Sarahana Shrestha left her native Nepal, politically turbulent at the time, to enroll at the New York Institute of Technology just weeks before 9/11, giving her a fraught introduction to American life. She got swept up in antiwar protests, but went on to become a graphic designer. (Please look at her cards and mailers – so much snappier than the standard political sludge.) In time she met Pete Cavanaugh, now her husband, who had upstate family connections. After 15 years of working themselves into puddles in their city careers, as he told me, they decided to move upstate in 2018 for an easier life. They'd long talked politics over the kitchen table, but not until she earned her citizenship in 2019 did Shrestha feel safe advocating in public. (Perhaps she knew that as a firebrand she’d be noticed.)

Newcomers to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), they went to a coat drive in Poughkeepsie held by the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of DSA, then later joined a "Tax the Rich" phone bank. Perhaps nobody is a born canvasser or phone-banker, the two keys to grassroots campaigning, but Cavanaugh found that after some initial hesitation at cold-calling strangers, he got into a rhythm and enjoyed it. If politics is organized money vs. organized people, and you don't have the money, you have to spend a lot of time and effort to reach and rally the people. Politics is a sociable endeavor.

Both found leadership roles in MHVDSA – Cavanaugh in communications, Shrestha in eco-socialism – but they first made an improbable impact when Phil Erner asked them and a few other MHVDSA stalwarts to run his insurgent primary campaign against the Democratic leader of the Ulster County Legislature in 2021. A farmer, an activist, a "nobody" in the party establishment's eyes, Erner won his primary race by 14 votes (248 to 234) after his campaign knocked on 1,000 doors, followed up by phone calls. Both Cavanaugh and Shrestha got a rapid-fire education in grassroots campaigning.

I'd assumed that Erner's upset victory inspired Shrestha to challenge another pillar of the establishment, Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, the following year. He'd served for 26 years, chaired committees on insurance and the environment, and probably hadn't considered that anyone but a sacrificial Republican might run against him. When I met him in person at a debate, I fell for his hometown charms. He knew the family history behind every house on my block. He also looked so much like several uncles of mine, I wondered how I could possibly vote against him. But, of course, he was also the old guard. Shrestha, to me, was the upstate AOC. But it turned out that even if she'd gotten a crash course in campaign tactics in Erner's race, his upset hadn't inspired her run against Cahill. In fact, at first, she had no desire to run at all.

At MHVDSA, Shrestha co-led an eco-socialism group that took up the cause of public power. If eco-socialism sounds a little esoteric, public power sounds, well, as all-American as public schools, public highways, and public libraries. Public utilities have a long history in the United States (Nebraska has nothing but), but so do private utilities like Central Hudson under the regulatory control of the state utilities commission. Nowadays, the push is on for a Hudson Valley Power Authority act for a public buyout of Central Hudson, but in 2019 the focus was on a Build Public Renewables Act act to get the New York Power Authority, which already operates huge hydro dams at Niagara Falls and along the St. Lawrence River, to build new renewable projects as well. Shrestha joined with a statewide coalition promoting this bill with little success. (It did get adopted in 2024.) They decided to run one of their own.

At first Shrestha said "no," not once but several times. "I was really, really, against it, to be honest, because I only enjoy being behind the scenes," she told City & State. "Public speaking was my nightmare. I'm actually a pretty introverted person, so I thought it was not a right fit for me." As I read this quote, I had to smile because I consider her our most compelling speaker in local politics. (Please spare me any more Pat Ryan.) She doesn't have the rhetorical flourish of Zohran Mamdani, but she delivers a powerful lecture on the topic at hand, lately the New York Health Act she promoted at a series of town halls. She truly believes what she says and she says it with urgency. That’s no small feat in a field crowded with droners and equivocaters, politicians who get lost in government speak or learned their English from consultants.

At a retreat several NYCDSA members already in the state legislature, including Zohran Mamdani and Julia Salazar, finally prevailed upon Shrestha to run. (Her reluctance may have been an attribute. AOC also said "no" at first, a plus for the Justice Democrats wary of those itching to jump into politics.) An 80-page study had identified Assembly District 103 as ripe for insurgency. In the 2016 Democratic primary Bernie Sanders carried Ulster County by 62 percent to 34 percent over Hilary Clinton. Two years later, challenger Cynthia Nixon beat incumbent Andrew Cuomo 52 percent to 48 percent in our county's gubernatorial primary. Not just Woodstock, which I've long thought of as the People's Westchester, but Rosendale, New Paltz, and now Kingston – we live in a deep blue district with a rich progressive history.

With Cavanaugh and a few other DSA brain-trusters, Shrestha mounted a campaign that knocked on 32,000 doors. She had the perfect villain to run against – not Kevin Cahill, but Central Hudson caught up in a disastrous changeover in its billing system. Suddenly, customers were getting $1,000 bills for no reason. On primary day, she won a close but definitive victory with 7,907 votes to Cahill's 7,369 votes, the second political earthquake in two years after Erner's upset victory.

The rest, as they say, is history. Two years later she beat a young Cahill-aligned challenger by a two-to-one margin in the primary. Now she's the establishment, if still a step apart from the Ulster County Democratic party. (She allies with County Executive Jen Metzger on such efforts as the "Fair Tax" proposal for the county to add a surcharge to the state income taxes paid by the wealthiest Ulster residents as an alternative to raising county property taxes.) Next year she'll join with 11 other DSA members in the state Assembly, up from five this past year. She'll be joined by new upstate colleagues from Syracuse and Buffalo. Four DSA members will join the state Senate. You'd have to go back more than a century to find anything like this many socialists in Albany.

The MHVDSA had fallen into a slump after Biden's victory in 2020, an exhaustion after Trump, Covid, Black Lives Matter, all the tumult that seemed relieved when he took office. But Shrestha's campaign re-energized the group. Then Trump's 2024 victory sent shock waves through the progressive community. Back in 2016, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign had turbocharged the DSA, helping it grow over two years from 8,000 often-older members to 55,000 members flooded by millennials and Gen Z-ers. After Trump's 2024 return, all ages have joined the DSA, fearful of rising fascism and frustrated with the Democrats after the Biden fiasco and the unholy support for genocide in Gaza. Nationally, DSA membership has hit 120,000. At MHVDSA it has rapidly risen to 1,000. (Among the mix I've met older DSA members who've moved up from the city as well as younger activists raised on Bernie campaigns as well as longtime locals who've just seen enough of this shit.) Nationally, DSA has elected about 250 people to public office. Closer to home MHVDSA has helped elect city council members in Kingston (Michael Tierney), Poughkeepsie (Daniel Atonna), and Newburgh (Giselle Martinez). As well, there are officials who've run on their own, but have joined DSA, such as Stephanie Bassler on the Saugerties town board and Abe Uchitelle, the Democratic majority leader of the Ulster County Legislature. "I've been radicalized by the suffering of my constituents," he told me. No more incrementalism. Time to take a harder line.

All this from a dozen people who gathered in a Peekskill coffee house on a cold winter day months after Trump's 2016 triumph and decided to draw up the bylaws to establish their own Hudson Valley chapter of DSA.

Will it last? Certainly, the rise of insurgent progressive and DSA candidates has been the story line of the 2026 Democratic primaries. New York City, Philadelphia, Denver. Soon, Providence, R.I. will have a 28-year-old DSA mayor who moonlights as a professional wrestler. But are we witnessing a tectonic shift in Democratic politics? Or the crest of a wave of frustration with sclerotic party leadership?

As luck would have it, I ran into Cavanaugh reading a book on a bench outside Shrestha's town hall for the New York Health Act in Kingston. Turns out, he's inherited her fear of public speaking. He can't bear to watch, especially not when an older man in the audience addresses his wife as if these issues are too complicated for her to understand. She was taken aback by the rough-and-tumble at her first debate with Kevin Cahill, but she grew a thick skin and now remains as calm as can be when Cavanaugh drives them to events. He's the one who does the worrying. Yet he put his anxiety to good use on the bench by reading a history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Civil Rights movement. His copy had two-dozen color tabs. He wanted insights that might apply to MHVDSA, which has grown dramatically, but growth isn't without growing pains. There's the difference between paper members and the workhorses who bear the burden of such bold ambitions. People join, burn out, and leave. Cavanaugh didn't go into any details about MHVDSA, but did tell me that SNCC didn't end well. Infighting, government suppression: the story of so many groups on the American left. We're not a country that takes kindly to anti-capitalist dissent.

Back home two versions of Democratic politics lay in my mail. One card touted "Senator Michelle Hinchey Delivering For Our Community" with a stock photo of her smiling in front of an American flag. The flip-side bullet points touted her accomplishments: "Ended taxes on tips up to $25,000 … Delivered $20 million to upgrade volunteer firehouses and equipment … " How depressing, this bragging about being a technocratic fixer in an Albany government that's so stagnant in the face of the crises of our times: prices, housing, global warming, our vast income inequality. Has Hinchey no greater ambition than to reassure us she'll keep the government bureaucracy creaking in our favor? (To be fair, Cavanaugh and other progressives are fans of Hinchey, even if her mailers abide by hoary political conventions I can't stand.) But this is the traditional local Democratic message: we're busy working on your behalf while you go about your life. Call us if you have a problem with your Social Security check.

From Sarahana Shrestha, however, I've gotten a jolt of excitement -- "A People's Report," a four page flier boldly designed in red and black and chock full of dramatic facts and figures. Not for her little legislative wins and doling out grants. (Okay, she does share a photo promoting a $100,000 grant she helped get for the Glasco Fire Department.) She's using this flier to advocate for fundamental change, the NY Health Act that promises to cut costs for 90 percent of us. It's not a new proposal – it has long been a goal for the MHVDSA – but she wants to revive support by hosting town halls and encouraging readers to complete an online questionnaire. Not unlike the knock on my front door back in the spring of 2022, when two canvassers first introduced me to Sarahana Shrestha as a candidate, this flier is an invitation to participate, to get out of my pajamas and bathrobe and go forth to change the world for the better, at least a little bit. I may not be a good socialist, but I'm definitely a civic dreamer.

(My thanks to Peter Frase, Pete Cavanaugh, Leanna Zilles, Niklas Moran, and Phil Erner for interviews that informed this history. Any mistakes are mine.)