She’s embarked on a nationwide tour with Vermont’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, held town halls outside of her district in upstate New York, and raised $15 million
Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive who has cemented her popularity with young voters, is reportedly considering running for president or the Senate in 2028.
Ocasio-Cortez, 35, made a splash when she was elected to represent New York’s 14th congressional district, located in the Bronx and Queens, in 2019. Now, the Democrat is reportedly considering taking the next step in her political career as the party searches for its next generation of leaders, Axios reported Friday.
Members of Ocasio-Cortez’s team have recently been positioning the progressive lawmaker, known as AOC, to either run for president or run for a Senate seat.
I’ve always interpreted it more as ‘plotting a course’.
Yeah I was honestly surprised to see how many people in this thread interpret “plotting” as inherently negative.
It’s both, but in journalism, you pick your words carefully. There’s no chance the writer of the headline wasn’t fully aware of both connotations. There are a dozen other words that could have meant the same thing without making it sound nefarious.
I think it’s like when people use “scheme”. In the US it has heavy tones of nefarious intent, but it’s still used a lot because some people just don’t think of it that way. (Be it from UK influence or whatever.)
I am guessing it is due to politics inherently being a skulduggery kind of thing, especially with mainstream media being in the pocket of the wealthy. If our news outlets had a reputation of being fair and truthful, their wording wouldn’t be treated with suspicion.
As an American, I have to turn many statements like a rotisserie and think whether they make sense. They cannot be trusted if left raw.
I think “plotting” doesn’t see a ton of use in that more neutral sense outside of a few idiomatic cases like “plotting a course”. I definitely did not naturally associate a presidential run with that navigational sense of “plotting”, but instead the “plotting an evil scheme” connotation jumped out. I’d think of planning a presidential run to be more similar in activity to plotting a scheme, another literal plan of actions to achieve a goal, than to plotting a course as a figurative map of those actions. That’s why I interpreted pretty sharply that way, at least.
Since the article is about her considering multiple options - Senate or President - that she’ll have to narrow down to a single path, the navigation implication seems relevant.