“The time stands still,’” said Cynthia Goldberg, the director of the F8 Foundation. “The moment you see your family, you feel as if you're taken off of life support and you can breathe.”

Change has come, gone away and come again in the realm of U.S. politics. But this moment in Democratic politics seems particularly potent: in state after state, the narrow, ironclad profile of who can run and who can win at the highest levels of politics has been irreversibly expanded.