AOC foe off & running

Queens GOPer unveils attack ad in challenge bid

The 2022 campaign season has already kicked off for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Republican Desi Cuellar — a former bartender, like AOC — formed a campaign committee in June to challenge the Bronx/Queens Democrat and last week launched his first attack ad.

“AOC is running and propagating so many leftist policies and it has forced me to feel like I have to do something because I don’t see anyone else doing anything about it in my area,” Cuellar (inset), 34, told The Post.

Only months into the race, the candidate says he has already banked about $60,000 and held meetings with local GOP politicians, including Bronx Conservative Party leader Patrick McManus, who met with Cuellar on Friday.

“He seems like he would be a positive thing comparatively to our current congresswoman,” McManus said, adding that another meeting with Cuellar was likely.

Cuellar’s online ad touts his Cuban roots and workingclass credentials — a strategy that has worked for OcasioCortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent and the daughter of a Westchester architect.

“I am proof that opportunity exists for anyone in this country,” Cuellar says in the ad, “that America is worth fighting for, that our values and our constitutional rights set us apart from the rest of the world.

“But my opponent, AOC, is doing everything she can to undo what countless Americans have died to preserve.”

The nearly two-minute spot leans on Cuellar’s personal story as the son of immigrants who fled Fidel Castro’s communist regime and takes aim at AOC and her “goon squad” of Democratic Socialist allies.

“I’m here to tell AOC that the party is over,” he says in Spanish. Since moving to Queens in 2013, Cuellar said, he worked mostly in hospitality and when those jobs dried up in 2018, he spent five months homeless.

He bears scars from those days, including more than $1,200 in back taxes he owes the state — an issue he said he was “working on.”

“It was a very difficult time for me. It was very trying and uncomfortable and humiliating,” he said.

Cuellar enlisted in the New York Army National Guard in 2015 and left active service this year to launch his campaign.