The story of the post-Obama Left began just a few years into his presidency, with the rise of Occupy Wall Street. The 2011 protest movement injected catchy memes like “the 99%” into popular consciousness, and it kickstarted the debate about inequality that’s now at the heart of the 2016 election. But Occupy’s work remained incomplete, partly because its activists never united behind a clear political strategy, and never teamed with others on the left to turn their vision into reality. “We were defeated because we couldn’t learn to work together,” says Winnie Wong, a NYC-based Occupy activist.

Wong is among the Occupy alums who have now shifted gears: She’s working with more than a dozen of her former comrades from Zuccotti Park to support Bernie Sanders’s insurgent presidential campaign. Well before Sanders mobilized his own volunteers, Wong helped set up People for Bernie, a digitally driven grassroots campaign to support his presidential bid. People for Bernie is credited with starting the #feelthebern hashtag that’s helped mobilize Sanders’s online ground troops. It’s even received funding from the National Nurses Union—one of only two labor unions that has endorsed Sanders—to hire staff and make digital media buys.

There’s a certain irony here: Veterans of a movement hellbent on being bottom-up and leaderless, now working to elect the leader of the free world as their first big foray into electoral politics. But in many ways, it’s a logical extension of the left’s lopsided organizing model: American progressives have long focused their energies and resources disproportionately on presidential contests.

For a bottom-up movement, this top-down approach has been one of the fundamental contradictions of the Obama era. An unprecedented grassroots campaign powered the first black president into office, and pressured him to pursue an unabashedly progressive agenda on issues like health care, gay rights, and immigration. At the same time, the 21st-century coalition behind his two victories proved impotent in midterm elections. That allowed Republicans—hardcore conservatives, in most cases—to take control of Congress and more statehouses than any time in recent memory.

Now Sanders, like Obama, is providing another unexpectedly strong challenge to a Democratic frontrunner (the same one, in fact). And again, it’s thanks to a dedicated army of true believers. Progressives are also succeeding in nudging Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, to the left on a host of issues. But so far there’s little evidence that progressive enthusiasm is trickling down to where it’s most desperately needed. With Congress in perpetual gridlock, national politics and policy are increasingly hashed out at the state level. So while the left’s agenda keeps growing more more ambitious, its ability to enact that agenda is diminishing.