Last week, former public defender Tiffany Cabán ended her insurgent campaign to become the next Queens district attorney, effectively closing the final chapter of the hotly contested, seven-way Democratic primary. During an emotional concession speech at an appreciation party for her supporters last Tuesday, Cabán remained defiant. “There is still so much work to be done in Queens and beyond. And you better believe I’m going to keep on fighting,” she said to thunderous applause. “We got work to do.”

After first declaring victory to a jubilant crowd of supporters on June 25 with an 1,100-vote lead over establishment candidate and Queens borough president Melinda Katz, Cabán saw her lead evaporate when Katz not only made up the deficit but took a sixteen-vote lead once absentee votes were counted the following day. The slim margin of victory triggered a manual recount that dragged on for weeks, concluding with the NY Board of Elections certifying Katz as the winner. As a last resort, Cabán’s team launched an expensive legal challenge arguing that a number of affidavit ballots were wrongly invalidated. However, after a series of hearings, Judge John G. Ingram ruled not to open a set of affidavit ballots that failed to properly state the voter’s political party affiliation. This left the Cabán campaign with little wiggle room to maneuver. With few options left, Cabán was forced to concede to Katz.

Yet, a week after the turmoil of a campaign, Cabán doesn’t view her defeat as a failure — her progressive message, she says, resonated with voters. If anything, her campaign and the grassroots movement it helped spearhead represent an affirmation of her beliefs. “Our campaign changed the debate around criminal justice reform. We’ve helped make issues like the decriminalization of sex work, bail reform, and the overcriminalization of poverty part of the national conversation,” she told Jacobin. “Perhaps most importantly, we talked about addressing the root causes of crime and the systemic oppression and inequities driving it. We drove conversations about our responsibility to center public health and public safety outcomes, and said it’s time to divest from a culture of convictions at all costs that has not made us safer and has devastated our black and brown communities.”