On April 12, Senator Ed Markey tweeted a simple PSA encouraging constituents to practice social distancing and to “wear a mask.” The message included a picture of Markey wearing a Boston Red Sox–branded face mask and stuffing his hands into a quilted car coat, but it was his shoes that were largely responsible for the post’s more than 2,000 retweets and 13,000 likes. Markey was wearing an original pair of Nike Air Revolutions, an iconic but niche basketball mid-top that he has owned since their initial 1987 release. The response from his plugged-in supporters was nothing short of total adoration. “Everything about him is good, down to the kicks,” tweeted one user. “[Fire] kicks, Senator!!” wrote another. “Ed turn off the faucet the drip is too strong,” added a third, whose tweet was joined by a chorus of fire and water emojis. 

Throughout the spring and for much of the summer, Markey’s chances of reelection looked somewhat dire—Congressman Joe Kennedy III entered the contentious primary race as the perceived frontrunner, and polls in June showed Markey down by double digits against Kennedy, a slightly more moderate Democrat roughly half Markey’s age with a Clark Kent forehead curl and a nostalgia-laden last name. With Massachusetts going through a statewide coronavirus shutdown at the time, Markey’s options to win over voters on the campaign trail seemed slim, his 47-year political career destined to end in crushing defeat. To say that Markey’s chances were revitalized by a single tweet (and a single pair of basketball shoes) is probably overstating things. But it is true that he’s now polling ahead in Tuesday’s Senate primary thanks to a dramatic swell in younger supporters—an outcome that would reaffirm the power of progressives after both a Democratic convention that arguably saw them sidelined and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi throwing her political capital behind the Kennedy heir at the eleventh hour.

While Markey clearly loves his vintage sneakers, if you ask him how he’s managed to win over the coveted youth vote—which has earned him a passionate “stan” army on Twitter and helped him become one of the few U.S. politicians to effectively use TikTok—he doesn’t cite Nike’s “it’s gotta be the shoes” slogan. “When I talk about the climate crisis, that’s an issue that has galvanized young people across the whole country,” he told me during a recent phone interview from his campaign bus. “It’s very obvious to me that my work on the climate is important to young people, because what they say to me is, ‘This is life and death,’ and climate change is the issue that they want resolved.” 

Markey’s climate change record intersects with another huge reason for his campaign’s groundswell of young support: he is being endorsed by 30-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he cosponsored the Green New Deal, and has received backing from progressive groups like the Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement. The alliance between Ocasio-Cortez and Markey, who is now beating Kennedy by 11 points in the race’s RealClearPolitics polling average, makes him a valuable asset for young leftists looking for any representation they can get in Washington, especially in the aftermath of Senator Bernie Sanders’s demoralizing defeat in the presidential primary. 

There are other areas where Markey is in sync with the younger generation. He struggled with student loans like many Americans, who as of January 2020 owed a collective $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt. “I did not pay back my student loans until I was in my sixth year in the United States Congress,” he told me, adding that he lived at home and was a commuter student during his time at Boston College Law School. “[My brothers and I] needed student loans, but we also needed to have jobs back then. I worked in a factory here in Malden; I worked in supermarkets; I worked in a warehouse and had a midnight-to-8 a.m. shift…and in the morning, I drove an ice cream truck.” After listing what he did to make it through college, Markey noted that the problems facing students today “dwarf anything that my generation had to carry. And we have a responsibility to those families, especially Black and brown families, that we provide free public community college, free public universities in our country, and that we begin a program of college-debt relief for every student.” 

If Markey’s post back in April jump-started his campaign, an ad released earlier this month served as a nitrous oxide injection straight to the engine, taking his youth support to new heights. The movie-trailer-style three-minute clip details Markey’s working-class, union upbringing and highlights some of the hundreds of laws he’s helped pass throughout his tenure. Rather than leaning on a professional narrator, Markey tells his own story in his Bay State accent that’s all but impossible not to like, set to a rock and roll score. His opponent isn’t mentioned in the ad, but Markey drops several clever references to the most famous quote from the most famous Kennedy. “We asked what we could do for our country. We went out. We did it,” he says. “With all due respect, it’s time to start asking what your country can do for you.” 

Throughout the video, Markey shows unabashed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, describing the protests as a response to the government breaking a “sacred contract” with its citizens. In another part of the video, Markey is shown walking through his hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, as the camera zooms in on his favorite pair of Nikes: the Air Revolutions. The sneaker shot, which echoed Markey’s first TV ad this cycle, is a particularly clever Easter egg for his supporters, both a subliminal exclamation point on his “revolution” messaging and a callback to the shoes that introduced so many very online young people to his campaign. “The reason I like these sneakers is that [they’re] a perfect metaphor for the Green New Deal,” Markey said when I asked him whether his choice of footwear was intentional. “Because that’s what we need: an air revolution. A clean-air revolution. And so for me, it’s a perfect metaphor for what our country has to do so that we lead the world to a safer, healthier future.”

If 2016 taught politicians anything, it’s that co-opting pop-culture references to pander to young people does not work—think “Pokémon GO to the polls” and whipping and nae nae-ing on Ellen. But Markey’s “air revolution” dad joke suits his persona in a way that doesn’t feel forced. It’s also a sincere double entendre: he has a deep connection to a piece of popular culture that appeals to young voters, and he’s using it to offer them the kinds of radical climate policies that, if enacted, would lead to material changes in their lives. 

In the history of American electoral politics, this is the first time Brendan Dunne, general manager of the sneaker-centric blog Sole Collector and cohost of the sneaker talk show Full Size Run, has seen a politician use sneakers “to say something so definitive.” Dunne told me that Markey’s Air Revolutions stand out for a couple reasons: it’s not a pair the average consumer would easily recognize, but the shoes were highly influential at the time of their release, given that they were among the first releases to show off the Nike Air’s “bubble” technology in a visible way—a development that contributed to Nike becoming the top U.S. sneaker brand. “You have to be a few layers deep into sneakers to know about the Revolution,” Dunne said, a point confirmed by Politico and New York magazine reports that misidentified them. He added that it would be “way too obvious” for a politician to pander to young people by flaunting, say, a pair of Yeezys or Off-White Air Jordans. “It’s the fact that he’s actually wearing something from an era when he got a lot of use out of it—the context makes sense, and it feels more authentic.”

Markey, who uses the 33-year-old shoes like a ’90s Toyota Camry pushing 300,000 miles, recently got them back from the cobbler—or, as he described it, sent them “off to the Air Revolution hospital” to have them “glued“ back together—just in time for his return to the campaign trail ahead of the September 1 primary. And they’re just as much of a fan favorite in-person as they are in his Twitter ’fit pics. “Let me see those shoes!” one young supporter yelled during a socially distanced campaign stop, according to a Boston Globe report last week that noted how “Markey shimmied his sneakers into the frame for a selfie.” 

He’ll wear them until they wear out—an embodiment, he explained to me, of his working-class mentality, and a symbolic reminder to strive for something better. “From my perspective, Caleb, my basketball shoes have always been aspirational,” he said. “And when you put them on, you know you’re dreaming, you’re thinking of what the future is all about. So that’s how I’ve always felt about my basketball shoes—that’s why I still wear them. I get up in the morning and put them on. When I’m going to sleep at night, I take them off. So that’s who I am. And that’s who I’ve always been.”

— An Oral History of the Protest Movement’s First Days
— How America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers Stifles Reform
— Fox News Staffers Feel Trapped in the Trump Cult
— The Tale of How a Saudi Prince Disappeared
— Ta-Nehisi Coates Guest-Edits THE GREAT FIRE, a Special Issue
— New Postal Service Plans Sets Off Election Alarms
— Stephen Miller and His Wife, Katie, Found Love in a Hateful Place
— From the Archive: Rupert Murdoch’s New Life

— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive the September issue, plus full digital access, now.