One afternoon last October, Alana Sivin and Divya Sundaram met for lunch at a falafel restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Sivin, who is thirty, and Sundaram, who is twenty-three, had become friends while working with Amplify Her, an organization that supports progressive women running for local offices. They ordered salads, and soon the conversation turned to the upcoming election for Queens District Attorney. A man named Richard A. Brown had held the title of Queens D.A. for about as long as they had been alive; now, at age eighty-six, he was not expected to run again. (Brown announced that he would not seek reëlection in January, and he died in May.) As the women talked through the list of potential candidates, they shared the same frustration: “Where are the progressive women of color in this race—somebody who can really transform that office?”

Sivin is Puerto Rican; Sundaram is Indian-American. The conversation paused, as they both skimmed their mental Rolodexes. After a few moments, Sivin came up with a name: “Tiff could run!”

Their friend Tiffany Cabán was thirty-one and born and raised in Queens, with grandparents from Puerto Rico. Sivin, who had worked with Cabán at New York County Defender Services, knew her as a “very effective” public defender who spent her days representing poor people in the criminal courthouses in Manhattan. Sivin also had a hunch that Cabán would be an excellent campaigner. A few months earlier, she had invited Cabán to South Brooklyn to volunteer for a woman running for state senate, and she had been impressed by how hard Cabán had hustled: handing out flyers to strangers, starting up conversations, winning them over.

Sivin reached for her cell phone and fired off five text messages:

Dude Run for DA in Queens Let’s make it happen You’ve got the vacation days Let’s go

Cabán ignored her entreaty. “Alana! What’s up girl!” she wrote. “Miss ya.”

Sivin responded, “I know! Now we can get to work and you can run for DA….”

“You serious?” Cabán wrote.

“Yes.”

A week later, the three women met at Maxwell’s, a bar in Tribeca, and called in another friend, Stephanie Silkowski, to help. “None of us had a ton of connections,” Silkowski, who is twenty-seven, told me. “There were no paid consultants leading the way.” One of their first tasks was to fill out the candidate questionnaire that was being circulated by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. They figured that securing the D.S.A.’s endorsement would be crucial, since, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent victory in a Bronx-Queens congressional race had shown, the D.S.A. included a large number of young people who, for the right candidate, would be willing to work very hard for free.

There was a time not long ago when a public defender would never consider running for District Attorney. Cabán told me that, when her friends first tried to persuade her to run, “It took me a while to really commit because there’s lots to reconcile there.” Her experiences as a public defender had led her to conclude that “the way that our system functions, there’s no good way to be a District Attorney, a prosecutor.” But she also kept saying to herself, “Well, somebody is going to sit in that seat.” Two years earlier, in Philadelphia, a veteran defense attorney named Larry Krasner, who had started his career as a public defender, had a similar internal debate. Three months before the primary, he entered the race for District Attorney, a seven-way contest, and stunned Philadelphia’s legal establishment by winning.

Cabán had followed Krasner’s campaign closely. “The things that he was running on—everybody wanted to call it radical reform,” she said. “What you learn doing the work if you’re a public defender, or if you’re part of the communities affected by our justice system—it’s common sense.” In his speech announcing his candidacy, Krasner declared, “We need to decarcerate. We need to get people out of jails.” He called for sending more people to drug treatment instead of prison, reforming the bail system, cracking down on police misconduct, and ending mass incarceration. “People thought he was crazy,” Cabán said, but she admired the fact that he “just did exactly what he thought was right.” Krasner became the best known of a new crop of D.A.s who call themselves “progressive prosecutors” and who have won office in recent years with the help of activists and philanthropists pushing for criminal-justice reform. Cabán also followed the work of newly elected D.A.s like Rachael Rollins, in Boston, and Wesley Bell, in St. Louis; their achievements, she said, left her “feeling encouraged and emboldened.”

When Cabán filled out the D.S.A. questionnaire, she described herself as “a proud queer Latina born and raised in Richmond Hill, Queens,” and declared that she was running for D.A. “because I am frustrated and infuriated by the system within which we operate.” Her frustration, she explained, came from “constantly seeing decision-making happen that didn’t serve any purpose,” that often seemed intended just “to punish people rather than to help make them whole and keep them rooted in their communities.” Cabán cited Krasner, who likes to refer to progressive prosecutors as “public defenders with power.” But, to Cabán, Krasner hadn’t gone far enough. “I am running to implement even more radical, necessary change,” she wrote.

Cabán promised that, if elected, she would decline to prosecute not only marijuana cases, turnstile jumping, and prostitution but also trespassing, disorderly conduct, loitering, drug possession, and welfare fraud. She attacked the “crooked bail bond industry,” and wrote, “As D.A., my position would be to end cash bail.” She said that she would “withdraw immediately” from the District Attorneys Association of New York; such organizations can have an outsized influence on criminal-justice legislation and, in her view, “tend to have regressive, racist, and classist ‘tough on crime’ mentalities.”

On January 25th, Cabán announced her candidacy. By then, three other candidates—Rory Lancman, a member of the City Council; Greg Lasak, a former judge and prosecutor; and Melinda Katz, the borough president of Queens—each had raised at least a half-million dollars. Cabán stayed at her job until March, then took a leave of absence and gave up her health insurance. (“I was offered COBRA coverage, but I couldn’t afford it,” she said.) The early months of her campaign were chaotic, in part because there was so little money to pay staffers. Her first two campaign managers left—though one stayed on as an adviser—and two volunteers took over. The New York City chapter of the D.S.A. endorsed her candidacy in February, and, in April, the Working Families Party (W.F.P.) endorsed her, too, bringing two decades of electoral experience to her campaign.

In the Democratic primary, which will be held on June 25th, Cabán faces six opponents. Voter turnout is expected to be extremely low, since there is no other major race on the ballot. In the end, Cabán’s fate will likely be determined by her campaign’s ability to persuade people who wouldn’t typically vote in this election to go to the polls—the same strategy that propelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into Congress. “In theory, there were a million things against her,” Bill Lipton, the director of the New York State Working Families Party, said of Cabán. “She’s thirty-one, she’s not a prosecutor, she doesn’t have enough money.” But, Lipton added, “She’s a really good candidate. On the stump, she’s really strong—charismatic, authentic, honest.” While Cabán is certainly the underdog, Lipton insists, “Victory is possible.”