Delaware candidate for Democratic Senate nominee Kerri Evelyn Harris, 38, has been called “the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” and you can see why: She’s a younger woman of color challenging a deep-pocketed white male Democrat incumbent, for one thing. And in terms of diversity, or identity politics (depending on how derisively you use the term), the context in which Ocasio-Cortez’s June victory over Rep. Joe Crowley in the Bronx and Queens has often been discussed since, Harris—a vet who served in the Air Force, a community organizer, and a gay black woman—has much more to bring to the table than her opponent, Tom Carper, 71.

But Harris is running on something beyond what can be gleaned purely from a list of characteristics; she’s demanding that political representatives offer, in her words, “diversity of experience,” or an understanding of how the issues and policies that they run on impact the majority of Americans in real life, not just at the podium. In this way, her identity politics and her progressive political goals collide, in a belief that we have to stop thinking of political candidates solely in terms of what they possess. Especially because so many Americans don’t possess much, economically—a look at Donald Trump and some of his particularly grabby White House associates provides an extreme version our exploitative 1 percent. The GOP and its pandering to Trump’s far-right agenda in service of a more familiar conservative financial one is another. “Don’t tell us we don’t belong; don’t tell us you can’t check the boxes that everybody used to check,” Harris said to Vogue on the phone from Delaware, the day after she faced Carper in a debate. In a new campaign video she released earlier this week, Harris urged, “We need to see past what the original visual is and see what the future looks like when you change it.”

Harris consistently discusses her viability as a political candidate in terms of what she’s been through. She was forced to retire early from the Air Force after suffering from complications from an anthrax vaccine, and it informs her support of Medicare for all: “I’ve been in a place where I only got services through the VA,” she has said. “I didn’t have to worry if I was able to pay for emergency services. I know people without access to those types of services who cannot.” And living in Delaware (nicknamed the “Cayman Islands of America” for its corporate tax laws) has made her particularly aware of the cost to low-income residents, especially black Delawareans, of Democrats’ past appeasement of Wall Street. She has spoken out against Carper’s support for a bipartisan bill that rolls back key provisions of Dodd-Frank not just on the legislation’s broad faults but also on how it affects people buying mobile homes: “It gave way to reinstituting redlining,” she’s said, “which communities of color are still recovering from. For our lower two counties, it made it so that people who purchase mobile homes are going to be burdened even further. It takes away their ability to sue landowners. It makes it so that they can only go through certain mortgage companies, which increases their mortgage payments.” She supports the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, which provides the funding to treat the opioid crisis like a health epidemic, as a resident of a state where an estimated 2,000 people seek treatment for opioids every day.

Where does Carper, who has served in the Senate since 2001, fall on the same issues? Carper, who was recently endorsed by former Vice President Joe Biden, sees himself as a crusader against Trump but has voted in the past with Republicans, for legislation like approving the Keystone Pipeline and on the Dodd-Frank reform mentioned above. He also voted to approve current Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for an earlier court appointment; “I will not do that again,” he said during their debate on Monday. Harris, who has sworn off corporate donations, said that the vote was representative of his deep ties to corporate interests and to a kind of old boys’ club in Delaware and beyond. “If everyone is viewing the world through the same lens, you get people like Kavanaugh,” Harris said, “because you spoke to people in your network and they told you he’s a good guy.” The aforementioned CARE Act, which Carper has yet to support, is of particular importance to Harris as a women’s rights issue because of the impact of the opioid crisis on mothers and infants; supporting Roe v. Wade as “settled law,” as Carper stated on Monday night, is not enough.