Ocasio-Cortez outpaces Democrats running for president on social media

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., arrives before David Marcus, CEO of Facebook's Calibra digital wallet service, testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, July 17, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

NEW YORK -- Judging by the social media metrics, it was a big week for the campaign of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Oh, wait.

She's not running for president. But the Democratic representative from Queens dwarfed the Democrats who are actually seeking President Donald Trump's job in a measurement of social media interactions with news articles by the tracking firm NewsWhip. The statistics were first reported by Axios.

For the week that ended on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez, who is known as AOC, had attracted 4.8 million such interactions, NewsWhip said. By comparison, all of the Democrats running for president reached a combined 6.5 million. California Sen. Kamala Harris had 1.2 million to lead the way, with Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice-President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren getting around a million each.

Given how Trump's tweets about Ocasio-Cortez and three of her colleagues have dominated the news since they were first made Sunday, that picture doesn't appear likely to change much this week.

"They can't get a breath because all of the oxygen is gone," said Fox News Channel's Harris Faulkner on Wednesday.

That would be a bigger concern if it wasn't mid-July, squarely in the middle of vacation season and 16 months before the presidential election. But since it's generally considered a goal of Trump supporters to have the liberal Ocasio-Cortez be top of mind when people think of Democrats, that indicates they are having some success.

The next time for some concentrated attention for the Democratic candidates will come on July 30 and 31, when CNN will host the second presidential debate.