Kopser, though, is standing his ground. In an April statement, he said the lawsuit is “dead wrong” and vowed to “fight within” the business community to support the paid sick leave law.

“I wouldn’t be able to stand with them, as a member of their board, at this point,” she told The Intercept.

Critics of the lawsuit, including Wilson, see it as an attempt to hold Austin back from making progress on workers’ rights. She immediately called on Kopser to resign from the board, which he’s served on for the last three years.

On May 22, businessperson Joseph Kopser will face off against pastor and former math teacher Mary Wilson in a runoff election. Kopser happens to serve on the board of the Texas Association of Businesses, a powerful business lobby that is a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

In late April, a conservative Texas think tank sued the city of Austin to block a new ordinance that, starting October 1, would give employees the right to take eight paid sick days per year – a first for the state. That lawsuit, filed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, sparked a dispute in an unusual space: the runoff in the Democratic primary in Texas’s 21st Congressional District.

Wilson, meanwhile, is supported by a number of national and local progressive organizations, including Justice Democrats, Our Revolution Central Texas, and the Stonewall Democrats of Austin. The Austin Chronicle issued no endorsement in the runoff between the two candidates, with its editorial board split on the issue.

For Wilson and her supporters, Kopser’s insistence on maintaining his ties to the business lobby while it sues to force sick workers to show up or lose their jobs is just another example of why the Democratic Party is betting on the wrong horse in this race. National Democrats have coalesced around Kopser and have largely ignored Wilson, a favorite among progressives, who outperformed Kopser in the first round of voting, despite having significantly less resources than he did. (Derrick Crowe, the most left-wing candidate in the race, was eliminated in the first round and immediately endorsed Wilson.)

In Kopser’s telling, there is little difference between the candidates on the big issues. “I think in terms of policies, when people look at our websites, you’re going to find out that our policies are very aligned,” he told The Intercept.

But a look at the two candidates’ issues pages elides some significant differences. On health care, Wilson favors a single-payer health care system, under which the government would provide insurance, while Kopser prefers a public option and Medicaid buy-in, where Americans could voluntarily buy into a public insurance program with their own money, rather than automatically being covered by one. (That distinction is also a symbol of how the health care debate has moved. In 2009, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, the public option was the rallying cry of progressive activists; now progressives prefer a single-payer system and establishment Democrats prefer a public option.)

When it comes to college education, Wilson has endorsed the House tuition-free college bill, which would make four-year public colleges and universities free for families earning up to $125,000 annually. Kopser, on the other hand, supports a more modest approach that would give tuition-free college to students whose families make less than the median income in their state and offer partial subsidies to other students.

The national Democratic support for Kopser, who has expressed his admiration for Ronald Reagan, could be explained by the fact that the district leans heavily Republican. In 2016, GOP Rep. Lamar Smith easily carried the district with 57 percent of the vote; his retirement as a longtime incumbent may weaken the party’s chances in the district, but few would describe it as anything other than conservative. Cook Political Report ranks the district as “likely Republican.”

But Wilson proved to be a formidable opponent in the first round of voting in March. Of five candidates, she led the field with 30.93 percent of the vote, to Kopser’s 28.98 percent. She did this despite having only a fraction of Kopser’s resources. Wilson spent around $39,000 to Kopser’s more than $600,000 prior to the first round of voting. That means she spent nearly two and a half bucks for every vote she earned, while Kopser spent over $40 per vote. The surprising strength of Wilson’s campaign may show that the district is becoming more progressive.

Shannon Proctor, an Indivisible activist in the district, described herself as a “Derrick fan girl” to The Intercept, referring to Crowe, the now-defeated candidate. After Wilson’s surprising performance in round one, she quickly aligned herself with the candidate. “I was guilty of having said that Mary didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell because I honestly didn’t think Texas District 21 was ready for a woman or a gay minister,” she admitted. But Wilson’s first-place finish changed Proctor’s mind, and she now believes Wilson is the strongest candidate in the race.

In an interview with The Intercept, Wilson sought to cast the race as the difference between a grassroots candidate and someone supported by Washington, D.C.-based organizations with substantial resources. She pointed to heavy-handed interventions by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in other Texas districts. The DCCC has not formally gotten involved in the 21st District yet, but did call Wilson to learn about her campaign after her surprising performance in the first round of voting on March 6. Wilson has not heard from the committee since, she said.

“I am more concerned, however, with the DCCC handpicking our candidates. The DCCC has completely misread the mood of the electorate. They continue to recruit and push candidates who do not represent voters’ needs or interests,” she said. “That’s why I came in first place in our primary after being outspent 20 to 1 by my opponent. Voters want to support candidates who will give a voice to working-class people, not multimillionaires. This year, voters are standing up and saying ‘our elections can’t be bought.'”

Like many other first-time Democratic candidates, Wilson was inspired to run for office after Donald Trump’s election to the White House, but her politics are more populist than anti-Trump. She has a track record as a social activist who has used her background as a lesbian member of the clergy to push back against the religious right. In 2005, she testified against Texas’s proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. More recently, she has been involved in activism in support of Planned Parenthood and against so-called bathroom bills that would require people to use public restrooms that correspond with the gender listed on their birth certificate.

In early April, Kopser’s campaign dealt with complaints after it field-tested messaging that referred to Wilson’s sexuality. The San Antonio Express-News summarized the poll as so:

Poll respondents were presented with a glittering narrative about Kopser. They were asked if they agreed that it would be important for Democrats to have a candidate who is a 20-year military veteran and has been described by former President Barack Obama as a champion of change. When it came to Wilson, the poll profiled her as a lesbian minister and asked if Democrats should vote for her in the runoff whether they think she can win in November.

Kopser’s campaign told the paper that it was not seeking to make the poll an attack on Wilson’s campaign. “We have great respect for Mary and wanted to understand the extent to which the electorate finds her profile and message compelling,” the campaign said in a statement.

Prior to the first round of voting, Kopser ran a primary campaign strongly branded around the Democratic Party and progressivism, using mailers and digital ads to tout an award he received from the Obama White House for his private sector work in green energy.