Positions available: candidates for 1998; long hours, low pay.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Grassroots Democratic House campaigns

Dubuque grandmother Donna Smith was innocent enough to believe that winning elections in America had more to do with raising issues than raising money. Her naivete almost got her elected to Congress.

Outspent by a margin of ten to one, matched against one of Newt Gingrich's top lieutenants, abandoned by the national Democratic Party, Smith committed herself to a populist platform that rendered her of no interest to the special interests. The pundits wrote her off as a political nonentity. But on Election Day, 1996, she won almost 48 percent of the vote, nearly defeating Jim Nussle, the entrenched Republican in charge of managing Newt Gingrich's takeover of the House.

"We were on our own. We didn't have any consultants telling us what we couldn't do," says Smith. "So we went back to the grassroots and ran the kind of campaign Democrats should be running."

The story of Smith's challenge to Nussle is more than a hopeful anecdote from the never-ending campaign trail. It could serve as a model for grassroots progressives.

"The system is far more vulnerable than Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich would let on," says Bernie Sanders, the independent U.S. Representative from Vermont. "I think there are openings. Not easy openings. But openings for progressives to run class-based, grassroots campaigns that challenge not just Republican incumbents but the whole system."

Walter Holden Capps mounted one such challenge. In 1994, the University of California at Santa Barbara religion professor was the Democrats' sacrificial lamb in the race for a California seat that the GOP had held since World War II. Badly outspent in a district famous as the scenic spot where Ronald Reagan maintains a ranch, Capps defended the rights of illegal immigrants, endorsed same-sex marriage and gays in the military, and called for broader protection of the environment. Asked about proposals to eliminate welfare, Capps said, "I wouldn't eliminate programs that are the reason we have government--to help those families and individuals that can't help themselves."

Political consultants labeled the Capps approach a roadmap to oblivion. But the professor, who had never before sought public office, got 49 percent of the vote in the face of the 1994 Republican landslide. He came back in 1996 and won the seat with ease. Tragically, Capps died of a sudden heart attack in October 1997, but his wife, Lois, who is equally progressive, appears to be a frontrunner to hold the seat in an early...