Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a political lightning rod since the moment she was a 29-year-old bartender who defeated a long time Democratic incumbent in her 2018 primary.

The new congresswoman has been under both a degree of scrutiny and attack that seems a bit out of place for a lawmaker whose elected career still can be measured in weeks.

This is not to say the New York Democrat hasn’t been busy, co-sponsors a highly ambitious plan to tackle climate change known as the “Green New Deal.”

Aside from her politics, Republicans have carped on Ocasio-Cortez for everything from her clothing, to a video of her dancing in college as if that were to prove anything.

These efforts, however, to turn people against this pol now known as “AOC,” don’t seem to have been entirely effective.

She scored very high with participants in a Democratic focus group conducted by CNN.

Asked to comment on her, one participant called her a “bad ass,” while another remarked, “What a woman.”

The participant who described the congresswoman as a “bad ass” elaborated, “I mean, she’s asking the right questions. She — I don’t feel like she’s playing games. I’m so excited about her. She is smart, she is intelligent, and I cannot wait to see what else she does.”

A second participant commented, “She’s got the Democratic Party nervous in a way they should be nervous, because she does represent the new — the new guard, the new generation. I think she really kind of personifies where we expected things to go down the line.”

And yet a third participant referred to Ocasio-Cortez as “the candidate of the future.”

“She’s got this down pat and she has also nailed it,” this third participant said. “And as a woman in a male-dominated field. Women in male dominated fields, we have to work like this all the time.”

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez also drew support elsewhere, from a much more surprising source over on Fox News, that being long-time TV host and Fox personality Geraldo Rivera.

“You know, I may be the only person in the country who supports both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Rivera said during a recent segment. “In her case, the reason I generally am supportive of her is that she has been a tremendous inspiration to young people. She has gotten this whiny millennial generation off the couches in their mothers’ basements and instilled in them the possibility that they maybe could even be more successful than their parents. I think it’s been a ‘woe is me’ kind of generation.”