Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that the Trump administration is "attacking women's ability to get an education," telling a Michigan town hall crowd, "They don't want women to go to college."
The New York Democrat made the remarks at an "It Shouldn't Be This Hard" town hall in Escanaba, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. She was criticizing an Education Department rule limiting student loan programs, which she said falls hardest on fields dominated by women.
"I want to be very clear that what the Trump administration is doing, specifically, is attacking women's ability to get an education," Ocasio-Cortez said.
She argued the rule makes it harder to get loans to become nurses, teachers and social workers — professions that employ large numbers of women and that she cast as the collateral damage of the policy.
Conservatives seized on the clip online, accusing her of misrepresenting the policy — and of turning a fight over the sustainability of the student loan system into an attack on women that the rule never makes.
The stop was part of a swing through Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a Republican stronghold, where the pair also held a town hall in Iron Mountain. NBC News reported that the trip is meant to show progressives can win over voters in red areas.
The timing is no accident. El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers on Nov. 3 in one of the races likely to decide control of the Senate, and the two were set to campaign in the Detroit area Friday. Every stop on this tour is really about that ballot.
And hanging over the whole trip is Ocasio-Cortez herself. She is weighing a 2028 presidential run, and every red-county town hall doubles as a test of whether her brand of politics can travel beyond the districts that already agree with her.
The exchange captures the student loan fight in miniature: one side sees a rule protecting the taxpayer from a system buckling under bad debt, the other sees an attack on opportunity for working women. The nurses, teachers and social workers Ocasio-Cortez invoked — and the Michigan voters watching — get the final word on Nov. 3.
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