That process has been led by Rep. John Sarbanes, a six-term congressman from Maryland who became a fierce advocate of campaign finance reform after growing frustrated with the way political candidates are pressured to raise money from big donors.

Sarbanes had long been determined to try to shake things up. “I just woke up one day and — I just can’t keep doing this the same old way,” he told HuffPost in 2013.

He ran a personal experiment during his own campaign mimicking, if only crudely, the New York City public campaign funding system that provides $5 in public funds for every $1 raised in small donations. It may have been a gimmick, but the congressman took it seriously and turned his experiment into a personal cause to make publicly financed congressional campaigns a reality. He convinced enough of his colleagues to support it, and he became the leading reform voice in the House.

This successful advocacy within the caucus moved Pelosi to appoint him as head the party’s Democracy Reform Task Force in February 2017. He set out to craft and build support for democracy reform legislation and respond to the endless stream of ethical malfeasance emanating from the Trump administration. Pelosi empowered Sarbanes and the task force by putting no limits on its work.

“She wasn’t prescriptive beyond saying, in a sense, collect the best evidence as to where and how our democratic system is failing and start assembling good ideas and proposals for how we can fix that,” Sarbanes said.

With the help of a diverse group of vice chairs, Sarbanes held town halls and roundtables around the country, meeting with pollsters and reform advocates and debating legislation with fellow lawmakers. This enabled the task force to build broad-based support and empower lawmakers from every part of the country.

“He’s a mighty leader of a broad coalition,” Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.) said of Sarbanes.

The final product includes Sarbanes’ own public financing bill, Rep. Terri Sewell’s (D-Ala.) legislation to reinstate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Rep. Mark Pocan’s (D-Wis.) bills to require paper ballots for voting machines, Kuster’s legislation banning members from using taxpayer funds to settle sexual harassment claims and the work of Rep. Marc Veasey’s (D-Texas) Voting Rights Caucus in pushing ways to increase absentee and early voting and raise the funding for election infrastructure.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s election, the ensuing ethical morass of his corrupt administration and the steady flow of criminal convictions of his campaign officials helped inject the task force with an urgency to put a different face out there.

“It made the mission of the task force that much more critical and brought us to a place where essentially we wanted to be ready at the first opportunity to put a different vision of how the system should operate forward,” Sarbanes said.

The work of the task force was rolled into Democrats’ campaign messaging as the “Better Deal for Our Democracy” in May. Candidates had already adopted reformist postures on their own by rejecting corporate PAC contributions and endorsing broad reforms. These ideas were popular topics on the campaign trail, where voters held strong beliefs that nothing could be done in Washington because of the corrupting influence of money.