What to make of this week’s Congressional primaries
What are we to make of the primary election wins of Darliaza Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander in New York? Six months after Zohran Mamdani became mayor, is it a new socialist dawn in America’s largest city? No — but I see at least five big lessons.
Mamdani’s support matters. A lot. (In a primary. And in New York City.)
The system that unfortunately prevails in House races across America is that candidates compete in low-turnout, closed primaries in Democratic or Republican districts made overwhelmingly safe thanks to aggressive partisan gerrymandering. This rewards candidates who play to the far left or the far right. (In the 2026 midterms, fewer than a fifth of Democratic voters in these districts cast ballots.) Candidates further to the left have a natural advantage in heavily partisan New York City districts, with one big caveat: Incumbents typically start out with a certain reflexive support among their constituents.
This year, Mamdani — who has star power, charisma and intense popularity, especially among the city’s most progressive residents — made the bold (and according to many in the chattering class, foolish) decision to back two young Democratic Socialists against far more established politicians with strong progressive track records. There’s little question Chevalier and Valdez would have struggled mightily against Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent congressman, and Antonio Reynoso, the sitting borough president, if not for Mamdani’s relentless and effective boosterism on social media and on the streets, including creative and compelling ads during the Knicks’ finals run.
The caveat here is that these three districts are among the furthest left-leaning in America. If a Chevalier-style candidate had been running in NY-12, where Micah Lasher prevailed over Alex Bores and many others, it’s unlikely he or she would’ve broken through even with Mamdani’s support. That is doubly or even triply true of districts outside the deepest-blue big cities.
That said, is it fair to write off the Democratic Socialist victories as only the result of support from young, well-educated, wealthier transplants? No. While Chevalier and Valdez, like Mamdani last year, were backed more by these groups than by others, they had a reasonably broad base of support from all types of voters. Chevalier, for instance, seems to have won more black voters than Espaillat. While it’s important to keep the low turnout in mind and to understand that Democratic Socialism may be more popular among relatively well-to-do voters than among the working class and poor people it purports to champion, it’s unhelpful and oversimplifying to suggest that these candidates only won thanks to one type of voter.
Never underestimate candidate quality.
Say what you will about Darializa Avila Chevalier — and I’ll say some unkind but true things about her in a minute — she’s a talent. She communicates clearly and in language that resonates with many voters. That doesn’t entirely come through in the transcript of the New York Editorial Board interview that I helped conduct with her, but it was definitely felt in the room. Chevalier was up against a five-term incumbent who had all the endorsements you could ask for but no special political skills. (Indeed, Reynoso had every endorsement under the sun from unions, proof that license to print dozens of labor logos on your direct mail doesn’t count for much, nor does access to what was once considered a difference-making get-out-the-vote operation.)
While there was no similarly clear gulf in candidate quality between Valdez and Reynoso, Valdez had a special capacity to connect with young people in her district, many of whom came from other parts of the country looking to make it and are struggling to stay afloat here. Put a dud Socialist in her place and Reynoso may well have won.
Something similar could be said of Lander’s defeat of Goldman. The incumbent comes across as a smart, dedicated public servant — but not as someone especially agile or compelling. And his ties to the district are much weaker than Lander’s; people in Brownstone Brooklyn have been seeing Lander on ballots for City Council, comptroller and mayor for many years now. Lander’s voice may drip with sanctimony, but he ran with more passion. He was both for and against more than Goldman, who struggled to communicate what his campaign was really about.
To the furthest left voters, Israel-Gaza is about much more than just the Mideast.
This brings us to Israel and Gaza. Growing numbers of Democrats are appalled by the reflexive U.S. establishment support of Israel amidst its continued brutal military campaign against Palestinians. As Dan Goldman found out, this anger extends even to Democrats who’ve spoken out against the Netanyahu government and attempted to impose consequences on Israel for overreaching. It glows so hot that, in the minds of some sizable number of New Yorkers, it justifies a local coffee shop shaming Goldman and refusing to take his money for allegedly being a genocide apologist. Among small but growing numbers of leftists, mostly but not only young people, support for Israel as a Jewish state — Zionism — is itself disqualifying, an original sin. Other than the support of Mamdani, that’s the clearest thread uniting the big wins of Valdez, Chevalier and Lander.
It’s unlikely that Israel and Gaza will prove as potent a political motivator as, say, immigration policy, which shapes every aspect of American life. But there’s no question that it is serving as a litmus test in safe Democratic districts in New York and elsewhere. That’s not only because voters increasingly side with Palestinians, but because support for Israel and Zionism is viewed as a broader proxy for establishmentarianism.
There’s some truth to this; the strength of the Israel-U.S. relationship isn’t unrelated to the fact that some Jewish New Yorkers and Americans are wealthy, prominent and powerful. The moment you write that, it begins to sound anti-Semitic, and to some on the left, a general suspicion of Jews’ influence certainly does enter the calculus. But step back and it makes perfect sense for idealistic voters who are throwing off establishment politics to connect a perceived failure of the governing class to serve the needs of working people to the continued sending of billions of dollars to a close ally they believe is perpetrating a genocide.
It helps to stand for something.
Democratic Socialism has never been my cup of coffee — but in a low-turnout primary in which many of those motivated to turn out are eager to bring the fight to Donald Trump, it can connect, in part, because the candidates who support it can speak loudly and clearly about what they’re for. They want health care for all, decommodified housing, much higher taxes on the wealthy, much more government spending, strong limitations on corporate power and more. They want ICE to be abolished, full stop. They want much more school spending, a funny thing to demand in a city that already spends $40,000 per pupil, that’s struggling to abide by a costly, unfunded and arbitrary class-size reduction mandate and that holds schools harmless when they lose enrollment. So the clarity of their message may not make much sense, but it can resonate when the alternative rhetoric sounds like a muddle.
What this means to someone like me, who generally sides with more pragmatic Democrats, is that the party's moderates need to articulate an affirmative agenda in compelling terms. Can mainstream Democrats unite around a persuasive, easy-to-understand agenda to grow and strengthen American families? To make housing more plentiful and easier to build? To answer worries about AI? (Bernie Sanders’ call to give the public a 50% stake in the largest AI companies by creating a sovereign wealth fund, one especially interesting proposal, has the approval of Micah Lasher, who won the NY-12 primary against Alex Bores, who foregrounded AI in his campaign.) Something else? We haven’t seen such an agenda emerge yet.
Chevalier will be a political liability to national Democrats.
We don’t know exactly what type of congresswoman Chevalier will be. She’s just 32. But all signals are that the Ph.D. student in sociology will be every bit as potent an avatar for what conservatives and independents across the country see as loony leftism as someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene has been for the excesses of far-right ideology.
In that New York Editorial Board interview, we asked Chevalier under what conditions she thought it was OK to deport people. Her answer was absolute: Deportations are never okay, not even of violent criminals. We also asked her whether murderers should serve time in prison. She refused to say yes; in her world, we must build a utopian society in which nobody hurts anyone. (She’s also for abolishing police, a topic we didn’t get to in our hourlong sitdown.)
The point is that it’s well and good for the far left to exult when they manage to get their candidates into office. But it remains to be seen what actual difference the back-bench House presence of someone like Chevalier (or, to a lesser extent, Valdez) will make in the lives of their constituents. And politically speaking, if history is any judge, there’s likely to be an equal and opposite reaction to their ascent.
