There’s reason to celebrate after yesterday’s Massachusetts elections, which saw Green New Deal–backer Sen. Ed Markey beat back a primary challenge, and Holyoke mayor Alex Morse give corrupt House Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal a genuine fright. But all in all, it was a mixed bag at best.

The bad news first. Yesterday saw close to a clean sweep for incumbents, which means a host of conservative Democrats from the Senate and House on down held onto their seats. The most high-profile of these was Neal, who as of the time of writing convincingly beat Morse by nineteen points, winning even in Morse’s home turf of Holyoke, and sailing to a seventeenth term in the House.

Neal was propelled to victory by one of the dirtier pieces of political villainy in recent memory, in which local college Democrats and the state party drummed up a fake controversy around Morse’s sex life that successfully baited progressive groups supporting him into temporarily rescinding their backing. Even when the scheme was exposed by the Intercept’s Ryan Grim, whose reporting single-handedly saved Morse’s campaign, the dirty tricks continued: an anonymous pollster rang up locals asking about a different made-up allegation against Morse, while a pro-Neal super PAC first drew controversy with an ad referencing the original scandal (“Now Alex Morse admits to sexual relationships with college students ― even while he was a university lecturer”), then “accidentally” sent the uncorrected version to local television stations.