On July 15, Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic primary for Arizona’s special election to fill the 7th congressional district seat. Grijalva will now go on to almost certain victory in the September election to fill the vacancy left by her late father, Raúl, who died in March.

Grijalva, whose father was a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, ran on a progressive platform advocating for the construction of affordable housing, rights for trans people and other members of the LGBT community, and a recognition of equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis. She was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), as well as by a slew of left-leaning organizations and labor unions.

For The New York Times, though, Grijalva’s win was evidence of a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the limits of Zohran Mamdani’s brand of politics. Baffingly, coverage of a special election in Arizona, in which the favorite candidate of the progressive ecosystem claimed a decisive victory, began with this sentence: “The Mamdani momentum withered in the deserts of southern Arizona on Tuesday night.”

The author of the piece, Jack Healy, went on to draw a false equivalence between Mamdani and another candidate in the race, Deja Foxx, whose age—Foxx is 25, while Mamdani is 33—apparently, de facto, aligned her with the Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party. Never mind that Grijalva and Mamdani shared scores of endorsers and substantial overlap in their platforms. For the Times, Grijalva’s victory was yet more evidence of Mamdani’s flailing candidacy, personal shortcomings, and general unfitness for office.

Where voters see a leadership vacuum at the head of the party, progressives are taking the reins and building creative and forward-thinking campaigns that actually challenge entrenched billionaire power and the Trumpist fascism that it enables.

Healy’s article continues a shocking trend from the Times and other mainstream media outlets that has taken hold since Mamdani’s somewhat-upset victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s June mayoral primary. The Times has reported breathlessly on the specifics of Mamdani’s college applications; penned editorials entreating him, for the millionth time, to take a more accommodationist line on Israel; and run sham non-endorsements that have veered into self-parody to such an extent that the newspaper’s behavior has sparked satire sites.

The Times’ repeated attempts to twist reality to fit a narrative depicting the collapse of progressive politics is........

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