In the first 48 hours after Democratic congressman Denny Heck announced his retirement, his then-sole opponent Joshua Collins, a 26-year-old truck driver, raked in $26,000 in campaign donations for the Washington state primary race. Collins owes a lot of that surge to his large social media presence: More than 61,000 people follow his campaign on Twitter and another 27,000 follow the video-sharing platform TikTok, on which Collins alternates between criticizing Trump's foreign policy and posting lighter stuff like calling for Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to name Danny DeVito as his running mate.

In December of last year, the 67-year-old Heck made the surprising announcement that he was retiring rather than seeking reelection in 2020. While Congress has seen a wave of Republican representatives choosing not to run for reelection this year, Heck is a Democrat in a solidly blue district, which included the state capital Olympia, and a member of the Intelligence Committee, which ran impeachment inquiry hearings. The reason Heck gave for leaving was, as he wrote, "simply too many hyperbolic adjectives and too few nouns. Civility is out. Compromise is out. All or nothing is in."

Heck and Collins are a sharp contrast. The retiring congressman is a staunchly centrist Democrat who did not support programs like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. Collins, on the other hand, is a professional truck driver running on an openly socialist platform calling to nationalize pharmaceutical production and abolish the CIA ("Our military can gather intelligence. The Central Intelligence Agency is an unaccountable institution with a long history of uninterrupted brutality that often undermines U.S. and U.N. security interests.").

Collins's victory is hardly assured though. With Heck out of the way, other candidates have jumped in, making the primary election a seven-way race with more orthodox opponents like state representative Kristine Reeves and former Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland. And despite being in a solidly blue district, winning the primary wouldn't be the end of the line: Washington has what's known as a "jungle primary," where the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election.

If he can pull off a win, Collins would be the youngest member of Congress, just barely over the age limit of 25 years. And he would be the first representative from Generation Z, the politically active and younger-than-millennials age group that is leading large-scale climate strikes and gun-control demonstrations. But less than 40,000 of his district's 400,000 registered voters are under 25. (Heck won 166,000 votes compared to his opponent's 103,000 in 2018.) Collins is going to need a lot more than just the TikTok cohort to win. Collins spoke to GQ about why he got into the race, and how he hopes to translate online organizing into a real-world victory in 2020.

GQ: When did you first get interested in politics?

Joshua Collins: I lived in Kansas when I was a child, in Missouri for a while, Las Vegas in high school, California for a very short time, and then Washington during the 2016 election. I grew up poor. My mom became a nurse in her 30s. She never finished middle school but she got her GED later and went to nursing school. My dad's not a part of the picture. She has six kids and three step kids, so we're a big family. In high school, I was an activist—I helped organize 1,100 students to occupy the Nevada state legislature. We were attempting to prevent them from funneling education funds to private prisons. And I learned then that some politicians can’t be pushed on some things. They'll just give you nice words and then go with their donors anyway.