At nineteen, in 2016, Gabriel Sanchez cast his first vote: for Bernie Sanders. Now, at twenty-six, Sanchez has just launched his campaign for Georgia state house and was endorsed by the Atlanta chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) last week.

Sanchez, who grew up in the northwest Atlanta suburb of Marietta, told Jacobin by phone late last week that he wasn’t politically active until the Bernie campaign, but he’s had socialist values for much longer. His parents immigrated from Colombia in 1996, and he was born the following year. His mother was a hostess in a restaurant, and his father worked as a bartender and as a fry cook for McDonald’s, among other jobs. After the 2008 financial crisis, the family had to move to Miami for a while because “there was no work” in Georgia, Sanchez recalls. He remembers realizing for the first time how easily the volatility of the economic system could upend his working-class family.

If Sanchez wins, his electoral victory would be a first for the Atlanta DSA chapter, a dynamic one that has been growing steadily — hundreds of new members and thousands of new supporters this year alone — due to its popular work on reproductive rights, labor, and especially as part of the coalition working to stop Cop City, a proposed police training center threatening to destroy a beloved forest, militarize law enforcement, and inflict further violence on poor and working-class residents (disproportionately black and brown). Sanchez has been a field leader in that effort, organizing volunteer canvassers to collect thousands of petition signatures this summer to trigger a referendum. Though the city has been stalling, Sanchez and his supporters hope the Cop City question will be on the ballot in 2024.