Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.

In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate who emerged after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25).

After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an “improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.

NBC News (11/4/25) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.

This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers, young people and first-time voters who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25) and Jacobin (7/15/25), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how they were able to succeed against such long odds.

Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats, which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.

These groups also spent years planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani’s campaign was the opposite of the Times‘ characterization as being “built from nothing in a matter of months.”

As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”

Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.

Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.

One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.

The New York Times (9/17/25) wrote about a new........

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