On its surface, that seems to suggest the revolution mostly involves voting. But to stick with the college tuition example, voting for president or even House and Senate candidates won’t suffice. Education, as Hillary Clinton points out, is almost entirely the purview of states and local districts, and that is especially true of the public colleges Sanders hopes to make tuition-free. (Federal military academies, like West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, are already more or less free for students.)

For the Sanders plan to work, his civic revolutionaries would have to fill statehouses with governors willing to either allocate state resources to the free-tuition plan (which would probably also require sympathetic state legislatures), or hand a good deal of control of their state universities over to the federal government.

The upside of this sort of ballot-box revolution is that once you get simpatico lawmakers in power, you’re good for the rest of the election cycle — if they support free tuition, they are probably on board for other big aspects of the Sanders revolution. But running campaigns takes time, good candidates, and money — and since the Sanders plan gets rid of super PACs and “big money” donations, that means a lot of fundraising calls, and lots of volunteers.