Photo illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Getty Images

Editor’s Note: This was written in early 2019 as the epilogue to the book , “ We’ve Got People .” In 2020, it stands up distressingly well. It’s been lightly edited for tightening. The insurgent wave that crested in the Bronx in June 2018, lifting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to victory, had begun with a rock thrown into the water in 1983 Chicago, with the election of Harold Washington. It would be only fitting that the same wave crashed back down in Chicago, in 2019, washing Mayor Rahm Emanuel out to sea. One of Harold Washington’s lieutenants, Chuy Garcia, had challenged Emanuel in 2015, and gave the mayor a scare from his left. It would later emerge that Emanuel’s team had suppressed horrifying video of the cold-blooded police killing of Laquan McDonald. He had buried it long enough to win reelection (Emanuel was first elected in 2011, after stepping down as Obama’s chief of staff). In 2016, the Cook County prosecutor who facilitated the cover-up was ousted by Kim Foxx, running on an aggressive reform agenda.

It can be painful to think what could have been if Democratic leadership made different choices decades ago.

In 2018, insurgents took on the beating heart of Chicago politics: county tax assessor. The position may sound mundane, but it produced the lubricant that greased the machine. An insurgent candidate ran for the office in charge of assessing and collecting property taxes in Chicago, and won a startling upset, which came along with other leftist pickups on the city council. Five members of the Democratic Socialists of America won city council races, producing enough socialists on the city’s legislative body to form an actual caucus. United Working Families, a sister to the Working Families Party that started in New York, backed an additional three successful leftist council candidates. Emanuel declined to run for a third term. Luis Gutiérrez retired from Congress, and Garcia, who had given Harold Washington’s elegy, won the race to replace him. Emma Tai, executive director of United Working Families, celebrated the progressive sweep of the city. “Tonight, voters rejected Rahm Emanuel’s legacy,” she declared. “Chicago belongs to the people.” The people, however, have yet to claim control of the country as a whole, or even of the Democratic Party. It can be painful to think what could have been had Democratic leadership made different choices decades ago. What if Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition had won that primary in Wisconsin and managed to clinch the nomination? Even if he had lost the general — as Michael Dukakis did anyway — it would have shown future candidates that people power provides a genuine path to the nomination. “There would have been no room for Trump if we had democratized our economy,” Jackson told me. Instead, the notion of exciting the base and expanding the electorate was suppressed until it reemerged around Howard Dean in 2003 and 2004, then around Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. (“We changed the rules in ’88 which made [it] possible for Barack to win. Under the ’84 rules, Hillary would have been the winner, because we went to proportionality rather than winner take all,” Jackson reminded me.) And finally, in a dramatic expression, behind Bernie Sanders in 2016. The eventual recognition that power for Democrats lies in people, not big money, transformed the 2020 cycle. No longer do candidates boast about locking down the most high-dollar bundlers; the competition in fundraising is now who can raise the most money with the lowest average contribution.

Yet the party establishment can’t be expected to simply hand over power. In 2019, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that it would blacklist any consulting firm who did any work for a challenger to an incumbent. Nancy Pelosi has reserved some of her most forceful language for the squad of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. Omar and Tlaib — and Omar in particular — have faced withering attacks from their Democratic colleagues; Ocasio-Cortez has been called by a colleague “Nixonian,” and much worse in private, where party honchos plot ways to bring her down. That’s all before the president and a billion-dollar right-wing spin machine have had their say. The final obstacle comes down to the people themselves. Democratic primary voters fancy themselves pundits. Jackson surged in the polls until he came close to winning. To be sure, some voters turned on him simply because they didn’t want a black man in the Oval Office. Many others, though, believed that other people would be unwilling to elect a black man president, which meant he wasn’t electable, which meant he needed to be stopped. Bill Clinton emerged from a deeply competitive primary and persuaded Democrats that he and his Southern charm could put an end to 12 years of Republican rule. In 2004, Democrats preferred Howard Dean, but believed the military man, John Kerry, would be the smart pick to take on Bush in wartime. Like most strategic calculations made by Democratic primary voters, it was harebrained. The one risk primary voters took was going with their hearts and nominating Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton, perceived by the Democratic electorate to be electable, was everything but. Headed into 2020, Sanders has a robust movement behind him, and Republicans I talk to in Washington believe he’s one of the few Democrats who could give Trump fits in the key states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. His organizing operation would be able to register and turn out far more black voters in crucial cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit, while he can also appeal to aggrieved working-class voters of all races who want someone to, well, drain the swamp. But the pundit-voter who thinks of Joe Biden knows one thing for sure: That man is electable.

The folksy Scranton man has managed to convince liberals that he’s the guy who can talk to those white, working-class voters Democrats have been chasing since they took flight from the party half a century ago.