They have a “basement dweller” achievement if you hit two years.

Being on a food TV show and becoming slightly famous therefor allows you to increase your prices and still keep all the seats filled. The best burger place near me has increased to $10 from $5 over roughly the same time period, in keeping with the increase in beef prices over that time.

There was a poll showing that Trump won voters who don’t follow politics at all by 14 points. There seems to be a substantial proportion of the population who just picks who they vote for based on how well things have been going for them for the last 4 or 8 years.

With inflation, the pendulum swung towards Trump. After 4 years of tariffs, declining dollar value and Trump being unable to run again, I think that pendulum will swing fairly hard to the left. So conventional wisdom on not picking a candidate who will scare off centrists could be out the window. In which case, you might as well nominate AOC or someone similar.

Of course, president AOC won’t be able to accomplish all the things she wants to without a supportive congress and getting that to happen is a much bigger challenge than winning the presidency.