Tuesday’s news from Massachusetts, where the Boston city councilwoman Ayanna Pressley beat the congressman Michael Capuano, a ten-term incumbent, in a Democratic congressional primary, wasn’t notable because of the ideological stakes of the contest—the two candidates “agree on almost everything,” Boston Magazine said in a recent feature—but in spite of them. “Capuano made his political name as the mayor of Somerville, Massachusetts. And he was mayor during a time when Somerville got much more attractive and vital. He’s been a congressman for nearly twenty years, and he’s been notably progressive and quite prominent within the Massachusetts delegation,” The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells told me on Wednesday, when we talked about race. “But the last decade has been a time when the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives has not been especially successful. And Pressley, in running, made a kind of Overton-window argument, saying, ‘We need to be pushing the buck more. We need to be more aggressive in moving the party to the left. You need, in this district—because of how progressive this district is—you need someone who is going to be out front, leading the charges.’ ”

Pressley wasn’t putting herself forward as a democratic socialist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who successfully challenged the New York congressman Joe Crowley from the left. And she wasn’t a first-time Democratic candidate like Conor Lamb, a more moderate figure who, in March, won a special House election in Pennsylvania, in a district that had voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016. Pressley is a veteran politician—she joined the Boston City Council in 2009, the first black woman elected to that body—who had come up working as an aide to Representative Joseph Kennedy II and Senator John Kerry. An insider’s outsider. “From the beginning of the primary campaign, she had sought to position herself as a more unabashedly progressive figure,” Wallace-Wells said. “I think there is something significant in that. As we end the primaries and go into the general-election campaigns, what we’re seeing again and again is a kind of radicalization of the Democratic establishment. Andrew Gillum in Florida. Beto O’Rourke in Texas. These are candidates, who have been seen as talented up-and-comers within the Democratic Party for many years, feeling a freedom to be a more progressive version of themselves.” Something else that unites Pressley with O’Rourke and Gillum is her age. “We’ve seen in these midterms that there are many politicians in their forties who have been able to speak very effectively to the current mood within their party, and to marry a sense of the Democratic coalition with a more progressive policy vision for the country,” Wallace-Wells said. “Pressley is among these—in her victory over Capuano, the clearest differentiation between the two candidates was not ideological, but generational.”