When civil-rights attorney Larry Krasner won the Democratic primary for district attorney here last spring, it made national headlines—not because he won with a large margin, which he did, but because in a race crowded with progressives, he stood distinctly in left field.

Krasner was the outsider candidate, offering voters zero experience as a prosecutor. As a defense attorney, he sued the Philadelphia Police Department dozens of times and represented Occupy and Black Lives Matter activists pro bono. And while his primary opponents were reformers, too, only he had spent decades litigating against the office all were vying to lead. Put simply: “I’ve spent a career becoming completely unelectable,” as Krasner joked at a recent debate.

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“I think that it helps to have experience as a prosecutor if you want to do a good job running a prosecutor’s office, just as running any office is easier if you have a handle on the workings of an organization. And [it] gives you credibility dealing with staff and other stakeholders in the criminal-justice system,” said David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor who studies the role of prosecutors. Still, there can be an advantage to coming in as an outsider, Sklansky said, because the DA will be better positioned to “make a clean break from past patterns that have not been helpful.”