In New York, public polling as recently as last week showed that a majority of New Yorkers supported the state’s deal with Amazon. But Amazon’s opponents among community groups, unions and public officials were fierce, and they held the power to stymie the deal.

In the short time since Amazon first announced its search for a new headquarters in 2017, the political climate in a liberal city like New York has also turned decidedly against big corporations (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes part of Queens, hailed the defeat of “Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world”).

What is perhaps most revealing, however, lies in the package Amazon will take from Virginia. Company officials said many times over the past year that subsidies weren’t the primary driver of its decision, although the premise of the public auction seemed to be that few would believe them. In fact, Amazon rejected the biggest offers on the table. It didn’t take the $7 billion, or the $8.5 billion, or the $9.7 billion.

Amazon chose Virginia, even when Maryland offered it access to the same labor market for 10 times as much money. The other differences between the two bids — Maryland offered a far less desirable site — are precisely the kinds of details that matter more. Virginia’s offer was relatively modest and straightforward, with subsidies for each high-paying job created in the coming years, and a grant from Arlington County tied to growth in local hotel tax revenue.

Virginia also pledged to invest about $200 million in improving infrastructure around Amazon’s campus, but that’s money that will directly benefit local residents as much as Amazon’s employees.

That package still angers some Virginia residents who believe that one of the world’s richest companies doesn’t need any incentives at all. But it’s a comfort to critics that the windfall is so far from their worst Amazon fears. If Amazon’s goal was to get the locations many people expected it to choose anyway to pay as much as possible, that is not how the story ended.

Amazon wanted to be in Northern Virginia, but the region was savvier than most about its incentives. Amazon wanted to be in New York, but its push for incentives — and insistence on secrecy along the way — directly undermined the deal. The politics of all of this grew even worse once New Yorkers realized they would pay so much more for the same prize in Virginia.