It’s a few hours before polls close in Michigan, and Rebecca Katz is alone in front of the stage at the Majestic Theatre in Midtown Detroit, pacing. Her candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, is scheduled to have his Election Night party here, and over the last week of the race, his campaign has expressed extreme outward confidence. Polls show him likely to win in a blowout against Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. The expectation is a short night and a victory speech early in the evening.

But Katz looks miserable, hunched over her phone, twitching, texting reporters and campaign staff, trying to keep an even keel as press file into the auditorium. Michigan is one of the last contested primaries of the year, one of the final places for the left wing of the Democratic Party to stake its claim. Control of the Senate next year, as well as greater checks on Donald Trump’s powers, could hang in the balance. And El-Sayed’s numbers are not looking great. Katz knows if things hold and he does not win easily, with a broad coalition, the party’s trust in his ability to win the November general election will be shaken.

The child of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed has campaigned for the Senate on his support for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending military aid to Israel. If elected in November, he has suggested he would not support Senator Chuck Schumer’s bid for Democratic leader of the body. The idea that El-Sayed could win the nomination would have been laughable a few years ago — when he ran for governor in 2018, he lost in the Democratic primary by 22 points.

Schumer and most of the rest of the Democratic Establishment lined up against him, as they have against Katz’s clients throughout her career: Graham Platner, the upstart progressive from Maine who chased a governor out of the Senate race; Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx principal who defeated a 16-term incumbent congressman; Senator John Fetterman, the Hells Angels look-alike whom elected Democrats disregarded; and even Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who did not receive the endorsement of party leaders until well after he had secured the Democratic nomination.

In all of those cases, Katz’s candidates won, and she provided crucial strategic advice. However, while there have been a lot of victories, there have also been a number of high-profile disasters. Fetterman has become the Democrats’ No. 1 troll, a Fox News regular who has distanced himself from the party. Bowman lost his reelection bid after a series of blunders, which included pulling a fire alarm during a vote in the House of Representatives. Accusations of sexual assault against Platner, which he denies, have put the Democrats’ hopes of taking the Senate in jeopardy.

El-Sayed is running in Michigan, a traditional home of the working-class, lunch-bucket Democrat and a state President Trump has won twice. It is close to mandatory for Democrats to succeed here. In the Majestic Theatre, no one — especially not Katz — needs to be reminded that there is a lot riding on her unorthodox ideas about who can win a big election in a purple Rust Belt state.

Ever since the Platner implosion, Katz has laid out to me her theory of politics, why it is not crazy to bet on El-Sayed — in fact, why it would be wrong to do the opposite and assume an Establishment candidate could win. She has done it over the course of weeks in near-daily phone calls and texts. Between arguments about why her formula would help Democrats win, she would also make a case for why I shouldn’t write an article about her. When we meet in her office in a tower in Downtown Brooklyn overlooking the Manhattan skyline, the pattern continues. I take out my phone and laptop; she says, “I am not sure I am agreeing to this.” And then Katz proceeds to talk for the next three hours. Often, she interrupts herself to ask who else I was talking to and what they were saying; she asks what the story would really be about. “How about the tension in my own soul?” she suggests, half in jest.

But the reason I am talking to Katz is obvious. Fight Agency, the political-consulting firm she co-founded a little over a year and a half ago with veteran ad makers Tommy McDonald and Julian Mulvey — later bringing in, among others, the 27-year-old wunderkind of left-wing politics, Morris Katz (no relation) — seems to have unlocked a secret for unlikely victories in American politics. For the midterms, the agency has orchestrated the campaigns of underdog and outsider candidates who have won key Democratic Party primaries. Fight’s victories have left the Establishment in a funny position. Despite many of them inveighing against her candidates for months, Democrats now need Katz’s theory of the electorate to work to win back Congress.

Some in the Establishment worry it is a foolish bet on novices aligned with an insurgency from the Democratic Socialists of America. Fight’s roster represents the left edge of the possible in American politics. The candidates chosen are in many cases making their first run for political office. Before the campaign, Platner was an oysterman who had served in the military; El-Sayed was a county public-health official; Dan Osborn, another Fight client mounting a second independent candidacy for a Senate seat in Nebraska, was a mechanic. Bob Brooks, a Fight client hoping to flip a congressional seat in Pennsylvania, was head of a firefighters union. In her work, Katz is explicitly looking for normal people who come from normal backgrounds, not carefully groomed career politicians. “The era of the perfect candidate is over,” she says, repeating a line she often uses when pitching her work. “You’re not looking for a candidate with perfect hair and a perfect life.”

The idea is a direct challenge to strategic orthodoxy in American politics. The way running a campaign is usually understood is that you need to convince some portion of the people who voted for the other party last time to vote for you this time. It’s why Democratic leaders have been optimistic heading into the midterms; as the president’s approval rating sags, Democrats just need some regretful Trump voters to flip. So party leadership has tried to recruit candidates who reassure persuadable Republicans — candidates who aren’t too woke, too left, too radical. Candidates who make people feel they can safely vote for a Democrat and it won’t mean prisons will be abolished, borders eliminated, or the internal-combustion engine outlawed.

Fight’s operating theory is sometimes described as the belief that the true path to victory lies in left-wing populism. But the fact that these candidates are all on the left is, Katz tells me, not her focus. She is far from a wild-eyed socialist or a fire-breathing revolutionary, despite having spent almost a decade and a half pulling the party in a more progressive direction. Katz says her choices are instead based on a belief that Democrats keep getting in their own way by nominating milquetoast candidates who play in the familiar battle lines of partisan politics.

“It’s harder to get candidates who are more in........

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