Until quite recently, the most visible embodiment of left-wing electoral activism was the terminally flaky Green Party. It made a showing on Tuesday when Joe Manchik, who claims to be descended from space aliens, won 1,129 votes in the special election in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District. Democrat Danny O’Connor trails the Republican by 1,564 votes in that race, with almost 3,500 provisional ballots still to be counted.

We can argue endlessly over whether an appreciable number of Manchik’s voters would have gone Democrat if there hadn’t been a Green Party alternative. But I have yet to see any evidence that the Green Party’s habit of running doomed third-party campaigns has ever done anything to further its ostensible values.

Greens will sometimes justify these runs as movement-building tools, but they never seem to actually build a movement. “They don’t know how to multiply themselves,” Ralph Nader once told me, explaining the dissipation of the party after his 2000 presidential run. “It’s a peculiar characteristic: Green Party people, they don’t like to raise money, they allow themselves to live in neighborhoods and communities where they become minorities of one.”

The new generation of left-wing activists, by contrast, is good at self-multiplication. The Democratic Socialists of America alone has done more to build left political power since the 2016 election than the Green Party did in the 18 years after Nader helped elect George W. Bush.

Just as the Christian Right did in the 1990s, the new electoral left — which also includes groups like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party — is trying to take over the Democratic Party from the ground up. These activists have, significantly, focused on races for prosecutor, which is a way to create immediate local criminal justice reform. (In Philadelphia, left-wing organizers last year helped elect civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner as district attorney. Among his reforms is the end of cash bail for many misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.)