Most coverage of Ilhan Omar, the thirty-five-year-old state legislator who won the Democratic primary in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District last night, has focussed on her identity. She was born in Somalia, and she came to the United States when she was twelve, knowing only two phrases of English: “hello” and “shut up.” Now her primary victory makes her likely to become the first Somali-American and one of the first two Muslim women (along with Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib) in Congress. But stories about these “firsts” tend to miss Omar’s certainty about who she is, and the rightness of her desire to “expand what is politically possible,” including cancelling student debt, banning private prisons, increasing the number of refugees admitted to the U.S., and cutting funding for “perpetual war and military aggression.” She supports passing a national bill of rights for renters, the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act, and automatically registering every eighteen-year-old to vote. These are the stances Omar is referring to when she speaks, as she does often, about “a politics of moral clarity and courage.”

On Tuesday night, the city of Minneapolis broke a record for turnout in a midterm primary. Omar beat her closest Democratic rival by more than twenty thousand votes, out of 135,318 votes cast for Democrats in the Fifth District, which includes Minneapolis and its inner-ring suburbs. (Compare that to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory last month, in New York’s Fourteenth District: she won by four thousand votes, out of only twenty-eight thousand cast.) Around 9:30 P.M., shortly after the race was called, Omar ascended a podium at a Somali restaurant called Safari to the power anthem “Wavin’ Flag,” by the Somali-Canadian pop singer K’naan. She paused to acknowledge a chorus of ululations before addressing the room.

“We did it, we won—oh, my God,” she said. Omar, who is small and thin, has a tiny silver stud in her nose. Surrounded by student campaign workers, Somali-American constituents, close friends, and her three kids, who were dressed casually for the occasion, she was smiling jubilantly, but didn’t give the impression that her success was entirely unexpected. There were no power suits, stilted thumbs-up, or stiff waves. Omar speaks English with a slight Somali inflection, which comes out when she gets more animated. She told the crowd, “I’ve always said you get what you organize for.”

Minnesota takes pride in its lineage of liberal politicians. I grew up in the Fifth District, in the eighties and nineties, going to Twins games at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, named for a senator and Vice-President remembered for his advocacy of civil rights. In 2002, both of the state’s senators, Mark Dayton and Paul Wellstone, were among the minority who voted against the Iraq War. Wellstone’s death, in a plane crash, two weeks later, was a loss from which the state has never fully recovered. But Democratic politics in Minnesota is also a story of failed national ambitions, from Eugene McCarthy’s five unsuccessful bids for the Presidency to Humphrey’s nadir, at the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, and Walter Mondale’s catastrophic loss to Ronald Reagan, in 1984. The revelations of sexual harassment that resulted in Al Franken’s resignation from the Senate, and the allegations of domestic abuse that now threaten the career of the congressman Keith Ellison, are only the latest disappointments. (Ellison has denied the claims, and local Democrats seem inclined to withhold judgment.) If he leaves a void at the vanguard of Minnesota progressivism, it may well be filled by Omar.

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

Ellison, formerly a state legislator, won the Fifth District seat in 2006, becoming the first Muslim elected to Congress. Playing up his support for single-payer health care and his opposition to the Iraq War, and hiring local community organizers to run his campaign, he pioneered the strategy of pursuing groups of voters with historically low turnout rates. The Fifth District reëlected Ellison five times, and he grew to national prominence as both one of the most progressive members of Congress and an early supporter of Bernie Sanders’s Presidential run. Last year, Ellison ran to chair the Democratic National Committee, on the strength of Minnesota’s voter-turnout rate, which was the highest of any state in the 2016 election. His loss, in February, was seen as a snub of his turnout strategy, and of the Party’s progressive wing, in favor of the traditional focus on targeting centrist swing voters and the Obama-Clinton establishment.

It may also have caused Ellison to see Washington as a dead end. In June, after the incumbent attorney general in Minnesota decided to run for governor, Ellison made a last-minute decision to pursue the attorney-general office (he won his primary last night). His decision set off an intense ten-week campaign to replace him, and Omar was one of three leading candidates, all of whom would make a typical Women’s Marcher proud. Margaret Anderson Kelliher, who is fifty years old, grew up on a family farm in rural Minnesota and was the state’s second female Speaker of the House. Patricia Torres Ray, who is fifty-four, was born in Colombia, and was the first Latina elected to the Minnesota senate. All three campaigned on single-payer health care, gun control, abolishing ICE, and ending the student-debt crisis. But, in the several days I spent in Minneapolis, Omar had the most campaign events, and the most energized base of paid and volunteer canvassers. She was also the only candidate I saw who had constituents attending her events just to tell her that they loved her.

I first saw Omar speak last Saturday morning, in Linden Hills, an upper-middle-class, overwhelmingly white neighborhood in south Minneapolis, which has one of the highest voter-turnout rates in the district. In a normal primary, where turnout is as low as twenty per cent, getting the vote of Linden Hills would be vital. Though part of Omar’s strategy was to insure that this would not be a normal primary, the neighborhood still mattered.

At ten-thirty in the morning, Omar met Linden Hills voters at Penny’s Coffee, a standard-issue Minneapolis café with high ceilings, blond-wood furniture, concrete floors, and natural light. Arriving from a previous event, Omar found a place that a staffer had set for her. There was a large coffee waiting for her, plus a handful of sugar packets; Omar emptied four or five of them into her cup. She wore an outfit of sky blue and white: a denim jacket over a floral blouse, paired with a dust-blue hijab embellished with pearl beads. Even casually dressed, she cut a distinctly cosmopolitan figure in the room, where most people were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, as if they were fitting in their civic duty between walking the dog to Lake Harriet and buying local produce at the Linden Hills Co-op.

The twenty or so people in attendance were a mix of couples, young parents, and retirees. Most of them were white; many of them reminded me of the mellow, gray-haired people I met when my dad went through a phase of attending Quaker meetings. When Omar hosts such gatherings, she begins by asking everyone to introduce themselves and share where they live, their profession, and any issues that particularly concern them. There were many teachers, a couple of college students, a child psychologist, and retirees. The group applauded for two new citizens, a French earth-sciences professor at the University of Minnesota and a pregnant Nepali engineer. Their concerns, which they expressed with urgency, ranged from education to social justice to climate change. “There’s a lot of things going on, and thank you for all that you’re doing,” a blond woman said. She was in attendance with her partner and their young son, and she added that her primary concern was health care. Tears sprang to her eyes. “We’re here to support you,” she said.