One of the more troubling aspects of Beinart's assessment was his reduction of Pressley to an "African American woman born and raised in Chicago" to Capuano's "stronger Boston accent and Boston lineage." He fixated on the question of accents—Capuano has one; Pressley doesn't—as the test of true localness. It was a retrograde assumption that to be a true Bostonian, one must be an Irish or Italian Catholic who speaks with a thick accent. Or that majority black Roxbury, which Pressley repeatedly evoked on the campaign trail, is not real Boston. The city, according to the latest census, is 25.4 percent black, 19 percent Hispanic, 9.3 Asian, and 45.3 percent non-Hispanic white—somehow this didn't factor into his perception of localism. The Seventh itself is majority-minority district, and so the assertion that her candidacy is non-local or appealed to "Bostonians desperate to resist Donald Trump" because "she offered the stronger voice" is patently ludicrous. It was the kind of erasure of minority and low-income communities that she addressed while campaigning. Pressley certainly speaks forcefully on Trump, with clear-eyed moral fortitude, but he's typically an aside; her focus on changing the inequities in the district that, as she says, "existed long before Trump."

There was one nugget of truth in Beinart's assessment, but he got it backwards. He turned to University of Pennsylvania political scientist Dan Hopkins, who argues that "the debates in states and even some localities have taken on a national hue" and "voters today are faced with very similar choices irrespective of where they live." The instinct to apply a nationalized template to candidates, with an emphasis on corporate fundraising prowess, may apply in certain races—that may be why the Democratic party has lost 1,000 seats in the past ten years. But it's unclear how this trend applies to Pressley. Although, she campaigned on being a "bold, activist candidate" and "building a movement," it would have all meant nothing if she hadn't already spent years in the community proving to constituents that she could deliver legislation micro-targeted to their needs.

While Trump country gets treated as a curiosity with endless profiles in national publications, the new Democratic voters who are defying polls have been ignored by many in the media, who instead have relied on egghead theorizing instead of actually talking to voters. The ones that did that were able to portend Pressley's win. "Ayanna is in rooms that no other elected officials are in," Boston City Councillor Michelle Wu told The New York Times regarding Pressley's meeting with female firefighters about sexual harassment before their charges were covered by the local press. "Whenever she stands up and speaks on the floor, everybody stops and listens because she speaks with moral authority." That connection was apparent to anyone who has seen Pressley campaign. She is an exceptionally electrifying speaker and preternaturally talented politician, who comes off as open-hearted, not slick. On one of her canvassing launch stops in July, I watched as a young girl gave Pressley a tight hug for what seemed a full two minutes. At a block party in Roxbury, where she showed up unannounced, constituents crowded around her for photos with warm familiarity; Capuano, I was told, was not a known figure in the neighborhood. As it turns out, residents of the Seventh care less about accents of their politicians than whether they show up in their communities.

While some former incumbents have drifted away from the needs of their constituencies, the new Democratic rising stars are taking that old dictum "all politics are local" to a deeper level by tacking on, perhaps, the modern consciousness that all potential voters are deserving and worthy of representation.

What is perplexing is that pundits didn't need to go searching for an explanation of how Pressley won beyond, as The Boston Globe put it in its endorsement, "rare political talents, combining personal charisma with a shrewd understanding of how to translate values into policy." It was clearly laid out by her very own team. "Memo to potential candidates considering a run someday across America: our only paid television ads for the ENTIRE @ayannapressleycampaign were on Telemundo and Univision," tweeted out Alex Goldstein, a former aide to former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and advisor to the Pressley campaign. "Besides that, our message was spread entirely on the doors, phones, and via social and earned media."

In other words, the Pressley team rejected the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's model of a candidate spending the majority of his or her time on the phone, raising gobs of money from corporate donors for television ads. Instead, they shunned corporate PAC money—indeed raising less money overall than Capuano—and focused on targeting various communities. Imagine if during the 2016 election Hillary Clinton spent less time fund-raising in California and more campaigning in Wisconsin, which she didn't visit and lost by a thin margin, and boosting black turnout, which fell by eight points from 2012.