Read: How COVID-19 has already changed campaigns

“We have millions of people sitting in their homes, some working, some not, some aching to do something,” says Paco Fabian, the director of campaigns for Our Revolution, the political-action organization born out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The group is mobilizing homebound people to make phone calls and do social-media outreach for candidates and causes. The Sunrise Movement has launched an online class to educate young people about the connection between the coronavirus and climate change. “We’re in a moment of crisis, but we’ve got a plan to heal: the Green New Deal,” the class description reads.

Morrison’s organization is focused now on helping Americans navigate the health-care and unemployment-insurance systems in this fraught moment, but it says it’s simultaneously trying to build a worker-led movement. “This has got to be a call to arms for changing the fundamental posture that working people take as it relates to this economy,” Morrison told me. “What we are prioritizing is shifting that power imbalance so working people who are saving all of our asses are the ones who are put in the driver’s seat of this economy going forward.”

Sanders, who still hasn’t dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination, has effectively converted his presidential campaign into a coronavirus-messaging apparatus, and he is holding regular broadcasts with other progressive lawmakers, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, to explain how the current crisis demonstrates the need for Medicare for All. “As we do everything possible to grapple with this crisis … it is also appropriate to ask ourselves how we got here and what this says about the financial and economic structure of our country,” Sanders said in a live-streamed video Wednesday night. “People are understanding that there is something wrong that we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all as a human right.”

For its part, the Democratic Socialists of America says it has seen a spike in membership since Super Tuesday, some of which the group attributes to the pandemic. “We saw one of the largest ever number of attendees for an online DSA call last week on the topic of COVID-19 organizing,” a DSA spokesperson told me via email.

Progressives will be carefully monitoring shifts in Biden’s policy positions to see whether their efforts are having an impact. Already, Biden has announced his support for Sanders’s plan to make public colleges free for some students, and he’s endorsed Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to fix America’s bankruptcy system. But it’s not enough, progressive leaders say. If he “is serious about attracting progressives and the Obama coalition—which included young people—he needs to articulate a bold policy agenda that meets the scale of the crisis people are experiencing right now,” Maurice Mitchell, the director of the Working Families Party, told me.