I first met Tiffany Cabán just before Valentine’s Day, in a crowded cafe not far from the downtown Manhattan court where she was still working cases as a public defender. Two weeks before, she had announced her campaign to become the next district attorney in Queens. Last night, she beat the odds, declaring victory in a primary race that was, from the start, an indictment of the ways in which the criminal justice system operates in the borough, if not the city, and now, the nation. Should the current vote counts hold in her favor, she will become the Democratic nominee, nearly ensuring her a win in November.

Tiffany Cabán is 31, queer, Latinx, and already being seen as a rising star in the new cadre of women coming to power. As district attorney, she will be the most powerful elected official in Queens, presiding over more than 2 million people, a population larger than that of 15 states and the District of Columbia.

Since her victory speech Tuesday night at La Boom nightclub on Northern Boulevard, most assessments of her campaign have focused on her impressive grassroots operation. According to the journalist Daniel Medina, volunteers knocked between 55,000 and 70,000 doors in the last three days of the race, roughly six times the number Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did in the final stretch of her own campaign. Cabán was riding a wave of support from the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, along with grassroots groups in Queens like Make the Road and VOCAL-NY, and Ocasio-Cortez herself, who endorsed her in May. But Cabán owes her victory more to her unique approach to criminal justice reform, which set her apart from the candidate the Queens political machine had wanted and poured around $1 million into electing: Borough President Melinda Katz.

While Katz (along with all but one of the seven total candidates) wanted to be seen as a progressive reformer, Cabán sought the office in part to dismantle its devastating power. She called herself a “decarceral” prosecutor, and in February, told me she hoped to mitigate the harm the criminal legal system inflicts by listening to the people of Queens and taking her cues from them. “It’s about communities,” she said, speaking about her now well-known stance on decriminalizing sex work. “It’s about communities knowing themselves best.”

Cabán’s radical commitment to decarceration—which goes beyond reforms that are easier to sell to the public, such as releasing only those with nonviolent offenses on their records—sets her apart even from other newly elected “progressive prosecutors” across the country. It also owes to decades of work on the part of anti-racist and feminist groups like INCITE!, along with newer coalitions like Survived & Punished, which have long called for alternatives to policing and prosecution to keep communities safe. Of course, not all such abolitionist groups are lining up to install progressive prosecutors; they want to dismantle the system in its entirety. But they have, until recently, been almost alone in acting a counterweight to a feminism that sees the police and prosecutors as allies in women’s empowerment, a feminism that is focused on putting more of that punitive power in the hands of women.