On Thursday Julia Salazar, a twenty-seven-year-old democratic socialist candidate for New York state senate in North Brooklyn, beat her opponent Martin Dilan with 59 percent of the vote.

Dilan is an established centrist Democrat, a nine-term incumbent whose political career has been underwritten by real estate developers, school privatization advocates, and various wealthy power-players in New York politics. By contrast, Salazar burst onto the political scene this year, took no corporate money, espoused openly socialist politics, and sustained an onslaught of smears so ugly and invasive they’d take a presidential candidate aback.

And she still won, by a considerable margin. Because people are sick of diversions; they want political change. They don’t care about media flame wars, and most can’t be bothered to read think-pieces on the amorphous nature of identity. They want politicians to back solid policies that protect and materially empower ordinary people like themselves, so their lives will be better in tangible ways.