When I first met David Morales it was December 2019, and I was standing in David’s ill-lit bachelor apartment as he announced to a small holiday party full of socialists that he intended to run for state representative. I was skeptical. David was young—only 21 at the time—just recently graduated, and not a native Rhode Islander in a state where that kind of thing still matters. The Providence neighborhood where he was living, Mount Pleasant, was a working- and middle-class, historically Irish and Italian part of town that had an emerging Latino majority and had also begun to see an influx of younger liberals. But longtime residents tend to dominate primaries, and the district was not yet, in my mind, a ripe target for a Bernie Sanders–inspired electoral challenge.…