Ready for AOC

Ready for AOC is a volunteer draft campaign asking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for President in 2028. Its organizers want to bring her 1,000,000 signed pledges. She isn’t part of it. The site asks every visitor to sign.

I want AOC to run, so I was thrilled to help build the site that asks her to. I’m on the volunteer team doing frontend and design. Most people show up on a phone, from a canvasser’s QR code or a friend’s link, so we designed at phone width first. It works in English and Spanish, and the animations turn off if your phone asks for reduced motion.

The campaign brought its brand kit, and I iterated on it. My favorite part is the hero. “READY FOR” draws in by hand, “AOC!” lands with a gold glow, and the line above it rotates through “Michigan is”, “Abuelas are”, “Transit riders are” and more (the states we most need come up most often).

The gold specks drifting from the crowd into AOC reflect the Spirit Bomb, a finisher move in Dragon Ball Z where everyone raises their hands to give a little bit of their energy to Goku. That’s pretty much what a draft campaign is.

It went live November 9, and The New York Times and The Washington Post both covered the launch.