew about the discussions.
The absence of the popular progressive lawmaker on the trail in the weeks that followed was even more notable. In nearly a month that passed from Feb. 11 until March 8 ― two days before the Michigan primary ― Ocasio-Cortez declined multiple invitations from Sanders' campaign to speak on his behalf in Nevada, South Carolina and the 14 states that voted on Super Tuesday, the three people told HuffPost.
During that period, Sanders rose and fell quickly, going from the uncontested front-runner after Nevada's Feb. 22 contest to a heavy underdog after a blowout in South Carolina on Feb. 29 and Super Tuesday routs on March 3.
As an embattled Sanders prepared to mount an unsuccessful stand against former Vice President Joe Biden in Michigan on Tuesday, the campaign again turned to Ocasio-Cortez for help.
She agreed at the last minute to deliver a speech on Sunday at a get-out-the-vote rally on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. Sanders' campaign issued a revised media advisory about the rally the night before, informing the press that Ocasio-Cortez would be present.
Neither the Sanders campaign nor the campaign office of Ocasio-Cortez denied the essential facts of the story.
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Although the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez teams would not say whether Ocasio-Cortez's decision to avoid the trail reflected any dispute, the first source said a disagreement over Ocasio-Cortez's remarks in Iowa seemed to cool her on helping with the campaign.
At a rally in Ames on Jan. 25, Ocasio-Cortez delivered a speech in which she failed to mention Sanders' name ― an omission that Fox News noticed and highlighted. She also encouraged those in attendance to tip off people about the presence of immigration enforcement authorities in their communities to help undocumented immigrants evade detention.
As Vanity Fair first reported in February, Shakir apparently communicated to Ocasio-Cortez his dissatisfaction over her remarks about alerting the presence of immigration authorities. While Sanders has sought to scrap and restructure the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in its current form, his campaign has been trying to avoid the impression that it was encouraging noncooperation with federal law as it exists, according to one source. (The Sanders campaign denied on Friday that Shakir ever spoke to Ocasio-Cortez about her immigration remarks.)
After that, Ocasio-Cortez ― already annoyed with the campaign's Jan. 23 decision to publicize the endorsement of controversial podcast host Joe Rogan ― grew less interested in helping Sanders' campaign, according to the source. After her last event in Iowa on Jan. 26, she did not return to the trail for Sanders until 16 days later, at the New Hampshire rally featuring The Strokes.