So I had a bad feeling about Cori Bush from the beginning, but hoped that she would grow in office or at least that putting a charismatic black woman front and center as the national face of St. Louis would help change the narrative and turn the page from Ferguson. But, alas, Bush’s divisive schtick continuously reinforced the metro’s image as a dangerous, racist, marginal hellhole.

In the meantime, another progressive fresh face had come to prominence in the wake of Ferguson: Wesley Bell, who was elected a “reform prosecutor” in St. Louis County after the longtime incumbent hadn’t pursued murder charges in the Michael Brown case. A lot of people braced themselves, expecting the utter uselessness of his counterpart Kim Gardner in the city, but Bell turned out to be a pleasant surprise: a measured, competent, basically responsible official whose core political instinct was bringing people together rather than tearing them apart. I haven’t agreed with him on a lot of things—he’s a very conventional progressive—but simply by not being an active embarrassment he was obviously the better choice when it was announced he was challenging Cori Bush to represent Missouri’s 1st congressional district.

And so ensued a bare-knuckle primary brawl, among the nastiest I’ve ever witnessed, with Bell running a largely positive and policy-centered campaign while the Bush camp desperately smeared him as a liar, a traitor, a crypto-Republican Zionist, and even a rapist.