Late Tuesday, in a small hotel on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, Zephyr Teachout stood in a dark stairwell. She had just learned that she had lost her bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. A clear majority of voters in New York’s nineteenth congressional district had chosen to send her Republican opponent, John Faso, a sixty-four-year-old lawyer and former state assemblyman, to Washington. Now she had to address her supporters, dozens of whom filled the bar and restaurant of the Rhinecliff Inn, wearing Teachout caps and buttons. But first, a moment of grief. I could see her in silhouette, standing alone with her head down and her hand on the railing. Perhaps she needed to compose herself. Or perhaps she wanted a few more seconds of silence before confirming out loud, to the people who had worked hard over the previous year to get her elected, that she had lost, and that the country had lost. Moments later, she was behind the lectern, facing the crowd. “It’s been a bad night for honest, respectful democracy,” she said slowly. “Across the country, and in this race, we did not have the results we wanted. But I am so proud of our campaign.”

Teachout, a forty-five-year-old Fordham law professor who has never held political office, was the upstart candidate. Her first campaign was in 2014, when she ran for governor, challenging Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary. She lost, but established her reputation as an anti-corruption crusader whose top priority was to reduce the influence of outside money on elections. Last year, she moved from Brooklyn to Dutchess County, joining a growing population of well-educated, liberal urban transplants. When Chris Gibson, the district’s three-term Republican congressman, announced his retirement, she decided to run for his seat. She continued to fight for campaign-finance reform, including the overturning of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that legalized unlimited contributions to independent, issues-oriented political organizations, or super PACs. In February, at the start of the race, Teachout asked Faso to join her in a pledge to keep super-PAC money out of the race. Faso declined, stating in a letter that the expenditures were equivalent to free speech. He subsequently criticized Professor Teachout—his preferred epithet—for not understanding the First Amendment. “I think James Madison’s handiwork was better than Zephyr Teachout’s,” he told me.

By November, both candidates had benefitted from their parties’ traditional PACs, which had raised more than two million dollars each. But the largest share of the money spent in the election, $6.7 million, came from four super PACs backing Faso, which bankrolled an onslaught of advertisements against Teachout. In August, Teachout called out two billionaires—the Wall Street financier Paul Singer and the hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who together contributed more than a million dollars to one pro-Faso super PAC—for skewing the election. Mercer, who lives on Long Island, has been a significant donor to the political organizations overseen by David and Charles Koch, and became one of Donald Trump’s most important backers after he won the G.O.P.’s Presidential nomination. Teachout blames her loss entirely on their influence. “This was a race inside the post-Citizens United world,” she said in her speech on Tuesday. “It wasn’t me against Faso. It was all of us against a handful of billionaires.” Ultimately, her campaign raised a million dollars more than Faso’s, mostly in small donations, but it wasn’t enough to counteract the super PACs.

Teachout’s obstacles were political as well as financial, however. The nineteenth district—a horseshoe of eleven rural counties around southern Albany that includes parts of the Catskills Mountains and the Hudson River Valley—is one of Congress’s rare swing districts. Turning it Democratic again after six years of G.O.P. control was never going to be easy, particular after its lines were redrawn, in 2012. “It’s a stinker of a district,” Elizabeth Spinzia, the Rhinebeck town supervisor, told me. “It’s an octopus. And it was very nicely gerrymandered.” While manufacturing once drove a healthy local economy in the area, those jobs are mostly gone, memorialized in abandoned factories like the grand, dystopian cement plant that still looms over East Kingston. Meanwhile, the predominantly white, working-class population has become increasingly disaffected. In this regard, the region, which Donald Trump won by ten per cent, parallels those around the country—especially in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—that helped bring about his national victory.

The Hudson Valley’s political loyalties can be fickle, and don’t necessarily follow traditional party lines. The electorate is split roughly equally between registered Democrats, registered Republicans, and those with no affiliation. In 2012, Barack Obama won the nineteenth district by six per cent. Earlier this year, during the primaries, Bernie Sanders quickly became its most popular politician, attracting both liberal and conservative support. Teachout seemed well-positioned to do the same. She backed Sanders’s primary push, and he, in turn, endorsed and raised money for her. Like Sanders, she framed her campaign as a grassroots, outsider-led challenge to big business. She opposed corporate monopolies and free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. She wanted protections for local manufacturing instead. “One in five people should be making or growing something here,” she told me. She opposed hydraulic fracturing as well as the construction of new natural-gas pipelines. (Teachout first got to know the region while pushing for a statewide fracking ban during her gubernatorial run.) In short, her appeal looked broad. One local official told me that she had seen placards for Teachout and Trump planted in the same lawn. In the months leading up to Election Day, the polls indicated that she and Faso were virtually tied.

But, as this entire election has shown, opinion polls failed to accurately reflect the views of the constituency. Faso won the district by nine per cent. To understand why, I joined a man named Kevin Rhoades on his small front porch in Kingston on Tuesday evening. He had voted for Faso and Trump. “Originally I supported Bernie,” he said, puffing on a cigar. “I liked a lot of his ideas. He seemed more real than Hillary, more”—he paused, considering the cigar’s embers—“grounded?” He hadn’t decided that he would vote for Trump until that morning at the polls. “Trump offered a change,” he said. Then Rhoades had split his ticket and voted for Senator Chuck Schumer. “Schumer’s done a lot of good things while in office,” he said. “He’s not a normal Democrat.” I asked whether he had considered voting for Teachout, especially since she had received Sanders’s endorsement. “I wouldn’t vote for her,” he said immediately. “The professor, right?” He smirked slightly. “I saw some TV ads about her. She wants to raise property taxes.” (Teachout had disputed that claim as false—her platform clearly stated that she wanted to lower property taxes—but the ad had its intended effect.)

Faso’s appeal to the Sanders-supporting yeoman, a guy like Rhoades, can seem unlikely. He is a career politician and lobbyist who has refused to say whether he voted for Trump. On Tuesday afternoon, Faso and his son, Nick, were in the town of Catskill, standing on a deserted Main Street. They looked like preppy out-of-towners, wearing button-downs and loafers. Faso was discussing his priorities in Congress: tax reform and regulatory relief. “The economy is growing way too slowly,” he said. “Growth is a”—he turned to look at his son—“what’s the phrase? Sine qua non?” Nick smiled. “Careful,” he said. “You have to make sure people understand you.” Faso went on, criticizing the “liberal carpetbagger” Teachout’s economic views, her ability even to comprehend the issues. “She never mentions the deficit or the national debt. She has a far-left, radical, ‘Grapes of Wrath’ view of the economy,” he said. He trotted out one of his favorite lines: “We need a teach-in for Teachout. She just doesn’t understand.”

At the Rhinecliff Inn, Teachout concluded her concession speech with a quote from F.D.R., who grew up in the area, and whom she called her hero. “In 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression, he took on the Wall Street financiers and bankers,” Teachout said. “He called them ‘Privileged princes . . . thirsting for power.’ ” She continued, quoting Roosevelt again: “The average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minuteman”—namely, “political tyranny.” The Minutemen had won their fight, she said, and Roosevelt had won his. What now? “Once in a generation, we are called upon to restore American democracy,” she said. “And you’ve seen what’s happened across the country tonight. It’s urgent and it’s going to take all of us. We may have lost this race, but we are not going away.” A woman in the crowd whispered, “Amen.”