Teachout is another type of force entirely, a professor with expertise on both corruption and the Constitution, whose skills seem uniquely tailored to this strange moment in American politics. She may never occupy the office—she’s tied for second in a four-person race, with close to half of likely voters undecided—but her anti-Trump battle plan has already shaped the contours of the race, with other occupants competing to out-anti-Trump one another, virtually guaranteeing the office will have a strong focus on the president. Nationally, it represents maybe the most extreme example of a specific new theory of Democratic politics: that the President of the United States represents a red-level threat alert to the republic, and that the first job of Democratic politicians, and especially Democratic prosecutors, is to stop him.

“We need someone in the AG’s office who is going to dig under every rock,” she says, promising “new tools” and “cutting-edge theories” about how a state-level prosecutor can go after the business, charity and personal empire of a sitting president.