Kerri Harris, the insurgent candidate who lost her primary challenge to Sen. Tom Carper in Delaware, will be taking a new national advocacy director position at Working Hero Action, a nonprofit organization advocating for the earned-income tax credit and other anti-poverty policies.

Harris, a 39-year-old queer woman of color and an Air Force veteran, rose to national prominence when she decided to challenge Carper, a powerful Democrat who had held his seat for three terms, from the left. While Harris, whose campaign was outspent 10-to-1 by Carper’s, ended up losing the election by a 30-point margin, the 35 percent she pulled was more than Delaware politicos had thought was possible against Carper, a local icon.

“If I just went back and got a regular 9-to-5 job, so much of the work that had been done would be halted,” Harris told The Intercept. “It would make many people who were inspired lose some of that inspiration, thinking, Well that’s it? You run a race and then it’s over? What about us, what about the movement?”

For a politician, Harris brings an unusually intimate understanding of the effects of policies she’ll be pushing for, especially the need for a cash benefit. Even during her Senate run, as she was profiled in glossy national magazines, she remained mired in poverty, cycling through the same few outfits that bore the brunt of the campaign. Growing up in poverty gives a politician an important understanding of its character, but grinding through it as an adult puts it into even sharper focus. She says that getting the new job is in and of itself a relief.

Harris told me that only recently, she had been asking her daughter, who was turning 8 years old, whether she wanted a birthday party. “She kept saying no,” Harris said. “And then she confessed a couple of weeks ago that she did want one, but she knew that I didn’t have a lot of money, so she didn’t want me to feel stressed. I felt horrible.”

“I don’t want any other kids to have to feel that way,” Harris said. “I don’t want any other parents to feel that way.”

Harris says that she’s thinking of running again in the future. But for now, she sees her role as using the platform she built from her campaign to highlight working-class issues in her new position at Working Hero Action.

Working Hero Action is an organization that advocates for ending poverty, mainly through state-level campaigns to expand the EITC and by helping low-income people claim their benefits. During the 2018 election, the organization’s founder, Joe Sanberg — a wealthy investor and co-founder of Aspiration.com, a financial company that helps direct users toward socially conscious banking and spending — created a PAC to support progressive candidates, one of whom was Harris. “Kerri speaks with passion and heart that she also marries with an intellectual mastery of the policy issues,” Sanberg said. “So to have her as our national advocacy director for the culture change we want to create, and ultimately the agenda to end poverty, is a natural fit.”

Sanberg himself grew up in a low-income household raised only by his mother, and their family ended up losing their home to foreclosure. “It sure felt like poverty, at least to her,” Sanberg said, “because she was always struggling to make ends meet, pay the bills, and also trying to shield me and my brother from all of that.” While most Americans are not currently under the official poverty line at any given time, 40 percent are one missed paycheck away from falling into poverty.

The EITC, which is touted as a policy with bipartisan support, is the country’s primary mechanism for delivering cash benefits to low-income workers through an annual tax refund. But it’s often criticized by progressives because the benefit only goes to the working poor — that is, only those who have an earned income of at least $3,000 get the full benefit. Those who have no earned income, as the name suggests, get nothing.

The EITC’s exclusion of the poorest Americans is a feature, not a bug, of the tax credit, which was massively expanded during the Bill Clinton welfare-reform era and designed to encourage working. It has drawn criticism from some on the left for playing into the idea of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor people. Clinton’s presidency also saw the decimation of what we usually think of as cash welfare for the poor. The result has been the number of households in extreme poverty, or those living on $2 a day, more than doubling in the two decades since welfare reform.

Even the two big plans put forward by Democrats over the past few years to increase the EITC — Sen. Kamala Harris’s LIFT Act and Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Ro Khanna’s GAIN Act — still exclude the nonworking poor. On the other hand, because the EITC encourages work and can act as something of a subsidy for wages, it has maintained a level of bipartisan support even in an increasingly polarized political climate. And though Harris ran as an insurgent, she talked often in her campaign about finding common ground on policies to make immediate improvements in poor people’s lives, arguing that the poor couldn’t afford to wait.

Harris says that expanding the EITC to cover those gaps is part of the policy issues that she is looking to push for in her new position, including making the benefit available to those who are excluded from the traditional definition of “work,” such as caregivers.

What constitutes “work” is often circumscribed by one’s socioeconomic circumstances. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the elite political world took great umbrage at the suggestion that Ann Romney, a stay-at-home mom, did not “work,” arguing that domestic labor should count. Yet, in order to obtain TANF benefits, poor parents must participate in what are described as “work activities” — and raising small children does not count as work.

“How many moderate- to low-income households choose for a parent to stay home because it’s cheaper than day care?” Harris asked. “If we are not providing for those people to make sure that they are doing better, then there are concerns. ”

Harris’s group will also be supporting policies like the Green New Deal and universal health care, as well as proposing a “green EITC” that would give people working in green jobs an even larger tax credit. “If we start to show people what counts as a green job and how you can benefit, it’s easier to push long-term for something like a Green New Deal because people see themselves in it,” Harris said.