Ellison is favored by many progressives, who have spearheaded opposition to Trump. Illustration by Lincoln Agnew / Photograph by David Zalubowski / AP (man)

“Here’s the interesting thing about Islam,” Keith Ellison, the Minnesota congressman currently running for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, said. It was a sunny, gelid afternoon just after Christmas. “The Prophet Muhammad—peace and blessings be upon him—his father dies before he’s ever born. His mother dies before he’s six. He’s handed over to a foster mom who’s so poor, the stories say, her breasts are not full enough to feed him. So he grows up as this quintessential orphan, and only later, at the age of forty, does he start to get this revelation. And the revelation is to stand up against the constituted powers that are enslaving people—that are, you know, cheating people, trying to trick people into believing that they should give over their money to appease a god that’s just an inanimate object. And those authorities came down hard on him! And his first converts were people who were enslaved, children, women—a few of them were wealthy business folks, but the earliest companions of the Prophet Muhammad were people who needed justice. I found that story to be inspiring, and important to my own thinking and development.”

Ellison, fifty-three, is stocky, with a wide, square head, pinkish-brown skin, and wavy, close-cropped hair. We were sitting at the back of a dimly lit restaurant in St. Paul, and he was wearing a red-and-black checked flannel shirt and faded bluejeans. He had spent most of the day calling members of the D.N.C., and would do more of the same after the meal. The D.N.C. consists of four hundred and forty-seven unelected Party functionaries—state Party chairs, obscure assemblypersons, former big shots—each possessed of his or her own local concerns. The vote for the chairmanship will take place on February 25th, in Atlanta, and so Ellison is usually on the phone, agreeing, promising, making moans of understanding. If he wins the race, he will resign his seat in the House, and continue to spend much of his time this way.

Ellison is the first Muslim to be elected to the U.S. Congress, and I had asked about his religion, and its bearing on his conception of politics, because I couldn’t quite figure out how someone with his background—he came to politics through the roar of student activism: protests, marches, rallies—would be happy in the role he was so strenuously seeking. Like many a Christian politician before him, Ellison had found a way to apply the particulars of his faith to certain timeless American themes—justice, equality, the ability to transcend the circumstances of one’s birth. But he had also managed to sketch the sometimes pious self-image of the party he hopes to lead: sure, a few wealthy donors here or there, but largely a coalition of the vulnerable and the cast aside, arrayed against the powers that be.

The Democrats’ calamitous defeat in last year’s elections—not only losing the Presidency but remaining in a rut in both chambers of Congress and ceding further ground to Republicans in state houses, governors’ mansions, and mayors’ offices around the country—deepened a well of intra-Party bitterness that had become evident long before Election Day. In December, 2015, Bernie Sanders and the former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who were both running for President, accused the D.N.C. and its chair, the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, of favoring Hillary Clinton. During the primaries, the D.N.C. established a joint fund-raising vehicle with the Clinton campaign, an arrangement that is usually delayed until a presumptive nominee has emerged. And it was later revealed, in e-mails allegedly stolen by Russian hackers and disseminated by WikiLeaks, that Donna Brazile, who now serves as the D.N.C.’s acting chair, had shared with the Clinton campaign questions from an upcoming debate on CNN—Brazile’s employer at the time.

Ellison is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the putative left-wing answer to the brinksmen of the Freedom Caucus on the right, and he was an early and fervent supporter of Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Like Sanders, he consistently opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal sought by the Obama White House in its final two years which was attacked by populists in both parties. (President Donald Trump recently withdrew the U.S. from the T.P.P.) Ellison announced his candidacy for the D.N.C. chairmanship six days after the Presidential election. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, predictably endorsed him—but so did establishment figures, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and his predecessor, Harry Reid. One of the early objectives of Schumer’s leadership has been to placate the increasingly powerful Sanders, whom he made a member of his leadership team, and Schumer has said that he endorsed Ellison because Sanders recommended him. This may have been a canny bit of political maneuvering, but it also indicated to Sanders’s supporters that the populist wing of the Democratic Party was poised to lead the opposition against Trump.

The race for the chair has often echoed the acrimony and confusion of the Presidential primaries. Ten candidates are competing for the job, though few have a national profile. Ellison’s chief rival, Thomas E. Perez, was formerly Barack Obama’s Labor Secretary. Perez has consolidated support from much of the Democratic establishment, and increasingly appears to have seized the role of front-runner. Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has positioned himself as a compromise candidate, saying, of the 2016 Democratic primary race, “I don’t know why we’d want to live through it a second time.” All the candidates agree that the D.N.C. is a shambles. Raymond Buckley, the Party’s chair in New Hampshire, and another hopeful, declared, at a Party forum in Baltimore, “For the last eight years, I’ve been a vice-chair, and I don’t know what the hell is going on in this party any more than any of you.”

Meanwhile, the turmoil of Trump’s first month as President has alternately panicked and emboldened the Democratic base. The activist surge on the left, most spectacularly demonstrated at the Women’s March, in Washington, D.C., and in other major cities, and during protests at nearly a dozen airports after the executive order to temporarily ban people from seven majority-Muslim countries, has stoked a conviction that the Party must be more forceful in combatting Trump. Democrats in the Senate have been conspicuously more strident in their opposition to his Cabinet nominees in the days since the airport protests. The rhetoric of the marches has seeped into the D.N.C. race as well, though to less certain effect. There seems to be a mismatch in expectations between the lofty hopes of the marchers and the more mundane work that awaits on South Capitol Street, where the D.N.C. is headquartered. Even with the Trump Presidency in disarray, there is no guarantee that the Democrats will make a strong comeback in the midterm elections of 2018 and the Presidential race in 2020—the real, albeit less glamorous, job of the D.N.C. in the years to come.

Ellison gained an advantage in the race by announcing his candidacy early, in November, but he has faced several obstacles in the months since: recurring questions about his more radical past; a palpable if rarely articulated uneasiness about his faith; and, perhaps most perplexing, the shadow of Bernie Sanders, whose support accounts for both the initial strength of Ellison’s run and the intensity of the opposition that has gathered against him.