Donald Trump memorably compared the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón, the Argentinian first lady known as Evita. But a new book reveals that when the young Latino leftwinger burst on to the US political scene in 2018, one US labour leader made perhaps a more telling comparison – to Bruce Springsteen.

“I was floored,” Michael Podhorzer, then political director of the AFL-CIO, told the author Joshua Green. “The best comparison I can make is to the famous Jon Landau line: ‘I’ve seen rock’n’roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.’”

Landau is a journalist who became Springsteen’s manager and producer. He passed his famous judgment in May 1974, after seeing Springsteen play at the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then 25, Springsteen went on to sell records by the million and win Grammys by the sackful, becoming widely known as the Boss but maintaining his image as a blue-collar hero, true to his New Jersey roots.

In Democratic politics, Ocasio-Cortez – widely known as AOC – has built her own star power while maintaining working-class credentials.

In 2018, she was a 28-year-old bartender when she scored a historic upset primary win over Joe Crowley, then 56 and a member of Democratic US House leadership, in a New York City district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx.

In a campaign ad, Ocasio-Cortez depicted herself as an ordinary New Yorker, hustling to work on the subway.

She described Crowley, in contrast, as “a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air”.

Green, previously the author of Devil’s Bargain, on Trump’s rise to power, reports Podhorzer’s response in his new book, The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics.

A look at three stars of the modern Democratic left, the book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Podhorzer, Green says, is a union official “who spends his waking hours trying to get voters to care about working people”. Among working people who might appreciate his comparison of Ocasio-Cortez to Springsteen is none other than Crowley, now senior policy director for Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.

At a party event on election night in 2018, as he digested the sudden end of his 20-year congressional career, Crowley picked up a guitar and took the stage with a band.

“This is for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he said, launching a cover of Springsteen’s Born to Run.

In his epilogue, Green considers a common question: was Ocasio-Cortez born to run for president?

Noting how AOC, Warren and Sanders have pushed Democrats left, as evidenced by Joe Biden’s record in office, he writes that Ocasio-Cortez “still gets covered mainly through the lens of ‘the Squad’” – a group of mostly female representatives of color who have achieved prominence on Capitol Hill.

“But among the rising generation of Democratic staffers and strategists who will soon run the party, she’s come to be seen as a significant figure in her own right.”

Speaking anonymously, a Warren adviser adds: “You can see [AOC] pointing a path toward the future in a way that none of the other Squad members are doing. She’s the one really marking the future of the left in the post-Biden era.”