It’s that authentic movement connection, more than a simple national endorsement, that helps candidates galvanize people and win. “All these candidates got elected mainly because they had established a base from the work they have been doing in their communities, or as elected officials,” Robertson says. “What they’re getting from the Bernie campaign is to be able to form a coalition with populist-leaning progressive white folks on a scale that has not been seen for quite a long time.”

Larry Krasner, a civil-rights attorney who won a shocking victory in May’s Democratic primary to be Philadelphia’s district attorney, told The Dig podcast that his work as a lawyer defending movements gave him a campaign army when he decided to run. “I think activists and organizers do politics better than politicians,” he said. “And that means that those of us who have been down with their causes and have supported them for a long time have credibility.”

In some places, newer faces on the scene have established credibility by leading newer movements. Atlanta’s khalid kamau (a Yoruba name, and thus lowercased)—a DSA member and co-founder of Atlanta Black Lives Matter and “fight for $15” stalwart—stunned the local Democrats by winning a city council seat in April.

The more radical demands of the newer movements have shifted the left’s political horizons and sharpened its demands. And its organizing skills and social-media savvy laid a path for activists like Krasner and kamau to move from relative obscurity to national name recognition. “Social movements expand the range of the possible and transform public opinion,” says Joe Dinkin of the WFP. “Larry never could have won had the Black Lives Matter movement not existed these last several years. The Black Lives Matter movement transformed how Americans thought about policing and about mass incarceration.”

Some of the recent wins attributed to the “Bernie left” are the product of decades of planning through what were very dark times for social movements. The victory of Chokwe Antar Lumumba in this year’s Jackson, Mississippi, mayor’s race was the product of decades of work that had first borne fruit in 2013 with the election of Lumumba’s father, also Chokwe Lumumba, to that same office. The first Lumumba’s untimely death in office put the plans the Jackson organizers had made on hold for a while, but they’d been building a movement from the ground up in Jackson since 9/11. That’s when the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, known nationally for its work calculating how many black people in America are killed by police each year, decided to focus its efforts on transforming Jackson’s economy and governance. They began to build people’s assemblies, and that grassroots work formed the basis for runs for office. “Despite many of our years, if not decades, of studying radical theory and process, we didn’t encounter many who had any serious analysis on how to actually govern,” says Kali Akuno, a leader of what became Cooperation Jackson.

Their focus now is building a “solidarity economy” on a local level that can be a model for transforming cities and empowering underserved communities, Lumumba told me recently. Part of that plan is to build cooperatives—with the city’s backing—to create new businesses. It’s a direct contrast to the normal development strategy of city and state governments, which throw tax breaks at big corporations in hopes that they’ll create a few jobs with the handout. “Where we see a void, where we see a need, we can create something for ourselves,” Lumumba says, “so the community can fill its own gaps and at the same time give the people who work the opportunity to dictate what their labor will be and what the fruits of their labor will be.”

There’s something about the fast-moving, ground-shaking political moment we’re in that defies the nomenclature we have, which perhaps explains journalists’ need to reach for a personality—a Bernie—to define what’s happening. Things are changing too quickly for our language to have caught up. “Progressive” feels too vague, too reminiscent, perhaps, of the 2000s-era anti-Bush “netroots” moment, though plenty of the people running today’s left-leaning campaigns cut their teeth in the netroots. For some, “populist” is too easy to confuse with the right-wing, Donald Trump brand. And “social democratic,” brings the “S-word” into the equation, and risks alienating some of the less-radical left-wingers who’ve just gotten turned on to activism.

The movement that supported Sanders in 2016 was simply too broad to lend itself to easy labeling, ranging as it did from the socialists of DSA to left-leaning Democrats who hadn’t been moved to hit the streets under President Obama. “There’s a much larger scale of people who are open to a left politics that’s a bit more moderate than your average DSA member but to the left of the Democratic party mainstream,” says Robertson. There are also those—like Randall Woodfin himself—who backed Clinton in the primary, but are to the left of the Democratic mainstream and have fought since the inauguration against Trump’s policies.

“In the age of Trump, most Democrats are in no mood to wait around and make slow progress when so much is under attack—voters want what they believe in and they want it now,” says Dinkin of the Working Families Party. “Trump has been part of awakening a new fervor and even militancy in voters.”

But the national media hates nothing more than “it’s complicated.” And unlike in the past, because of the decline of local newspapers, they don’t have sharp local political reporting to lean on for making sense of particular elections. Instead, narratives get picked up and run with because they are already out there.

The tendency to reduce the story to the “Sanders left” also exemplifies an ongoing problem of horse-race journalism. Really, though, boxing is a more apt sports metaphor than a horse race, since journalists tend to count every action or sentence from a politician as a jab, cross, or knockdown blow with the relish of a ringside announcer. Sanders, in this framework, is important because he is a once and (presumed) future presidential candidate, and therefore everything that involves him in some way or other is seen through the lens of his rising or falling power within left-of-center politics.

Take this recent story from Business Insider: “There’s a quiet battle between Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris.” Ostensibly a news piece about the Atlanta mayor’s race, what it actually does is take the opportunity of a (perceived) 2020 presidential candidate giving a speech in Atlanta to set up a mostly-nonexistent “battle”—not with another wing of the same party or even against a competing ideology, but against another (presumed) 2020 candidate. Sanders has backed Vincent Fort in Atlanta; Kamala Harris said some generic words of praise for the sitting mayor of the city, Reed, when she spoke there. Hardly a “battle.” But there we are.

It is our inability to conceive of politics beyond personalities, in part, that makes such farcical articles tick. But the problem goes beyond a couple of laughably bad takes. To really understand our shifting politics, we need to understand Sanders himself as the symptom of a phenomenon that is in fact global—the failure of the neoliberal center in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which has resulted in the collapse in country after country of the consensus between a couple of centrist ruling parties, and the rise of popular social movements to fill the vacuum left by politics that is so clearly not up to the task of finding solutions to our problems.

In that time we have seen the rise of not just Sanders but Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise in France, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, along with right-wing counterparts with similar politics to Donald Trump. In some cases, like Sanders, Corbyn, and Mélenchon, or indeed like Vincent Fort, they are people who have labored below most people’s radar for decades, building a reputation as the elected official you could call to come walk a picket line, to craft a bit of legislation that would sneak through progressive policies or one that might fail but help to move the dial a little bit leftward. In the post-2008 moment of more aggressive social movements and more dramatic shifts, those people are often being turned to by a new generation looking for leadership, while younger leaders also rise from the streets to elected office they perhaps never imagined occupying.

The left-wing surge in local politics, in so many different cities, bears watching in part because these new mayors and council members will be tomorrow’s state-legislative leaders, gubernatorial and senatorial candidates. (Imagine Woodfin occupying Jeff Sessions’s old U.S. Senate seat some day.) But it’s also a sign of a rising tide every bit as important as the Trump movement, which has garnered so much more careful attention. Reducing them to victories for one “side” of the Democratic Party certainly does social movements no favors, either. As Chokwe Antar Lumumba said, “I do not believe electoral politics is the end; it is the means to an end.”