THREE candidates backed by democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday, a result widely read as a show of strength for the city’s left and for the Democratic Socialists of America, of which the mayor is a member.
The most closely watched contest was in the 7th congressional district, an open seat left by the retiring Nydia Velázquez.
State Assembly Member Claire Valdez, an early activist in the New York City DSA and a United Auto Workers unit chair, faced Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had Velázquez’s backing and that of the Working Families Party.
Velázquez had criticised Mamdani for not getting behind her preferred successor.
Reynoso, himself a progressive with a record of independence from the party establishment, was the more institutionally embedded of the two.
The contest was not close. Valdez won 56.1% of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8%, a margin of more than 13,000 votes.
She was endorsed by Mamdani, Senator Bernie Sanders and UAW President Shawn Fain, and drew volunteers from the DSA, her union and rank-and-file unionists across the city.
‘Solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organise your union, and join DSA,’ she told supporters at her victory party.
In the 13th district, covering Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, the result was more startling.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral student and first-time candidate, unseated Adriano Espaillat, who had held the seat since 2017 and chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Chevalier won by about 2,000 votes, with most scanners reporting.
Chevalier’s campaign was centred on Palestine.
A Columbia University student active in the campus protest movement, she challenged Espaillat in part over his response to the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and protest leader who was arrested, transferred to Louisiana and held for months over his pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Espaillat’s campaign was supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
In the closing stretch the race turned bitter, with Espaillat’s allies attacking Chevalier over deleted social media posts and positions such as prison abolition.
Mamdani, who endorsed her late, called her a person ‘of clarity, of conscience and of conviction’.
The third race, in the 10th district covering Lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn, sent former City Comptroller Brad Lander against incumbent Dan Goldman.
Lander won by the night’s widest margin, taking 65.8% to Goldman’s 34%.
Goldman, a two-term incumbent who served as lead counsel in the first impeachment of President Donald Trump in 2019, was heavily backed by pro-Israel groups as well as real estate and finance interests.
‘Tonight, the voters of 10th District have spoken. While this is not the outcome I worked so hard for, I respect their decision,’ Goldman said, adding that he had called Lander to congratulate him.
The 10th was not a DSA-endorsed race, as the group did not back Lander, though Mamdani did, calling his a ‘vision of politics that is more than what we’ve seen for so long.’
Lander’s own record on Israel is more mixed than the contest’s framing as a referendum on Gaza might suggest, and sets him apart from the other two winners.
A self-described liberal Zionist, he supports Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state and does not back the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
As comptroller he had moved swiftly in 2022 to divest the city’s pension funds of more than $30 million in Russian securities after the war in Ukraine, framing the move as both a moral stand and a fiduciary one. He declined to take the same step over Israeli holdings.
During his tenure, the city’s pension funds acquired and increased holdings in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, even as the genocide in Gaza escalated, and he defended the investments rather than divest, saying pension managers should not bring politics to the job of investing pensioners’ money.
Campaigning alongside Mamdani, he pledged to ‘fight to end occupation and apartheid and genocide’. Both Lander and Goldman are Jewish.
All three winners have called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for higher taxes on the wealthy, and Valdez and Chevalier, like Mamdani, have accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, which it denies.
The sweep extended to state-level contests.
In Queens, Aber Kawas won a state senate seat, and most of the assembly candidates aligned with the DSA, among them Christian Celeste Tate, Eon Huntley, Illapa Sairitupac, David Orkin and Samantha Kattan, won by wide margins.
UAW organiser and public defender Conrad Blackburn fell short against an entrenched Harlem machine but is expected to run again.
Upstate, Adam Bojak won an assembly seat in Buffalo, while a Syracuse race involving Maurice Brown remained too close to call. Several incumbent DSA-backed legislators held their seats comfortably.
Mamdani took a different approach to the state races than to the congressional ones. Rather than challenge sitting legislative leaders, he declined to endorse any assembly challengers and backed only candidates in open seats, avoiding a direct fight with Albany leadership.
Even so, all but one of the DSA assembly candidates prevailed.
The results offered an early measure of Mamdani’s influence since his upset mayoral win last year, and a test of whether his volunteer base would mobilise for allies.
Establishment Democrats in Washington have cautioned that left-wing candidates may struggle with swing voters in November’s midterms.
According to NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, the group knocked on 650,000 doors this cycle and ran a phone bank of some 600 people making 100,000 calls the night before the vote.
The slate drew about 3,500 volunteers in its final push, compared with the 4,600 Mamdani mobilised on the eve of his own primary.
Trump appeared to respond to the night’s results in a social media post, declaring that America would ‘never be a communist country!’
Of Goldman, Trump said the congressman was ‘weak and pathetic’ and had ‘just lost, BIG!’