It was a gentle spring morning in Ridgewood, the season’s first flowers blushing innocently in the breeze. A field organizer was passing out fliers advertising the campaign of one Kristen Gonzalez, a young, bright-faced Columbia University graduate who had moved to neighboring Long Island City shortly before the neighborhood would prove to be the center of a new district in the state senate in Albany. The future state senator had not arrived, but the air twisted with anticipation. 

The flyers painted a rosy image of this coming future. Her name, printed in not-quite copper black font – “at least I remember paying for a font named Rose Ave,” the organizer excitedly told me. The muted pastels were unavoidably tasteful. They lacked the explosiveness of the neighborhood’s normal run of political advertising – a year earlier, the failed campaign behind a local former city councilwoman named Elizabeth Crowley had courted controversy by printing out campaign mailers that looked like eviction notices. Another candidate had printed fake newspapers endorsing himself. The ones from Gonzalez’s campaign, however, looked like notices announcing the opening of a new lifestyle store. “People over profit,” the bubbly font read. They were printed with a QR code to learn more.  

“The company you keep matters,” a Queens city councilwoman named Tiffany Cabán was telling the assembled crowd. Some in the crowd wore t-shirts that advertised one of her previous campaigns. A few years ago, the Times had bequeathed Cabán “More Significant to Progressives Than Ocasio-Cortez” shortly before she narrowly lost a primary race for district attorney in Queens. Her candidacy a year later for a far-off city council seat representing parts of Astoria and Rikers Island received less press and Cabán had quietly won that easily, securing her accedence from organizer to politician. She was a charismatic figure who was visibly at ease in the utilitarian language of contemporary leftist politics. Gonzalez had yet to arrive, but Cabán was prepared to tell us that it hardly mattered and, in fact, had a better way to say exactly that: “Candidates are vehicles for organizing, “ she told the restless crowd, which had the air of aspiring politicians and bureaucrats.