2028 presidency — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

FRESHENED 2026-10-03 (Eric-approved freshness rescore): the May register floor is RETRACTED as evidence. The two catastrophic reads that floored her (-9.71, -10.00) are caption artifacts, not register: both texts carry zero sentence-terminal punctuation (156 and 776 words), so the frozen matrix reads each caption track as a single sentence and the confidence index collapses mechanically; the videos are also out of window (a 58-second clip uploaded 2025-03-07 and a third-party Fox News package from 2019-04-18). A fresh 13-item corpus (2026-05-08 to 2026-10-01, 48,646 words across 6 months: own-channel rallies and remarks, Axelrod/Errol Louis/Psaki/ABC interviews, the 9/28 Students-vs-Billionaires town hall, 10/01 floor remarks) scores mean momentum +0.04 with zero reads at or below -5 and all four most recent items positive (+0.35/+0.37/+1.26/+1.80). The 9/27 'weakest register of the four tracked Democrats' language is retracted; on fresh evidence she is level with Ossoff (+0.07) and ahead of Buttigieg (-1.73) and Shapiro (-0.78) on the 9/27 field means. What stands: the SEM math (D-nomination 21.41% x ~25% progressive-lane ceiling = 5.35%) - the ceiling is structural lane math (roughly a quarter of the vote in modern Dem primaries; without consolidating moderate Democrats she cannot win the nomination), not a register finding. NOT TIQ-scored; INSUFFICIENT_POLLING (2028 primary polls do not consistently include her). Path-choice bimodality stands: a Senate run vs a presidential run is bimodal, and this number prices the presidential path only. The 4% was 5.35% damped against the 2% baseline on the strength of the floored register; with the floor retracted, the damping goes with it: ehiq_prob 0.04 -> 0.0535. The market move is still read as celebrity-lane heat, not a real candidacy. EHIQ 5.35% vs Polymarket 13.15%, -7.8pp.