Is Democrats' AOC moving from hard left to centre?

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Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been split with longtime fiancé Riley Roberts for two years, TMZ confirmed.

The news site said Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts had not been seen in public together in quite some time, adding that Puck News Washington correspondent Leigh Ann Caldwell reported the engagement was called off 18 months ago. The congresswoman's office neither confirmed nor denied their relationship status.

The news comes after Ocasio-Cortez, 36, released a series of online posts about freezing her eggs "to feel more in control of her life." The process, called oocyte preservation, is often used to extend a woman's childbearing years, experts say.

But that could be the latest step in what some say is her attempt to rehabilitate her image from a member of "the Squad" — an informal title for the far-left, insurgent wing of the Democrats famous for strident social media rhetoric and guerilla-style challenges against the party establishment. Ocasio-Cortez could be trying to reinvent herself as a more serious, pragmatic figure who could appeal to more moderate voters, as she weighs a potential bid for the presidency in 2028 or even a challenge against her party's leader in the U.S. Senate and fellow New Yorker, Chuck Schumer.

In an interview with ABC's This Week, Ocasio-Cortez distanced herself from some of the rhetoric of the Democrats far-left elements, specifically declining to endorse Francesca Hong, currently the frontrunner of the Democratic primary election for governor of Wisconsin.

Hong, a member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America wing of the Democrats, recently came under fire for past tweets that called for the abolition of police and borders, and suggesting that holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving should be cancelled because of their roots in European settler culture.

"I have a local city councilman that has this saying, 'Woke 1 was crazy," she said. She added some of the statements she made supporting defunding the police in 2020 wouldn't be something she'd say today, putting it down to the COVID pandemic.

"During lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today," she said.

American moderates and conservatives don't think much of Ocasio-Cortez's reinvention of herself, if indeed that's what she's trying to do, smelling a radical in moderate's clothing and going on social media to say so.

"Woke 1 was crazy" new cop out for insane positions held as recently as yesterday," conservative podcaster Ryan James Girdusky posted on X. He added, "Oh, she's running for president."

Journalist Matt Taibbi wrote on his Substack: "What she means is, 'We tried to shove it down your throats through the sheer power of our freakout before. This time, we're going to get elected first.' AOC has to refer to "Woke 1" because "Woke 2" is now ascendant, and its primary characteristic is its effort to remarket itself as a viable electoral movement, less insane than that initial run from a screeching mob of torch-bearing half-literate buffoons who tried to burn the American project to the ground."