A far-left progressive who won big in Pennsylvania says his election should be a lesson for national Democrats

Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner won the race for Philadelphia district attorney Tuesday in a blowout.
The election saw a boost in turnout of nearly 75,000 over the last competitive DA's race.
Krasner says the enthusiasm around his campaign should be a lesson to the Democratic Party that it should be "

Civil rights attorney Larry Krasner won the race for Philadelphia District Attorney Tuesday in what can only be described as a blowout. Philadelphia voters provided him with a mandate to pursue the kind of drastic criminal justice reform he touted on the campaign trail.

With 98% of precincts reporting by Wednesday morning, Krasner had taken just under 75% of the vote. While his predecessor, Seth Williams,

"Yeah I think that there's something going on. I think it's real," Krasner said.

"I think the Democratic Party should be madly wrapping its loving arms around progressives," he added.

Prominent African-American lawyer Michael Coard, who has worked on activist cases with Krasner for a decade, told Business Insider that a "sleeping giant" of progressive Philadelphians and communities of color had "woken" this year to campaign, canvass, or vouch for Krasner.

When Business Insider asked Krasner about the enthusiasm for his campaign, and the excitement generated by a series of ads aired by the Soros-funded Public Safety and Justice PAC during the primary that centered his legal advocacy for Black Lives Matter and the Occupy Movement, he said it taught him a lot about what voters — and specifically Democratic voters — are looking for in 2017.

Heres Krasner on voters in 2017 and the Democratic Party:

Business Insider:

Krasner:

I think that if Democrats would come out for that, then you would see a lot of rural areas that went for Trump where there's little pickup trucks going to the polls, with guys who have beards and they have ponytails and they have a gun rack in the back, and they would be voting for recreational marijuana because they know it makes sense too. They know that the reality is that where it's readily available you have a 25 percent reduction in opioid/opiate fatalities. That is a national catastrophe. They know that at least the states that get in early are going to have tremendous tax funds that they can use to bolster education.

The Democratic Party has got to stop running around trying to be close to the Republican Party. Bernie [Sanders] made that clear ..."

In numerous majority-minority neighborhoods, Krasner netted more than 1,000 votes more during the May primary than Williams, the city's first black district attorney, did during the 2009 primary. Neighborhood vote totals for the general election have yet to be released, but considering the overall turnout bump, one would expect to see similar gains.

By the Krasner campaign's account, Krasner's strongest voter demographic was African-American women, which he attributed to their understanding of the criminal justice system he has proposed to reform.

William Wagner, a canvasser for the ACLU's "Smart Justice" campaign in Philadelphia and and a formerly incarcerated person, put it this way: "Voting for a DA, where I come from, is something that we don't care about."

But this year was different, he said, because "the candidates are specifically campaigning on the issues that we want our constituents to vote for."