“Are
all of the apartments smoking weed?” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asks on a
fourth-floor hallway of Elmback Houses in Queens, where indeed the
smell of marijuana does seem to waft from one long end of the corridor
to the other.

Ocasio-Cortez
has come to this block of red-brick apartment complexes in the Elmhurst
section of Queens on a quixotic mission: She is running to dethrone
Congressman Joe Crowley, who has represented the district for two
decades, rising to the fourth spot in the House Democratic leadership,
all while serving as the head of the Queens County Democratic Party.

And
so Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Bronx-raised former Bernie Sanders
organizer, is searching for votes wherever she can find them, hoping to
bring millennials and first-time voters out to the polls tomorrow in a
race that if she were to win, would upend the entrenched New York
political establishment, never mind the country’s. At nearly every door —
she avoids the dope-stenched ones — voters seem surprised to see
Ocasio-Cortez, and quite pleased that she has made the trek.

“We
got you, we got you. I tell everyone here to vote for you,” one elderly
woman says, taking a stack of palm cards from Ocasio-Cortez’s hand.

“People ask me who to vote for, I say ‘Vote Alexandria,’” says another.

“I
see you in the street all the time,” says a third who came to the door
on this bright Friday afternoon in nothing but his T-shirt and
underwear.

This
recognition stems in part from the fact that the Elmback Houses are
down the street from the Ocasio-Cortez campaign headquarters, which is
bedecked out front with campaign posters featuring her face looking off
into the distance, and that a Ocasio-Cortez truck has been circling the
neighborhood all week blaring “Despacito.”

The 28-Year-Old Progressive Hoping to Unseat One of the Top House Democrats