The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez answered a question about potentially running for higher office in 2028 by declaring: “My ambition is to change the country.”

The Democrat delivered that remark at a political forum in Chicago on Friday amid widespread belief that she is positioning herself to run for the White House in 2028 or challenge her party’s leader in the US Senate, fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer.

Democratic strategist David Axelrod directly asked Ocasio-Cortez whether she planned to run for either while he hosted a conversation at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

“What’s funny is they assume my ambition is a title or a seat,” the Bronx US House representative replied. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go.

“But single-payer healthcare is forever,” she added, in reference to the kind of national healthcare platform she has long supported over the private system entrenched in the US.

Ocasio-Cortez then ran through a litany of her other signature policy positions, saying: “A living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that, and so anyways … to a finer point to your question is that when you aren’t attached, when you haven’t been like fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating.”

Later in the exchange, Ocasio-Cortez said she wanted to “make decisions from a place of how are we going to change the country”.

Ocasio-Cortez’s evocative response to Axelrod – once an adviser to the former Democratic president Barack Obama – comes amid early jockeying among her party for its 2028 presidential nomination. That is bound to kick into a higher gear after the midterm elections in November determine the lay of the political land for the rest of Donald Trump’s second presidency.

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll taken in April showed support among Democratic voters for former vice-president Kamala Harris at 24%; California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, at 12%; and ex-transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez each at 9%.

Ocasio-Cortez said that instead of aiming for higher office, “I get to wake up every day and say, ‘How am I going to meet the moment?’

“And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some positional title or position and working backwards from there.”

She added: “I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country. And saying what move or what decision can I make today that is going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, better than yesterday.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks come days after she appeared on a podcast with comedian Ilana Glazer. In that exchange, the progressive congresswoman spoke of entrenched economic, racial and social inequalities.

“When you have these systems, when you have corporations, when you have an economic elite … there’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right?” Ocasio-Cortez remarked.

She added that under the US system, “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”