When Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 2016, her campaign largely wrote off Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Sure, the Clinton campaign extended some political courtesy to the left-wing of the party. But by and large, the Bernie base was cast aside. After all, how could Donald Trump ever beat the most qualified presidential candidate in history? Now, as the Democratic Party heads into the 2020 election grappling with the all too real threats of a Trump presidency, there is a recognition within the Joe Biden campaign and the party establishment that every vote counts and the enthusiasm rests with the progressive wing. Progressives, seizing on the political moment, are leveraging the establishment’s fear of alienating the base into real political power. Nowhere is this more clear than in California where, over the weekend, Sanders’s delegates secured a major victory.

After two weeks of frenetic organizing at the grassroots level, delegates selected Congressman Ro Khanna and Congresswoman Barbara Lee to lead the state delegation to the Democratic National Convention in August in an overwhelming vote of 368 to 20. “We need to make sure that the progressive policies become part of a governing philosophy…. The question then is how do you overcome the inertia of the status quo? How do you overcome the lack of imagination of the status quo? How do you overcome the risk aversion of the status quo? And California is saying we’re going to lead,” Khanna told me. “We’re not going to stand fearful of a change. We’re not to defer to tradition and precedent. We’re not going to just swallow our largest aspirations and dreams. We’re going to push the envelope for the policies that the American people want. California will be the largest delegation at the DNC. And we’re going to be the loudest delegation when it comes to our progressive policies.”

Progressives boast that the Saturday night decision to name the two progressive lawmakers, along with Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis, as cochairs is a blow to the Democratic establishment. Tradition would dictate that Governor Gavin Newsom would be the face of the states 415 delegates, but given that Sanders won the California primary, progressives were intent on securing real representation at the convention. “There’s a lot of grassroots power in California waiting for fights like this,” Amar Shergill, the leader of the California progressive caucus, told me. “You just need to get the word out and unleash them.” In Khanna, who served as a cochair of Sanders’s 2020 campaign, and Lee, a progressive lawmaker widely recognized for her lone opposition to the 2001 war authorization against al-Qaida, progressives found their vehicles. Solis, who served as labor secretary under Barack Obama, has been described as something of a compromise.

Bracing for a virtual Democratic convention, Sanders’s delegates and progressives recognized the stakes of the cochair selection. In contrast with 2016, when Sanders’s supporters engaged in a series of direct actions on the convention floor, delegates could quite literally be muted this year. A progressive cochair was paramount. “One of the reasons we wanted to do this was to actually remind people that we won the state and build on that win,” Karen Bernal, a Sanders delegate and the immediate past chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus who helped lead the organizing efforts on the ground, told me. “We knew that even if they were to fight back hard and we would lose, it would be a very bad optic for the party…that would not communicate unity whatsoever. And as you could see from the deal that they negotiated, that was what they were after more than anything—the appearance of unity.”

When Sanders delegates first started their organizing effort, the California governor was widely viewed as the expectant heir to the chair. “Everybody I talked to had the assumption that Gavin Newsom would be the chair of the delegation,” Norman Solomon, a Sanders delegate and the national director of RootsAction.org, told me. “It was seen like a done deal.” But as the effort continued, the numbers started to shift, largely driven—Solomon explained—by younger delegates. “This was sort of a classic activism versus power brokers. This is really what it was. It was the grassroots activists who knew that we had the underground wind at our backs,” he continued.

“Certainly if Gavin would have put up that fight that would be out the window,” Bernal added, noting the California governor’s “graciousness” in stepping aside.

Shortly after the cochair decision was announced over the weekend, Newsom praised the choice on Twitter. “Never been a more urgent election—and CA Democrats have never been more energized, united and ready to elect our next President,” he wrote. “At this moment in history, I’m proud that our Delegation will be chaired by those who reflect the diversity and dynamism of our great stcate.” A source familiar with the dynamics said Newsom angled behind the scenes to hold onto the position. But a spokesperson for Newsom dismissed the notion that there was a power struggle at all; the position wasn’t even on his radar.

“[Governor] Newsom is busy leading us through the pandemic and related massive economic challenges, plus the reckoning on structural racism,” Dan Newman, a political spokesman for Newsom, told me. “His hands are beyond full with governing.” Newman noted that the governor’s office also “proactively suggested Barbara Lee be added to a unity slate that represents and reflects the nation’s most diverse state.” In a statement, Congresswoman Lee said that she had been contacted by Newsom’s team last week about the position. “He recognizes this historic moment we are in and wanted to ensure a slate that reflects the diversity of California,” Lee said of the governor. “I am honored to serve with two extraordinary cochairs and look forward to representing the most progressive, diverse, and enlightened state in the union. We all know what is at stake in this election, and Democrats are united in this fight.”

Within the Democratic Party, Newsom is hardly seen as a moderate. But much like how Nancy Pelosi, a self-described San Francisco progressive, is now seen as out of step with the left flank of her party, activists in California are frustrated that key planks of the progressive platform such as “Medicare for All” and the Green New Deal are not yet a reality in the deep-blue state. During the presidential primary, Newsom endorsed California senator Kamala Harris, and has since thrown his weight behind Biden. Yet notably for Newsom, RoseAnn DeMoro, the former head of the nurses’ union told The Atlantic earlier this year that she saw the young California governor as “Sanders’s heir apparent.” She added to the outlet, “They won’t be able to portray Gavin as an outsider in the way they try to do other progressives.”

But it is clear that the ground is shifting under the Democratic Party. “The future history inside the democratic party and in the country will be made below the conventional political radar and below the routine media capacity to see it coming,” Solomon said. “It’s that tipping point I believe that we may be approaching. And if California is a bellwether, then we’re a potential tipping point where there's a sort of a delayed effect. I would say that people in high elective office in general, they’re often literally the last to know that social movements are going to shake the ground that they stand on.”

Certainly it is hard to argue that Newsom, like all governors at the moment, doesn’t have his hands full grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread police-brutality protests. But it is also hard to discount how a speaking slot at the party convention can catapult a politician. Before his 2004 DNC speech, Obama was a little-known state senator. Newsom is among the shining stars within the Democratic Party seen as a potential future contender for the Oval Office.

For progressives, the cochair victory is viewed as more than a speaking slot. The effort to secure it reflects a change in perspective; every victory counts. The thinking goes, while Biden might be the presumptive Democratic nominee, the party platform has yet to be written. Amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, progressive policies have never made more sense. A string of primary victories and near upsets over the past week have energized progressives who see the embrace of the Khanna–Lee–Solis ticket as an acknowledgment that the left flank of the party is not to be dismissed. “It is less a show of unity and more a recognition by the establishment that the progressive movement is ascendant,” Bernal told me.

“Within the span of one week the delegates came together, whipped up hundreds of votes, and made a clear case to the state party for what they wanted,” Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley–based strategist who works with Khanna, said. “No matter who the candidate or the issue, it’s clear that the left’s ability to organize will remain a constant and they’re only growing stronger.”

California progressives see this win as a blueprint for elsewhere in the country and the first step in shaping the Golden State into the lodestar of the progressive movement, much like California was the birthplace of modern conservatism, cemented by the elections of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. “We were able to create in California a moment of unity that the rest of the country can follow. And unity doesn’t mean you compromise your values or your leaders. It means you organize around those things and make it very difficult to deny success to the movement,” Shergill told me. “If we do that in our community, it bodes well for Democratic success across the nation. And hopefully this is a story that gets retold—that if California can do it, then New York can do it and Florida and Iowa can do it. Then you really got something you can take into the campaign to defeat Trump.”

Progressives are playing the long game. “The Bernie movement and base is very, very strong, and it is going to win the future of the party. This is at heart a progressive party; it is at heart a multiracial party; and the energy of the party is with the progressive base and with the next generation,” Khanna said. “I view Biden as a bridge presidency to a progressive future.”

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