Moments before the She the People event was set to begin in Houston, last week, Aimee Allison took a step toward the stage, and peeked out from behind the curtain. It was electric, she thought in that moment.

Nearly 2,000 women of color from across the American south had come out to hear from eight presidential candidates at a forum specifically for, in its first year, women of color. Eighteen months before, it had been a seedling of an idea. During the 2016 election, Allison planned to write a book about the power of female voters of color in the context of America’s first female president in 2016, Hillary Clinton. Instead, when Donald Trump who took office 20 January 2017 she realized there were lessons still to be learned by Democrats, namely around one of their key voting blocs: black female voters.

“It’s the false belief in the primacy of the white moderate voter as the most valuable voter. For Democrats, it isn’t true. We were invisible. And it wasn’t because women of color weren’t there,” the event’s founder told the Guardian.

Black female voters have been showing up consistently for some time. In 2008 and 2012, African American women turned out in historic numbers for Barack Obama, voting at a higher rate than any other demographic bloc in both years. In 2016, more than 90% of African American women voted for Hillary Clinton, according to CNN exit poll data, even though they were voting at a much lower rate than the two previous presidential elections.

In recent years as well, they showed up for Senator Doug Jones in Alabama in 2017, narrowly handing the Democrat a victory over the Donald Trump-backed Republican. They showed up to vote in the last two gubernatorial races in Virginia. In Georgia, more than 1 million black female voters are registered to vote, and a significant number of them pushed Stacey Abrams to within a few thousand votes of her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, in a historic gubernatorial election last year.

What’s so amazing about She the People, Karine Jean-Pierre, the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org and a Columbia University professor, said, is leading contenders in the Democratic race showed up to hear from women asking them, “OK, tell us how you’re going to improve our lives. What are the things you’re talking to us about. They’re battle-testing each person and asking them, demanding, really, what are your issues and do something for me. Because I’m going to come out and vote.”

In turn, she added, the candidates are paying attention. Winning over African American voters as a base will be key for one of the 20 Democratic frontrunners eyeing their party’s nomination next year, and almost all of them have acknowledged that reality over a year out from the 2020 Democratic national convention.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Audience member looks toward the stage during the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston. Photograph: Loren Elliott/Reuters

Half a dozen candidates have made their way to South Carolina, an essential primary battleground where 60% of the 2016 primary voters were black. A dozen hopefuls showed up at the Rev Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention. Candidates traveled to Selma, Alabama, earlier this year to pay their respects on the weekend marking Bloody Sunday, a turning point in the fight for African American voting rights during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

It’s not just about Iowa and New Hampshire any more, Jean-Pierre added.

“[W]e’re talking about reparations. Reparations!” Jean-Pierre said, referring to the debate around payments in the United States to descendants of slaves, a conversation that has shown up in multiple town halls and interviews for the first time during a presidential election.

It’s a long road to 2020, Allison said, saying some of the Democratic candidates will have to learn to engage with their largest voting bloc better. Michelle Ferrell, an African-Latina-American from Houston, who attended the presidential forum hosted by She the People, agrees, some of the candidates were not able to address this demographic in a “real way”.

“There was a lot of hissing” when Beto O’Rourke spoke in his home state, she said.

“Look, it was very lively, it was really real. Like, we’re not going to take your shit, we wanna know. Just admit you don’t have an answer, it’s OK,” Ferrell said, referencing other uncomfortable moments, like the crowd of women booing Bernie Sanders, who she thought just dropped a bunch of generic statistics on inequality.

Elizabeth Warren, though “addressed all of those uncomfortable topics” and engaged with the crowd, she thought.

Paul Begala, a CNN contributor and Democratic consultant who worked with President Bill Clinton on his 1992 campaign, said on CNN recently he thought some of these Democratic candidates still seem to think they’ll win by focusing on white liberal voters. However, he said, the heart of the Democratic party is people of color. “The path to the nomination runs through the African American community,” he began, adding, “That’s how Clinton won, that’s how Barack beat Hillary, that’s how Hillary beat Bernie.”

On that stage, it was clear the path to that understanding might be a ways off, Allison admitted. When Pete Buttigieg, the mayor from South Bend, Indiana, said during a CNN Town Hall he didn’t believe incarcerated Americans should have the right to vote, she said he didn’t realize how he was insulting AfricanAmericans, a large proportion of the people in prison this would affect. He, like some of the others, are going to have to learn to engage with this “power bloc” as she called black female voters.

“You are not going to win the nomination or the White House without us.”