A race that was considered a bellwether of the Democratic Party’s future, the contest between U.S. Rep. Daniel Lipinski and Marie Newman for the Democratic nomination to represent Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District, went, fittingly, late into the night without a clear winner. Finally, with 96 percent of the precincts counted by early Wednesday, The Associated Press called the race for Lipinski, who had a lead of about 1,600 votes out of the roughly 90,000 that were cast. On Tuesday morning, Politico summed up Washington’s view of the heated primary in a story with the subhead, “Is there still room in the Democratic Party for a Blue Dog who opposes abortion rights?“ The race was indeed a signal of where the party is headed, but the question Politico posed is the wrong one for this particular district. It’s such a comfortably Democratic seat that Lipinski didn’t face an opponent in the 2016 general election. Now that he’s won the primary, he’ll face a fringe candidate with a neo-Nazi past in the 2018 general. Democrat Hillary Clinton easily carried the district two years ago, and Bernie Sanders beat Clinton in the primary there. Questions about the future of the party gained new momentum after Conor Lamb’s upset victory in last week’s special election, which took place in a deeply conservative western Pennsylvania district; centrist Democrats argued that his win demonstrated that the true path was through moderation. They cited Lamb’s embrace of gun culture; his personal, but not political, opposition to abortion; and his unwillingness to back single-payer health care. But the lesson only goes so far: Even though Lamb ran in a far more conservative district than did Lipinski, the former ran a far more progressive campaign — and still won. So a more precise question might be: Is there still room in a solidly Democratic district for a Blue Dog who opposes abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, a $15 minimum wage, and who voted against the Affordable Care Act? And the answer, at least in Illinois’s 3rd District, is barely — for now. The race also answered a different question, one that is perhaps more relevant to the future of the party: Can the progressive Democrats mount a powerful enough challenge to entrenched, well-funded incumbents that they can threaten the status quo?

Lipinski may have held on, but he got the kind of political scare that no incumbent wants.

The answer to that question, clearly, is yes. Lipinski held on, but he got the kind of political scare that no incumbent wants. Newman, taking the stage at her election night party at Marz Taproom in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, declined to concede the race, but said that whatever happens, voters had shocked Lipinski into more progressive positions. “No matter what happens tomorrow, we have moved him on immigration, we have moved him on healthcare. I scared the crap out of him on $12 vs. $15” — a reference to their debate over the minimum wage. She continued, “There’s many things we can move him on more, so let’s be clear. The fight is not over. It’s not done.” Just how present that threat was became clear about two hours after the polls closed, as vote counts showed Newman, who’d been trailing by two to three points all night, surging ahead. At Marz Taproom, volunteers and staffers hugged each other, with one screaming, “I can’t believe this is happening!” Newman’s slight lead lasted only a few minutes — apparently the result of a tabulation error — before Lipinski crawled back on top for the rest of the night. If Newman decides to run in 2020, she’d be the favorite in the race. This cycle, an actual neo-Nazi ran unopposed in the GOP primary in the same district. Because Illinois has an open primary system, Republican voters could have chosen to vote in the Democratic primary and back Lipinski. (The irony of a Sanders-backed candidate losing thanks to crossover votes in an open primary was not lost on Twitter.) Sophia Olazaba, a field manager for the Newman campaign, said she doesn’t doubt that some Republican voters crossed over. “Even when we were canvassing, a lot of homes had both Jeanne Ives and Dan Lipinski signs, so those people could have crossed over,” she said, referring to the GOP gubernatorial candidate whose entire campaign was premised on her opposition to legal abortion. Another volunteer, Sabrina Ithal, also from the 3rd District, mentioned that the open primary format could have actually worked in their favor: “I converted quite a few Republicans who voted Democrat for the first time in 30 to 40 years today.” The Susan B. Anthony List, a group that opposes legal abortion, made re-electing Lipinski a major priority of theirs, dumping big money into the race and working the ground to get out the anti-abortion vote on his behalf. Volunteers at the election party said that a key challenge during the campaign was familiarizing voters with Lipinski’s voting record — a task they eventually accomplished. “Our main opponent wasn’t Dan Lipinski, it was the fact that Dan Lipinski’s record had been hidden so long,” said Travis Ballie, an associate field coordinator for NARAL Pro-Choice America. Knocking on doors in the 3rd District, Ballie said he encountered two categories of people. “The first were the folks who were well aware of his record and had been waiting for someone to challenge him for years. The second were the folks who, frankly, did not know.” Ithal echoed this: “People were shocked. Who sits around saying, ‘Gee, I wonder how Lipinski votes on every issue’?” Dan’s father Bill Lipinski, an old-school machine politician, was elected to Congress in 1982 and retired right after the 2004 primary, replacing his name with his son’s on the general election ballot, so that he waltzed into Congress with no competition. Anyone born in the district after the early 1960s has only known a Lipinski on on the congressional ballot, which makes his margin of victory in Chicago understandable. In 2011, as state Democrats redrew district boundaries, Lipinski made his own more conservative, in order to reflect his politics. But his new constituents were less familiar with him, and he was still stuck with some of the more liberal suburbs, which went for Newman on Tuesday.

“Our main opponent wasn’t Dan Lipinski, it was the fact that Dan Lipinski’s record had been hidden so long.”

The who and how of the insurgency that nearly toppled Lipinski was not a version of the Bernie vs. Hillary frame that is popular in the press, so it’s worth a closer look. The following account of the campaign is based on interviews with people involved throughout the course of the effort, which burst into public view in November, when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., announced her support for Newman. Less than two weeks later, five progressive groups declared they’d be getting behind her, too. The groups were NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. They joined Daily Kos, which had already endorsed Newman and has been taking shots at Lipinski for years. MoveOn, Democracy for America, and the PCCC had little to lose politically by targeting an incumbent Democrat. They are not built to be a part of the machinery of the Democratic Party; in fact , they are constantly working to pull it in a more progressive direction. NARAL and HRC, however, were both taking a risk, knowing that their support of a challenge to a sitting Democrat could infuriate allies back in Washington. The decision was made easier, though, by the fact that Newman, while characterized in the press as a Sanders-like lefty, is actually much closer on the political spectrum to the Democratic establishment than Lipinski is.

Even before she declared her candidacy, Newman met with mothers in Chicago who had lost their kids to violence.