Summer Lee, a candidate for state representative in southwestern Pennsylvania, runs her campaign out of Milton’s Top Notch Hair Salon, in downtown Braddock. On a recent Saturday morning, three dozen volunteers, most of them bearded, white millennials, were eating bagels and studying canvassing packets, preparing to go door-to-door to convince residents to vote for Lee. Among them was Arielle Cohen, who was wearing a T-shirt that read “A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution,” and Adam Shuck—“like corn or oysters”—who co-chair the Democratic Socialists of America in Pittsburgh, which endorsed Lee at the end of last year. If she wins, Lee will be the first African-American woman elected to the state legislature from southwestern Pennsylvania. But this race is also notable for the way that it pits Lee, who is thirty years old, against Paul Costa, a popular state representative who has been in office for nineteen years and is a member of a Democratic dynasty around Pittsburgh. (One of his brothers, Jay, is a state senator; another, Guy, is a city official; and his cousin, Dom, is a state representative.)

Here in this tiny race is the larger, existential battle over the future of the Democratic Party that is taking place across the country. Will it be centrist, establishment candidates who lead the much-anticipated “blue wave,” or will progressive insurgents sweep them aside? In Texas, Tennessee, California, and Hawaii, a Democratic electorate is pushing back against the Democratic machine’s support of the old guard. Many, like Lee, see the Democratic Party’s faith in centrists, like Costa, as having already failed; the increasingly radical right means that there’s no meaningful middle in which to meet.

The D.S.A., which calls itself not a political party but a nonprofit organization, has been backing candidates that it perceives to be a challenge to the Democratic establishment, and has been rapidly gaining members nationwide. The Pittsburgh D.S.A. chapter began with seven members in November, 2017, and now boasts five hundred and ten. In Pittsburgh, the D.S.A. has supported three candidates who are running against a member of the Costa family. (Sara Innamorato, who lost her father to opioid addiction, is running against Dom Costa in the Twenty-first District.) Lee, like other activists, is fashioning her platform after Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, in which he called for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” (The 1968 movement is undergoing a resurgence, led in part by the efforts of the Reverend Dr. William Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, who, as Jelani Cobb writes, are calling for federal and state living-wage laws, equity in education, an end to mass incarceration, a single-payer health-care system, and protection of the right to vote.)

Among the volunteers on Saturday were Alexis Davis, Lee’s seventeen-year-old cousin, who was leading “power parties” by the hair dryers to teach fellow-students to identify structural racism at their high schools. Students from Woodland Hills, Lee’s former high school, had also come to help, inspired by a talk that Lee had given there in which she expressed frustration that it had taken the school shooting in Parkland for the country to pay attention to gun violence. Already this year, at least five students at Woodland Hills High School have been shot and three have been killed. If caring about that made them socialists, they said, then they were socialists.

“It’s been a slur, an attack word, but for those of us who are younger it’s hollow,” Shuck said. “We can fill it with whatever we want.” For some, like Paul Costa, the D.S.A. is radical and naïve—the left’s answer to the Tea Party. Few of the members, he said, understood how laws in the state capital required consensus. But, for the dozen or so D.S.A. members I talked to at the salon, including Lee, “consensus” was just another way to keep everyone but the élite stuck at the margins.

Lee lives with her mother, about a mile from her campaign headquarters. “I’m a millennial’s millennial,” she joked on a recent chilly afternoon, shoving a pair of high heels and a basketball into the trunk of her battered Elantra to make space for a passenger. She was raised in North Braddock, which sits on a hill above one of the few working steel mills that remain in the area. Between 1950 and 2000, Braddock, a river town along the Monongahela, lost ninety per cent of its population, and North Braddock, once the tonier part of town, is now full of homes marked with red signs bearing white Xs. In 2010, when Lee was surveying for the national census, she discovered that the house she had grown up in had been torn down. Her high school, Woodland Hills, having been forcibly desegregated in the nineteen-eighties, was divided equally between white and black students when Lee attended. But she was often the only black student in her advanced classes.

The artist Latoya Ruby Frazier, who is six years older than Lee, also grew up in Braddock. In 2012, she launched a critique of Levi’s “Go Forth” campaign, which contained images of long-haired waifs in hard hats leading horses around the deserted town. “Go forth where and who gets to go forth?” Frazier asked at the time. As the artist pointed out, people, including her mother, still lived there. Lee recalls feeling relief that someone else was seeing the Levi’s ad as “a Rust Belt whitewash.” “Here was black woman from Braddock speaking truth to power,” she said.

Like many D.S.A. members, Lee initially supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election, but, after graduating from Howard Law School, she moved home to organize for Hillary Clinton. Then, last spring, a scandal erupted at Woodland Hills High School after officials were caught on tape threatening and assaulting African-American students. Lee decided to use her organizing skills to target what she saw as the racism of the school board, which was almost entirely white. (The district has a population of sixty thousand people, a quarter of whom are African-American.) She got involved with running African-American candidates for open seats on the board. They won, and the principal and superintendent resigned. Soon after, she took up work as a paid organizer around progressive issues, including the fight for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage.

Lee’s success against the school board drew the attention of Daniel Moraff, a member of the D.S.A.’s steering committee. He approached Lee and asked if she’d be willing to run for office. When she said no, he asked her to think about it. Lee concluded that it was no longer enough for black women like her to vote. “We already do,” she said. In Alabama, the Democrat Doug Jones beat the Republican Roy Moore in a special Senate election in December; it was the first Democratic victory in the state in a quarter century and was largely attributed to the votes of black women. “We’re not going to wait for someone to stand up for us,” she said. “We need to run.”

Local Democrats, including Costa, have focussed on bringing businesses to Braddock, many of which train and employ locals. Among them, Costa told me, was a microbrewery opened by two students at Carnegie Mellon, and Superior Motors, which Food & Wine voted one of the best restaurants of 2018. But Lee sees such “revitalization” as a form of gentrification, a term she uses to describe “the forces of late capitalism” that lead to cycles of poverty and displacement. Last year, establishment Democrats energetically backed the initiative to pitch Pittsburgh as a home for Amazon’s new headquarters. Lee was disgusted. Pittsburgh’s roads and bridges were already in dismal condition: How would they handle thousands of new trucks? What kind of taxes would Amazon pay while driving up rents? “The tech boom has made city officials proud,” she said, but, for the city’s African-Americans, the benefits were scarce. In 2015, the median income of black households was $26,330, less than half of the white median income of $57,187. In one Pittsburgh neighborhood, a billboard protesting gentrification caused controversy before it was taken down. The billboard said, “There are black people in the future.”