Nick Hayes is sweating. Hiking up a rocky trail and lugging a 40-pound camera, he pauses every few steps, frames a shot, and then scrambles uphill to stay ahead of Zak Ringelstein, Maine’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.

It’s unseasonably hot for September, the kind of balmy weather that’s usually sequestered to a few summer days here in Maine. But even though a smattering of leaves have begun to turn orange and yellow and red, the air is hugging us as we trudge up one of Bradbury Mountain State Park’s steepest hills in an act of performative outdoorsiness for Hayes’s camera.

For Hayes, the sweat is worth it. He and his partner Naomi Burton have traveled from Detroit to Maine to film a campaign video for Ringelstein, a 32-year-old freshly declared socialist looking to knock off Maine’s independent senator, 74-year-old Angus King. It’s a huge ask for a first-time candidate, given that Maine hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988 and King boasts a reputation for bipartisanship and a mustache that gives him the bearing of an aging but dignified L.L. Bean model.

Enter Hayes and Burton. They’re here to introduce Mainers to Ringelstein’s campaign and open another front in the larger war that the left has been waging against the Democratic Party’s establishment this election season. “I think the challenge is less bringing the Democratic Party to the left and more bringing the Democratic Party to its knees,” Hayes told me that day. “And, like, really just scooping it out, every single person in there, and building something totally new.”

Hayes and Burton already won the first round of their fight. In March, they cold pitched a then-unknown 28-year-old socialist from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on a short film that would frame her U.S. congressional campaign as a struggle on behalf of New York’s working class. Unlike established production companies, Hayes and Burton were willing to do it on the cheap, quoting her campaign a budget just south of $10,000, a number her underfunded campaign could afford. To keep costs down, Hayes and Burton traveled from Detroit to New York by train and accepted no fee for their labor on the project.

It was a risk, but one that paid off for both parties. When the ad hit the internet, it turned Ocasio-Cortez, later endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, into a political sensation and helped her grassroots campaign knock off 10-term Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley in a June primary. Overnight, she became the face of the Democratic Party’s ascendant left wing.

The victory also turned Hayes and Burton into in-demand campaign ad makers this election season. They’ve fielded calls from more than 40 candidates who have asked that their production company, Means of Production, turn them into the second coming of Ocasio-Cortez. So far, they’ve traveled from Rhode Island to Hawaii making what they call “propaganda for the working class,” work that has gotten them featured in The New York Times and on MSNBC. Next month they’ll be named to Filmmaker Magazine’s list of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

It’s not a bad start for having started doing this work full-time in only March. “This was an insane summer,” says Hayes, who is 21 years old. “You know, what the fuck?”

Though their short-term goal is to elect left-leaning politicians like Ringelstein, Hayes and Burton’s ambitions extend far beyond campaign work. Electoral politics matter, but Means of Production wants to broaden its fight to take on a different enemy: capitalism.

“I think the challenge is less bringing the Democratic Party to the left and more bringing the Democratic Party to its knees. And, like, really just scooping it out, every single person in there, and building something totally new.” —Means of Production cofounder Nick Hayes

Every day, as they see it, Americans are bombarded with capitalist propaganda. From Hollywood films like Black Panther to television shows like Shark Tank and news networks like CNN, Hayes and Burton contend that the underlying ideology of our media and entertainment system promotes a status quo that oppresses working people, and they believe it’s time for some counterprogramming.

“Our next project is making socialism cool again and making it entertaining,” Hayes says. “Really breeding that ‘Fuck capitalism’ mind-set. Then it’s like, we can put whatever we want in place of that.”

Over the next year, they’re looking to raise $5 million to launch a socialist entertainment platform, “a Netflix for the left” that will showcase everything from anticapitalist documentaries and comedy specials to cooking shows and narrative films. Taken with their political work, they are hoping to execute an “inside-outside” strategy. They want to keep working inside the current political system to support candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and at the same time build popular support for socialist ideology with entertaining content.

“This isn’t a tea party moment. This isn’t some AstroTurf-ed bullshit. This is a grassroots movement that has roots far back and has a resurgence that is realistic,” Burton says. “We know how to get our ideas across. We know how to do these things quicker than the 75-year-olds who have been holding onto public office for 35 years. And we’re all just kind of realizing the collective power.”

But before they can launch a Netflix for the left and further upend the Democratic Party, they’ve got to finish hiking to the top of this hill to help Ringelstein win a race that looks to be about as far out of reach as the pink and gold splashing across the horizon at sunset.

The next day, Hayes and Burton are hunting for squalor. Most visitors in downtown Portland seek out the city’s hipster stations of the cross: the natural wine bar founded by an indie rock drummer, the James Beard award-winning restaurants, the coffee shops with enough cold brew to keep all of Williamsburg caffeinated.

Instead, we’re looking for images that juxtapose the wealth coursing through gentrifying Portland with the hardscrabble experience of the working class. Rusted lobster traps. Fishing boats leaking oil. Signs of the state’s rampant opioid crisis. Anything that looks like it hides in society’s darkest corners is fair game.

“This isn’t a tea party moment. This isn’t some AstroTurf-ed bullshit. This is a grassroots movement that has roots far back and has a resurgence that is realistic. We know how to get our ideas across. We know how to do these things quicker than the 75-year-olds who have been holding onto public office for 35 years. And we’re all just kind of realizing the collective power.” —Means of Production cofounder Naomi Burton

The use of heavy-handed juxtapositions is a style that Hayes appropriated from Soviet-era propaganda. He recalls recently watching a 1934 Soviet film, Three Songs About Lenin, where large, grinding gears cut directly to a shot of child looking expectantly into the distance. “I love the juxtaposition between the individual, the collective mass, and their relation to the means of production,” he says, “How the [gears are] immobilized by the workers being out in the street.”

We’re moving fast to cut down on shooting time, which requires Hayes to film everything handheld. The style gives his cinematography an unsettling shakiness. To heighten the drama, he uses anamorphic lenses to give every shot a wide-angle, cinematic look. “Everything I’m shooting is very documentary and very gritty,” he says. “To give all these characters a very underdog, underbelly-of-establishment-society sort of feeling, like they’re sort of excluded from the top and those who are extremely successful in society.”

We wander down a fishing pier, and Hayes dangles their Canon C500 camera over the water to shoot an old fishing boat. Burton audibly gasps, fearing the loss of a roughly $5,000 investment to the salty Casco Bay. Despite the recent accolades, they’re still just scraping by financially, and the loss of the camera would significantly derail their expansion plans. “You can see who’s the type-A one,” Burton jokes once the camera is safely back on dry land.

While Hayes handles the cinematography, Burton, 29, does just about everything else. She coordinates shoot logistics, communicates with clients and the press, and helps drafts the scripts for their campaign videos, an intense process in which the Means team and the candidate solidify the video’s underlying message. She also does the bulk of the driving.

And in Maine, she’s had to drive a lot between shooting locations. Those long car trips gave us many hours to talk about their path to becoming the left’s most prominent propagandists.

Hayes tends to answer questions first. Of the two, he is more easily identifiable as a member of the Dirtbag Left. His beard and hair are scraggly, and he wore the same black shirt and shorts on consecutive shoot days. (He insists that he brought two pairs.) Reared on leftist Twitter and podcasts like Chapo Trap House and Street Fight Radio, he’s always profane, often hyperbolic, and occasionally very funny.

Outwardly, Burton is more polished in both speech and appearance. Her uniform on the shoot was functional: black T-shirt, skinny jeans, clear-frame glasses, gray Allbirds sneakers. When Hayes finished an answer, she’d pick up the thread from denouncing the gentrification in downtown Portland to mocking her own since-lapsed affinity for the liberal ex-Obama staffers podcast Pod Save America. Despite her previous work in corporate PR, I saw her attempt to rein in Hayes only once, when he was on a diatribe about the mainstream media’s hypocrisy, touching his hand to silently signal that he was going too far in the presence of a reporter.

Most of all, the couple exudes an evangelical streak common to the newly converted. Like college students who have read critical theory for the first time and can’t help but deconstruct every social interaction, they’re eager to use their newfound socialist ideology as an analytical framework to critique politics and culture. Targets of their ire include John McCain, Meghan McCain, Amazon, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, Nike, Democratic congressional candidate MJ Hegar’s viral “Doors” political ad (“extremely nationalistic,” Hayes says), TV sitcom The Office (a missed chance to highlight the dehumanizing realities of workplace culture, in their view), and pretty much every Democratic 2020 hopeful, from Cory Booker to Kamala Harris.

They credit Bernie Sanders for their political awakening. Both were raised in liberal Democratic households in the midwest—he’s from outside Chicago, she’s from Ann Arbor—and had been taught to view Republicans as the roadblock to progress. The Sanders campaign redirected their outrage. His rhetoric about millionaires, billionaires, and the corrupt political class gave them a new way to understand the economic devastation that they were seeing around Detroit, where they’d both moved for work. Instead of railing against the tea party, their attention turned to an economic system that prized profits over people.

“I’ve always been an empathetic person, and I think [socialism] is the only political philosophy that’s actually empathetic to people’s experiences,” Hayes says in a moment of sincerity before making a joke. “But yeah, seeing my parents just get fucked every which way by our economic system didn’t help.”

“It’s clear that the secret sauce is in the marriage of identity and ideology.” —Precision strategies cofounder Teddy Goff

When Donald Trump was elected president, their slow turn left accelerated. That month, they joined their local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Hayes bought the camera that Means of Production still uses today. Soon, they were shooting short films together. They made a mini-documentary about a 93-year-old DSA activist, they shot live shows for Chapo Trap House, and even went to Washington, D.C. to shoot the Juggalo March on Washington with Street Fight Radio. Soon, they started dating.

As they began to make films, they realized that there was a market for left-wing, anticapitalist propaganda, but Burton had reservations about leaving her 9-to-5 job. While Hayes worked as a freelance commercial producer and could take on Means projects between gigs, Burton had a stable career at a major public relations firm. Increasingly, she was torn between the job’s stability and her distaste for work that perpetuated systems that she believed were fundamentally oppressive of working people. As her commitment to socialism—and Hayes—deepened, she increasingly felt like her workplace’s culture of stress was just another way capitalism was keeping her from being happy.

“Every day, she would go off to the office and come home, you know, stressed and talking about work,” Hayes says. “It’s just like we wanted to be able to work together. I don’t want to see my partner go off and do something that makes her super unhappy every day.”

In March, she quit and committed to making Means of Production a reality. “We were just kind of like, ‘We can’t make that work, so we’ve gotta make this work,’” she says. “And a few weeks later I reached out to Alexandria, and it has just been kind of crazy since then.”

Their video for Ocasio-Cortez, titled “The Courage to Change,” instantly went viral went it was released in May. Without paying a penny for television advertising, the 28-year-old suddenly had the platform to discuss socialism in Vogue and was raking in small donations that more than exceeded the amount her campaign paid for the video. (Ocasio-Cortez declined to be interviewed for this story.)

When Ocasio-Cortez pulled off the upset in June, Hayes’s and Burton’s lives went into overdrive. From their two-bedroom apartment in Detroit, they were suddenly fielding calls from the national news media and being asked to film ads for candidates across the country.

Which brings us back to shooting B-roll on Portland’s docks for Ringelstein’s long-shot Senate bid. With enough footage captured, we head to dinner at the Honey Paw, a trendy Asian fusion restaurant and symbol of the city’s recent hipster resurgence. Over spicy noodles and craft beer, Hayes and Burton discussed the tumult in their life.

In the past year, they’ve established Means of Production as a worker-run cooperative and have just moved into a new office space in Detroit. At the moment, it’s just a three-person company: Hayes, Burton, and their third partner, Natasha Fernández-Silber, a fellow DSA activist who handles business logistics. They’re currently self-funding the operation with their political work paying the bills. Though they now charge more than $10,000 for a political ad and pay themselves for their labor, Hayes says, “Honestly, the money’s not great.”

I point out, at the very least, they’ve managed to carve out a mini-socialist utopia for themselves in one short year. They’ve become their own bosses. They no longer have to work for brands they detest just to make a living. And, most of all, Hayes and Burton get to work together every day, liberated from the culture of stress that created tension in their relationship.

“We’re trying to carve out [a utopia] for lots of people,” Hayes says. “I want Means of Production to be a place where young creative professionals like filmmakers, writers, like, whatever, can tap into and make money and create stuff they’re passionate about as an alternative to the totally soulless private creative industries.”

After the midterms, they’re looking to start raising money from ideologically aligned angel investors to build their “Netflix for the left.” They intend to start releasing short-form content on social media soon and will look to begin developing longer-form projects in 2019.

They showed me one animated cartoon destined for social media that they’ve already finished, depicting a group of employees for Raytheon, the defense contractor, attempting to earn public goodwill by sponsoring a float in an LGBTQ pride parade. In the short, bumbling “creatives” brainstorm the anatomical similarities between missiles and phalluses, hoping that their pride flag liberalism will help Americans forget about the company’s involvement in endless wars overseas.

To make sure their videos reach a wide audience, they told me that they plan to purchase a YouTube channel with more than 100,000 subscribers from comedian Sara June, who created the viral internet meme Nyan Cat a few years ago. “We’re just going to buy that from her and start piping socialism to subscribers of Nyan Cat,” says a giddy Hayes.

As we’re discussing their plans to ramp up their propaganda operation, I was reminded of the last major figure in American politics who identified as a propagandist: Steve Bannon. Before joining the Trump campaign, Bannon ran the right-wing website Breitbart and made his name in the conservative movement crafting right-wing documentaries, once telling a colleague that he wanted to be the “Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP.”

These films were part of a larger effort to push American culture to the right. As one of Bannon’s political mentors, Andrew Breitbart, was fond of saying, “Politics is downstream from culture,” and Breitbart and Bannon believed that conservatives needed to first combat Hollywood’s liberal bias if they were ever going to succeed politically.

I ask Hayes and Burton if they agreed with Breitbart’s diagnosis about the relationship between culture and politics and if that’s why they were interested in crafting anticapitalist entertainment. Hayes pushed back, contending that in the wake of Trump’s election, politics has become one of the defining features of American culture.

“Politics really does dictate culture,” he says. “It’s like Alexandria got on [The Late Show With Stephen Colbert]. If I was like making moody films to try and change the culture for 30 years, it wouldn’t nearly have the effect of what a single election like that could have on the national political discourse or on the cultural discourse. You have to do them in tandem, and you have to do them in connection to get people on your side.”

When the temperature gets cold, Jim Richard’s left index finger starts to burn. A few years ago, the 63-year-old flooring refinisher sliced it to the bone cutting a board on a table saw. Despite the gushing blood, Richard went home to let his wife know that he’d be driving himself to the hospital. “I had to let her know where I was going to be,” he says.

Richard tells this story after shooting a sequence with Hayes and Burton. In addition to B-roll juxtaposing wealth and poverty and a lengthy interview with Ringelstein, Hayes and Burton’s video includes shooting sequences with “talent” from the working class. Over the course of their trip, they’ll also shoot footage of a postal worker who delivers mail by boat, a father-son lumberjack duo with hands big enough to palm a watermelon, and a waitress living paycheck-to-paycheck in Portland.

In an ideal world, everyone featured in the video would support Ringelstein’s campaign, especially Richard. He’s spent 38 years installing hardwood floors and has the injuries to show for it. He’s had one knee replaced, has had surgery on the other, and is set to undergo a third operation on his back soon. He spends around $25,000 a year on health insurance for himself and his wife and would like to retire but can’t afford to do so until he’s eligible for Medicare in two years. He’d benefit more than most from one of Ringelstein’s main campaign planks, Medicare for All.

But in reality, he’s not a Ringelstein supporter. Like many Mainers, he’s an independent and in 2016 voted for Trump, or “Numbnuts” as Richard now refers to him. “I thought he’d buck the system, which he does, but he’s doing it in the wrong way,” he says. “I’d like to see somebody like Ronald Reagan. I haven’t made more money than when he was the president.”

Back in the car, I ask Hayes and Burton about the ethics of using someone like Richard who doesn’t support Ringelstein in a video that’s supporting his campaign. Hayes is quick to defend the practice. First of all, he says, Ringelstein advocates for policies that will help workers like Richard even if conservative media has conditioned him to reject leftist ideas. “It’s going to take a little bit longer to reach someone like Jim [Richard] with full-blown socialist messaging,” Burton adds. “But even if he doesn’t know, like, the terminology, he fucks with it.”

Second, Hayes argues that corporations have appropriated working class characters for decades to make money. Think about the Marlboro Man. Given that history, Hayes has no problem doing the same thing to promote an agenda that he believes will benefit working class people everywhere.

The ends justify the means, he argues. “We’re all really radical. We want full socialism, and, like, we would love a revolution. That would be sick. It’s just like, how do we get to the point that there’s conditions for that and like most working people, they’re throwing their shit down and they’re like, ‘Let’s do this,’ you know?”

To get there, he thinks Americans first need to get acculturated to leftist rhetoric and stop fearing words like “socialism” or “propaganda,” which is why he and Burton have tried to subtly insert these ideas into their campaign videos. To make the point, Hayes cites a recent campaign film for Matt Brown, a Rhode Island Democrat who just lost his bid to knock off a centrist incumbent in a gubernatorial primary.

“A line in Matt Brown’s video is ‘People should have control over the structure of their society and economy.’ That’s just straight communism. That’s a line that is normalizing communism,” he says, “but we pulled communism out, and we pulled [the phrase] ‘means of production’ out to just sort of start acclimating people to this language again. So that when we do start calling these things what they are, it’s a lot less scary.”

It’s work that is starting to have an impact. In August, a Gallup poll found for the first time ever that Democrats have a more positive view of socialism (57 percent) than they have of capitalism (47 percent).

As we leave Richard to his labor, we start talking about what it will take for Ringelstein to beat King. In the 32-year-old ex-school teacher, Hayes and Burton are convinced that they’ve found a candidate who shares their socialist ideology and politics. But getting Maine’s electorate to accept him hasn’t been easy.

A few days earlier, I watched Ringelstein’s stump speech bomb at the Bangor Rotary Club. It was a conservative crowd, but even Democrats in the room, like Jane Bragg, a retired dance teacher, weren’t persuaded to ditch King. Bragg told me afterward that her two main voting issues were getting money out of politics and the environment—both in line with Ringelstein’s platform—but his rambling response to her question about dark money wasn’t convincing to her. “Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water,” she says, voicing support for King, a former Maine governor and a fixture in state politics since the 1970s.

Ringelstein, on the other hand, has lived in Maine for only two years. It’s the thing that separates him most from the left’s most successful insurgents this cycle like Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, and Andrew Gillum in Florida. All three have deep roots in their respective communities, are charismatic public speakers, and have been able to spin their left-leaning message as an authentic outgrowth of their biography.

“It’s clear that the secret sauce is in the marriage of identity and ideology,” says Teddy Goff, a former Obama campaign staffer and the cofounder of Precision Strategies, a corporate strategy group. He cites Pressley’s U.S. House primary upset victory over incumbent Mike Capuano as an example of how the messenger mattered just as much, if not more, than the message in many of these races. “She didn’t particularly run to the left of Capuano. There are some issues in which she ran to the right of Capuano. But people see her speak and they’re like, ‘Shit, I want to vote for somebody like that.’”

That’s the reaction Ringelstein needs to get from voters, but it hasn’t happened yet. Despite sharing the ideology that launched Ocasio-Cortez to national prominence, Ringelstein is still laboring to get his message across and struggling to have voters connect with his identity so they’re receptive to his socialist politics.

“That’s part of the whole script process too. It’s really figuring out that identity,” Burton says. “Zak’s not fully formed or fully baked or the same as his stump speech. It’s a lot of our job to figure out what are the good pieces.”

Sammy Potter, Ringelstein’s 18 year-old executive assistant, is trying very hard to pretend that he’s not excited to meet Spose. For the uninitiated, Spose is Maine’s best-known rapper, which is a little like being New York City’s best-known lobsterman. His only brush with mainstream fame came with his Slim Shady–knockoff frat-rap track “I’m Awesome,” in 2010, but he’s maintained cult status among Maine’s rap-starved teenagers ever since.

Ringelstein is on his way to appear on Spose’s new podcast, and I’m following along to get a sense of the candidate who will be at the center of Hayes and Burton’s film. We arrive at a nondescript white barn 30 minutes outside Portland, and Spose (aka Maine Gretzky) greets us. He immediately praises Potter for wearing a signature piece of merch, a T-shirt that reads “L.L. Bane,” quoting a lyric from Spose’s 2013 single “The King of Maine.” Potter, a Stanford-bound high school grad working on the campaign for another week before heading west, plays it cool.

On the podcast, Spose engages in some boilerplate politician banter, asking Ringelstein how he feels about Maine’s best fairs and whether he’s a fan of Moxie, Maine’s official soft drink. (He is.) Dressed in hiking boots and a white button-down shirt, Ringelstein speaks with the rasp of a hoarse surfer, discussing his plans for a federally mandated minimum teacher salary and deepening his self-described “bromance” with Spose. When the rapper jokes that sometimes he gets drunk and thinks about running to be Maine’s governor, Ringelstein’s on board. “Spose for Governor!,” he says. “We’d be a dream team.”

Once the interview ends, however, the conversation gets more revealing. Ringelstein asks Spose to hold a concert to support his campaign. “Please,” begs Ringelstein. “It would be really cool.”

But Spose wants to think bigger. A concert would rake in some donations, he says, but it won’t take down the actual King of Maine. He’s got a great reputation and a great mustache, so what Ringelstein needs to do is get creative and find a “Trojan horse” idea, something that nobody is expecting.

The good news, says Spose, is that anyone can get on the news in Maine. This is a lesson he learned from his music career. Once, he recorded an album in a day. It was a news story! Another time, he filmed a video in all 16 of Maine’s counties. Another news story! That’s why Spose, a 33-year-old father of four, is bundling a children’s book with his new album.

“The children’s book is fucking fire,” he says. “So I know that as soon as I drop that, that becomes a news story. Oh, ‘Rapper writes children’s book,’ you know?”

It’s a formula that Spose wants Ringelstein to employ, and the candidate is receptive. As Ringelstein told me earlier, the biggest challenge in the campaign is that nobody knows who he is, and he needs to get creative if voters are going to pull the lever for him in November.

“People want what we’re offering,” Ringelstein says. “But at the end of the day, there is a corporate structure in the establishment that is literally meant to keep incumbents in power and which is very protective.”

While Ringelstein blames his lack of name recognition on the establishment, he’s also not that well known in Maine because he’s lived there for only two years. Born and raised in rural New Hampshire, he attended Columbia University in New York and then began a migratory professional career.

First, he moved to Phoenix as a Teach for America corps member and taught elementary school for three years. It was there that he met his wife, Leah, and together they founded a startup called UClass in 2012, an online platform that allowed teachers to share classroom materials and resources. They relocated to San Francisco. That work landed Ringelstein an invitation to speak about education at the White House and a spot on Forbes’s 30 under 30 list in 2015.

“They don’t want to see [an Andrew] Gillum or an [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez or a me. It’s about power and literally the establishment structure feeling that I’m a threat to their existence, which I am.” —Zak Ringelstein, DSA-affiliated U.S. Senate candidate in Maine

That same year, they sold UClass to Renaissance Learning. Ringelstein then went to work for Renaissance, a relationship that devolved into a lawsuit in September 2016 after Ringelstein was reassigned within the company, resigned, and sued for his unvested stock shares and $75,000 in damages. The suit was ultimately settled and terms were not disclosed.

Meanwhile, Ringelstein and his family moved to Nashville. Under the name Zak Mountain, Ringelstein attempted to launch a country music career. Though he didn’t become the next Luke Bryan, he did record a music video that leaked a few months ago. The song, “Raised in the U.S.A,” was recorded in the middle of the contentious 2016 election and urges listeners to ignore politics and enjoy summer. “Even Hillary can’t piss me off / And I took more sick days than my boss / Because you can’t take freedom from a man / who’d rather drink and get a tan,” he sings in a stars-and-stripes speedo.

“Every person in a country this rich should have an opportunity to make art, to have a little bit of leisure,” he explains, describing his idyllic stint in Tennessee, where he played music, built a chicken coop, and raised his newborn son. “It was something I wanted to do, and as I got deeper into it I realized that I am justice-oriented. I get my fulfillment from either working with kids or fighting for justice, and so I made my way back to what I’ve been doing my whole career, which is fighting for educational justice.”

In fall 2016, Ringelstein and his family moved to Maine, where his wife was raised, and settled in the Portland suburb of Yarmouth. Ringelstein worked as an elementary school teacher from October 2016 until the end of that school year before setting his sights on becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee to take on Angus King. He won the primary unopposed (several other candidates dropped out of the race) but says that the party’s national donor class discouraged him from running. “They don’t want to see [an Andrew] Gillum or an [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez or a me,” he says. “It’s about power and literally the establishment structure feeling that I’m a threat to their existence, which I am.”

So far, though, no one seems to be feeling very threatened. Ringelstein’s running a distant third (at just under 9 percent) to both King and the Republican Eric Brakey, who also has been featured dancing in his underwear in a leaked video.

Which brings us back to Spose’s recording studio, discussing Trojan horse ideas to supercharge Ringelstein’s campaign. Spose says that Ringelstein’s recent trip to the Mexican border was a step in the right direction. In June, Ringelstein was so outraged by the Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents that he suspended his Senate campaign to drive a truck full of toys to a detention center in McAllen, Texas.

He livestreamed his eventual arrest on Facebook. “Zak is now a political prisoner of the Trump regime,” his account posted to Twitter at the time. Ringelstein spent almost 24 hours in jail before returning to Maine.

“Dude, that was fucking awesome,” Spose says. “I was like, ‘Zak! Marketing genius!” Potter quickly replies that the impetus for the trip wasn’t marketing but accepts that the arrest had a positive impact on the campaign.

The month after the Texas trip, Ringelstein announced that he had formally joined the Southern Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “The Democratic Socialists of America are a group that is standing up for all the right values. And if their values were the values the Democratic Party we’d all be a whole lot better off,” he says. “And I felt like it was time to do what was right, and I really didn’t care that it was hard and that it would turn some people away.”

Since then, he says that he’s been called a “commie” at the grocery store, but the decision to become a card-carrying socialist also got his campaign more media attention and earned him the endorsement of DSA’s national organization.

When I ask Ringelstein why he’s running for a seat in the U.S. Senate despite his thin roots in the state, he pushes back. “I grew up in the county bordering Maine. My parents are an hour and 45 minutes away from my current house. My wife grew up in Rangeley, Maine. So in many ways our roots are here. This is home to me,” he says. “The idea behind our race is that teachers and people from the working class can step up in extraordinary ways and stand up the values of the working class in ways that career politicians can’t. And I think this campaign has proven that.”

It’s this newfound commitment to the working class and to socialism that put him on the radar of Hayes and Burton in the first place. When Ringelstein’s campaign reached out to them, they were excited to work with the only DSA-endorsed candidate running for the U.S. Senate this election cycle.

In Means of Production’s campaign film—released late last week— they’ve cast Ringelstein as a warrior for the working class, a public school teacher and father who was compelled to run for the U.S. Senate after a student asked him one day if his family would be deported from the country. All of the working class “talent” is featured, too, including one powerful sequence that juxtaposes Ringelstein and Jim Richard, the floor refinisher, opening the rear hatch of his pickup truck. “We’re done fighting for scraps and letting the rich rig the system,” Ringelstein says as the video’s music swells to crescendo. “It’s time to start fighting for everything we deserve as the workers in this state.”

There were no references to Ringelstein’s time in Phoenix as a TFA corps member, his startup career, his stint as Zak Mountain, or the limited amount of time he’s been a Maine resident.

It is propaganda, after all.

Andrew Helms is a writer in New York.