Every so often, an acquaintance will ask me a question so niche, yet so telling: what is the best Congressional District in New York City? And my answer might surprise you.

My first full-time job after graduating college was working for Nydia Velázquez, in the office of the 7th Congressional District (North Brooklyn, Western Queens); fittingly during the year when the district was, rather abruptly, redrawn and compressed into what would later become The Commie Corridor. I have lived the vast majority of my life inside the 12th Congressional District (Manhattan), attending church services on the West Side and school on the East Side. A hyper-competitive and fascinating race for the 10th Congressional District (Lower Manhattan, Brownstone Brooklyn), perhaps the most walkable stretch of the five boroughs, was an early boon to this newsletter. And the 14th Congressional District, of course, has the best representative.

All compelling places, to be sure, but none that can match the rich history and ethnographic tapestry of New York’s 13th Congressional District.

And on June 23rd, this district — spanning a thirteen-neighborhood patchwork across Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx — will decide the most interesting Democratic primary in the country, which pits Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and first formerly-undocumented member of the House of Representatives, against Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old organizer backed by NYC-DSA, Justice Democrats, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The story — a charismatic insurgent pushing a seasoned incumbent to the brink — is all too familiar. But the setting — an ethnic melting pot home to dueling political machines and a nascent progressive coalition — is unique.

Thus, the race for NY-13, between Espaillat and Avila Chevalier, deserves the closest of inspections: a rigorous attention to detail that reflects its near-infinite nuance.

And so, starting with the smallest sliver of the electorate, counting down to the most important, we begin our journey in the Bronx—oh wait, technically Manhattan.

Quick Note: I will reference the Mamdani vs. Cuomo mayoral results often (their respective performances are listed with each neighborhood), because the Mamdani coalition is Avila Chevalier’s aspirational ceiling: resounding young turnout, anchored by college-educated renters, and buttressed by genuine inroads among working-class Black and Hispanic voters. Cuomo’s coalition, and its reliance on older voters, is similar to Espaillat’s — with two important distinctions: Espaillat is far less beloved than Cuomo with older Black voters, but much stronger among older Dominicans.

#13 Marble Hill (Manhattan)

Share: <1%

Electorate: White ~12% / Black ~28% / Hispanic ~56%

Age: 18–49 = 35% / 50+ = 65%

R1: Mamdani 37% / Cuomo 48%

Final: Mamdani 46% / Cuomo 54%

Marble Hill is a footnote of New York geography: the only Manhattan neighborhood physically attached to the mainland, a three-block accident of the Harlem River Ship Canal’s 1895 routing that severed it from the island and then, in 1914, glued it to the Bronx with rocks dredged for Grand Central Terminal. Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons planted a Bronx flag here in 1939, calling the area “The Bronx Sudetenland.” In 1984, the State Legislature officially ended the dispute, declaring Marble Hill permanently part of Manhattan. Anchored by pre-war apartments and the Marble Hill Houses, a public housing development, Marble Hill is home to a longtime Dominican and West Indian population, layered onto older Irish and German roots.

Marble Hill, less than 1% of the electorate, will nonetheless be one of Espaillat’s best neighborhoods: primarily home to working-class, triple-prime seniors — 90% renters, with the lowest first-time-voter share and most pronounced age gap in NY-13.

Verdict: Espaillat will likely exceed Cuomo’s 54%, retrospectively an underperformance for the former Governor. Avila Chevalier should view Mamdani’s 46% as closer to a ceiling than a floor. The paltry 16% under-35 share, even in last year’s wave, makes the math challenging for Avila Chevalier in a lower-profile contest.

#12 Kingsbridge (The Bronx)

Share: ~1%

Electorate: White ~23% / Black ~11% / Hispanic ~59%

Age: 18–49 = 46% / 50+ = 54%

R1: Mamdani 43% / Cuomo 41% / Lander 7%

Final: Mamdani 52% / Cuomo 48%

The only Bronx neighborhood Mamdani carried in NY-13, albeit barely.

Kingsbridge is the Irish-turned-Dominican enclave at the northwest corner of the borough, named for the 1693 wooden toll bridge built by Frederick Philipse under a royal charter from William III. The Irish thinned out during the late 1970s, replaced first by Puerto Ricans and Cubans and now by Dominicans clustered along Broadway. But the texture endures: Gaelic Park hosts hurling matches on 240th Street, and the shamrock painted at 231st and Kingsbridge Avenue every St. Patrick’s Day is still a local tradition. Across generations, Kingsbridge has remained a Catholic community.

Verdict: Espaillat should flip Kingsbridge, still home to many Dominicans and older Democrats, earning a mid-to-high-50s margin. But Avila Chevalier has a real chance, particularly if she can win middle-aged white professionals (Riverdale-spillovers, cooperators) and keep Millennial and Gen-X turnout from cratering.

#11 Bedford Park (The Bronx)

Share: ~1.5%

Race: White ~11% / Black ~20% / Hispanic ~59% / Asian ~7%

Age: 18–49 = 40% / 50+ = 60%

R1: Mamdani 43% / Cuomo 46%

Final: Mamdani 49% / Cuomo 51%

Bedford Park was conceived in the 1870s as a garden suburb — its developers named it for Bedford Park, London, the world’s first such experiment — and the freestanding Victorian houses along Villa Avenue still nod, faintly, to that aspiration. By the 1920s, the IRT Jerome Avenue Line and the IND Concourse had transformed it into a middle-class Jewish, Italian, and Irish community along the Grand Concourse, the Park Avenue of the Bronx, home to both Our Lady of Refuge and the Convent of Mount St. Ursula. In the second half of the 20th century, Bedford Park became Dominican and Puerto Rican and then, more recently, Bangladeshi, Mexican, West African, and Albanian. Still, a Hispanic majority remains: close to two-thirds of residents speak Spanish at home, and more than one-third have Dominican ancestry.

Verdict: Espaillat has a path to outperforming Cuomo by five to ten points, predicated on strong margins among older Dominican and Puerto Rican Catholics. Avila Chevalier will live-and-die by her ability to turn out the Muslim (vital to Mamdani) and younger Hispanic voters along the Concourse. If she wins here, Espaillat is in big trouble.

#10 Morris & University Heights (The Bronx)

Share: ~3%

Race: White ~1% / Black ~33% / Hispanic ~59% / Asian ~6%

Age: 18–49 = 34% / 50+ = 66%

R1: Mamdani 32% / Cuomo 58%

Final: Mamdani 36% / Cuomo 64%

The worst neighborhood for Zohran Mamdani was not Harlem or the Dominican-dense precincts of Washington Heights, but the elevated plateau across the University Heights Bridge in the Bronx. Home to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the birthplace of hip-hop, and bounded by the Cross Bronx Expressway — Robert Moses’s infamous gash — both Morris and University Heights still bear the scars of a borough no longer burning. The Dominican, Black, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Puerto Rican families along University and Sedgwick Avenues are the ones who stayed. Though its residents skew young, its voters are among the oldest in the borough. Almost everyone rents (94%), and college education is scarce (13%). In a borough defined by poverty, household incomes are the lowest in Morris and University Heights. Few neighborhoods shifted more towards Donald Trump in 2024.

Verdict: This is the heart of Espaillat’s older, Hispanic base in the Bronx, and anything less than a 65-35 split would be a five-alarm fire for the incumbent. Avila Chevalier has the canvassing advantage districtwide, but her operation is unlikely to pound the pavement as hard here. Older Black voters in public housing and the Fordham Hill cooperative will determine the margin.

#9 Fordham (The Bronx)

Share: ~3%

Race: White ~3% / Black ~26% / Hispanic ~63%

Age: 18–49 = 39% / 50+ = 61%

R1: Mamdani 38% / Cuomo 54%

Final: Mamdani 42% / Cuomo 58%

Fordham Road is the commercial heart of the West Bronx — the longest retail BID in the borough — and the neighborhood with the highest share of renters (97%), the lowest rate of college education (12%), and the lowest household income in NY-13.

Fordham University’s campus acts as a local but distant institution, whose imprint is barely visible in a Democratic Primary. Here, the electorate is predominantly older, moderate-leaning voters of color. At the street level, Albanian-owned pizzerias and cafes coexist alongside Dominican-owned bodegas and bars.

Verdict: This is the largest Hispanic electorate on the Bronx side of NY-13, and should presumably be one of Espaillat’s best neighborhoods. His apparatus is strong in the West Bronx, where most voters speak Spanish. Avila Chevalier’s inroads here will come from earned media and digital ads, rather than on the doors.

Her job is to keep the margin under 20 points.

#8 Kingsbridge Heights (The Bronx)

Share: ~4%

Race: White ~12% / Black ~23% / Hispanic ~58% / Asian ~3%

Age: 18–49 = 36% / 50+ = 64%

R1: Mamdani 38% / Cuomo 49%

Final: Mamdani 45% / Cuomo 55%

Kingsbridge Heights lives up to its name: defined by steep step-streets and the prewar walk-ups that line the Jerome Park Reservoir. Held together by a parish network that persists to this day, Kingsbridge Heights survived the worst of the fires that burned across the Bronx. With an intact housing stock, many voters over-65 (35% of the electorate) cast their ballots from the apartment houses their parents first rented several decades earlier. The Dominican majority runs along the apartment houses of Heath Avenue and Kingsbridge Terrace; older Irish and Jewish residents remain in Van Cortlandt Village, sandwiched between the park and the reservoir; while newer Ghanaian and Mexican families live along the eastern slope.

Verdict: Mamdani was competitive in Kingsbridge Heights because he won liberal cooperators along the northern edge of the reservoir. Avila Chevalier will have to replicate that, given Espaillat’s strength with the older Dominican voters.

He’s hoping for a 20 point win; she’s hoping for a 10 point loss.

#7 Manhattan Valley

Share: ~6%

Race: White ~52% / Black ~13% / Hispanic ~24% / Asian ~5%

Age: 18-49 = 45% / 50+ = 55%

R1: Mamdani 47% / Cuomo 27% / Lander 17%

Final: Mamdani 65% / Cuomo 35%

Median HH income $87,037; College 51%

Now we cross back into Manhattan, into the first of seven neighborhoods that will, collectively, decide this election. Manhattan Valley is the southernmost tip of NY-13: a slice of the Upper West Side east of Broadway above 96th Street and below 110th. Historically known as the “Bloomingdale District,” Manhattan Valley resembles a museum of the pre-gentrification Upper West Side, cast as a decades-long war between the social-services industry and the brownstoning class. The Frederick Douglass Houses, one of Manhattan’s largest NYCHA developments, between 100th and 104th Streets, stand apart from what is otherwise an extended exercise in SROs being retrofitted, demolished, or converted into market-rate condos.

Manhattan Valley straddles the politics of “No Kings & No Cuomo” and “Commie Corridor Jr.” The neighborhood is home to many older liberals (31% of voters over-65) who found an affordable pocket in an increasingly unaffordable area, plus younger college-graduates (oftentimes from Columbia) and the Valley’s longstanding Hispanic population. The Primary electorate is majority white and college-educated.

Though Espaillat famously no-showed the local forums, Avila Chevalier still struggled to capitalize, failing to win a single club endorsement (neither Broadway Democrats nor Three Parks). Now, the Espaillat campaign and allied Independent Expenditures are hammering Avila Chevalier for her lack of experience and problematic old tweets.

Manhattan Valley is where that strategy will be tested.

Verdict: Mamdani’s 65% in Manhattan Valley is the ceiling Avila Chevalier must aim for, but she will need Lander voters to break decisively for her — far from a guarantee. Espaillat, whose presence in the neighborhood is non-existent, will rely on surrogates and sound trucks to get his message out.

#6 Inwood

Share: ~6%

Race: White ~44% / Black ~5% / Hispanic ~45%

Age: 18–49 = 46%, 50+ = 54%

R1: Mamdani 52% / Cuomo 30% / Lander 11%

Final: Mamdani 66% / Cuomo 34%

First-time voters: 16% (lowest), Median HH income $78,650

Inwood is the battleground state of NY-13, the only neighborhood that holds both coalitions in full, staring at one another across a single avenue, Broadway.

The New York Daily News once profiled Inwood, accurately, under the headline “One neighborhood, two worlds.” North of Broadway is the first world, a leafy retreat sequestered from the bustling commercial corridor, boasting an elevated terrace of well-kept co-op buildings, winding lanes, and picturesque parkland. Adjacent to the Park Terrace West cooperative sit the only detached suburban houses on Manhattan Island, Tudor-and-Colonial Revival cottages with gardens. The residents here are upper-middle-class professionals, civil service retirees, and younger families. Their presence in any electoral map is unmistakable: breaking for Mamdani by 41 points (58-17) in the first round before delivering a 66-point margin in the final round (78-22). These precincts are as progressive an enclave as you will find in Manhattan.

South of Broadway is the second world. The land slopes down toward the Harlem River into the bulk of the neighborhood’s rental apartments, neon-lit retail thoroughfares, and restaurants with music and hookah spilling from their windows. On a sticky summer night, folding chairs line the sidewalks, men crowd around a dominoes table, and mopeds race down the block. Predominantly lower-income, with fewer trees and more industry, this side of Broadway is nonetheless seeing rents climb fast enough to push Hispanic families across the University Heights Bridge into the Bronx. The electorate south of Broadway is 78% Hispanic with median household incomes around $50,000; almost everyone (98%) is confined to the renter class, and 40% of voters are over the age of 65. Predictably, Cuomo defeated Mamdani here, albeit by a smaller margin (57-43) than anticipated. When Espaillat said “Northern Manhattan has my DNA in it,” he was talking about these blocks.

On a hot summer day, the shaded and tree-lined streets north of Broadway will remain cool; while the surface temperature in the concrete jungle south of Broadway will approach triple digits, the only reprieve coming from an opened fire hydrant.

Verdict: Inwood is NY-13 stripped down to one neighborhood: the Espaillat coalition versus the Avila Chevalier coalition, separated by a single street. The arithmetic, on the surface, looks promising for Avila Chevalier: North Inwood casts two ballots for every one South Inwood casts, which is why Mamdani carried the whole neighborhood by a 2:1 margin. However, South Inwood is not generic establishment-friendly turf; it has been the core of Adriano Espaillat’s support for three decades. Without a doubt, the incumbent will resoundingly exceed Cuomo’s share among the older Dominicans who dominate the south Broadway vote. The race in Inwood is a contest of intensity: the voters in the north are higher-propensity and relish a midterm primary; but the south is the heart of the machine, and the Godfather is on the ballot.

#5 Morningside Heights & Manhattanville

Share: ~8%

Race: White ~52% / Black ~15% / Hispanic ~20% / Asian ~7%

Age: 18–49 = 48% / 50+ = 52%

R1: Mamdani 49% / Cuomo 24% / Lander 18%

Final: Mamdani 68% / Cuomo 32%

Median HH income $102,276 (highest); College 64% (highest).

Morningside Heights is the half-mile plateau between Riverside Park and Morningside Park where an entire intellectual and spiritual community was assembled during the 20th century: Barnard College, Union Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and Riverside Church.

Nonetheless, the neighborhood is widely known as the home of Columbia University, a revered Ivy League institution that simultaneously holds the dubious distinction of being the city’s largest landlord. Once upon a time, Columbia’s massive footprint was confined to Morningside Heights. But that, too, is changing. Now there is also Manhattanville, the 17-acre tract between 125th and 133rd Streets, that Columbia rezoned, condemned, and built out into a satellite campus.

This is Darializa Avila Chevalier’s home base. She graduated from Columbia in 2016, and later helped organize the 2024 Gaza encampment as an alumna, alongside her friend, Mahmoud Khalil. Following his unlawful ICE abduction and detention last year, Khalil’s case was taken on by the office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because his representative — Espaillat, a top recipient of AIPAC money — conspicuously declined. This story lives at the heart of Avila Chevalier’s campaign. Now, the anti-AIPAC super PAC, American Priorities, has released an ad where Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, recounts the ordeal: “Congressman Espaillat left me in the dark.”

The commercial is designed to appeal to: (1) college-educated younger voters with pro-Palestinian messaging; (2) working- and middle-class voters with anti-ICE framing; and (3) older liberals and progressives who dislike AIPAC.

But the key tension here is whether Lander-supporting liberals come home to Avila Chevalier or sit out the primary. Despite sharing a commercial with Mayor Mamdani, there is no love lost between Avila Chevalier and Lander: the former Comptroller famously disavowed the October 8th rally that Avila Chevalier attended; whereas she wrote in her NYC-DSA questionnaire that she ranked Lander fifth on her mayoral ballot in protest “because of how he threw my friend Mahmoud (Khalil) under the bus and supported a policy of further NYPD surveillance.” Here, the avalanche of advertisements is intended to plant seeds of doubt about her fitness for office.

Verdict: Mamdani more than doubled up Cuomo in Morningside Heights, and Avila Chevalier will have to do the same to Espaillat. Her ability to appeal to older, Zionist Jewish voters with left-leaning politics will ultimately determine the margin. Columbia’s spring semester concluded in early May, and undergrads have already dispersed for the summer. New York has no same-day registration, but how many students registered to vote for Mamdani (last fall) and maintained their registration?

The answer will prove particularly consequential for Avila Chevalier’s fortunes.

#4 Hamilton Heights (incl. Sugar Hill)

Share: ~8%

Race: White ~35% / Black ~22% / Hispanic ~35%

Age: 18–49 = 54% / 50+ = 46%

R1: Mamdani 58% / Cuomo 26% / Lander 8%

Final: Mamdani 70% / Cuomo 30%.

Largest 18-34 Age share in Upper Manhattan

Hamilton Heights lies between Morningside Heights and Washington Heights, the site of Alexander Hamilton’s historic country estate, as well as the National Historic District of Sugar Hill, once the residential heart of Black America’s professional and creative elite (home to W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Duke Ellington). And don’t forget about the Garrison Apartments at 435 Convent: the oldest continuously operating Black-founded, Black-owned, and Black-managed co-op in New York City.

But Sugar Hill is the high ground, economically and topographically, and it is only half the neighborhood. Walk west and Hamilton Heights resembles the uptown texture that defines Washington Heights and Inwood. Broadway and Amsterdam are lined with colmados and barberías, and restaurants serve tostones and mofongo.

Today, Hamilton Heights has the most demographically balanced electorate of any neighborhood in NY-13: ~33% White, ~24% Black, ~35% Hispanic; with both the youngest age split in Upper Manhattan (31% of voters under 35) and one of the highest shares of first-time-voters (25%). These blocks show subtle signs of gentrification: brownstone renovations along Convent Avenue and Riverside Drive, co-working cafés popping up along Amsterdam, HDFCs nabbed by young professionals, Columbia University buying up (and rehabbing) previously derelict apartments. The collision is generational, linguistic, and economic; today, it is “just as easy“ to order a Neapolitan pizza as a plate of fried green plantains on Broadway.

Prior to Mamdani’s rise, Hamilton Heights was akin to a political no man’s land — outside ethnically homogenous establishment bases in Washington Heights (Dominican) and Harlem (African American). Now, it is The Next Commie Corridor.

Verdict: This was Mamdani’s best NY-13 neighborhood in the first round of the Democratic Primary, the final round of the Democratic Primary, and the General Election. Hamilton Heights is where the Mamdani coalition most easily translates to Avila Chevalier; flush with college-educated renters, a progressive Brownstone class, and the young Hispanic voters who have become a signature of the new progressive coalition. For Espaillat to avoid a drubbing, the incumbent must make inroads with the remaining older Black voters in Sugar Hill. If Avila Chevalier can win Hamilton Heights by 30 points, she has assembled a broad, multi-racial coalition that can carry the district. But if she wins by only 15 points, she runs the risk of falling short.

#3 East Harlem

Share: ~14%

Race: White ~17% / Black ~36% / Hispanic ~37%

Age: 18–49 = 45% / 50+ = 55%

R1: Mamdani 45% / Cuomo 38%

Final: Mamdani 55% / Cuomo 45%

Median HH income $48,663; Renter 90%

East Harlem is the oldest continuous Hispanic neighborhood in New York City, and the historic capital of Nuyorican New York. But before the Puerto Ricans arrived following the Second World War, East Harlem was an Italian stronghold, home to political mavericks like Fiorello La Guardia and Vito Marcantonio. Immigration has been endemic to the arc of El Barrio: first Italian, then Puerto Rican, then Dominican and Salvadoran, and in the 21st century, many Mexicans and Chinese.

Walk the commercial spine of El Barrio and its history permeates every block. 116th Street is now the heart of a growing Little Mexico: El Aguila, Café Ollin, and the tamale and taco vendors that mark the Mexican immigrants reshaping the neighborhood. Under the Park Avenue overpass lies La Marqueta, which hosted over 500 vendors in its heyday and will soon house one of the Mamdani administration’s municipal grocery stores. Pleasant Avenue is the last living block of Italian Harlem, reduced to the parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Rao’s on the corner of 114th Street. Along the avenues the past and future collide: dollar stores across from chic taquerias, the Second Avenue Subway creeping north, public housing and condos sharing a skyline.

In fact, East Harlem is one of the most public housing-dense neighborhoods in the city, home to the Wagner, Johnson, Jefferson, Carver, Taft, and Washington Houses; traditionally a bulwark of Democratic primary votes for an incumbent.

And yet, the last time Adriano Espaillat faced any semblance of an opponent — two under-funded challengers in 2020 — he barely cracked 50% in El Barrio.

Verdict: East Harlem is the greatest unknown of any neighborhood, and credible arguments can be made for either campaign having the advantage. Far from the Espaillat heartland, Avila Chevalier will have more canvassers and volunteers on the ground, a monumental asset in a lower-turnout race. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of an older (and working-class) electorate still favor the incumbent. Toss-up.

#2 Washington Heights

Share: ~23%

Race: White ~40% / Black ~8% / Hispanic ~45%

Age: 18–49 = 48% / 50+ = 52%

R1: Mamdani 50% / Cuomo 32% / Lander 11%

Final: Mamdani 63% / Cuomo 37%

Washington Heights is two neighborhoods under the umbrella of one. The Dominican capital of the United States, Washington Heights contains ~23% of NY-13’s primary electorate — more than the entire Bronx portion combined. The neighborhood is both the heart of Espaillat’s machine and the epicenter of its most ardent resistance.

Washington Heights proper & Fort George (~17% of district):

Race: White ~28% / Black ~12% / Hispanic ~55%

Age: 18–49 = 47% / 50+ = 53%

R1: Mamdani 50% / Cuomo 37%

Final: Mamdani 59% / Cuomo 41%

90% renter, 35% college, median HH income $61,971

Washington Heights and Fort George are the Espaillat heartland: with an electorate that is 55% Hispanic and 90% renter, home to the most Spanish-speaking (and rent-stabilized) blocks in Manhattan. The “Little Dominican Republic” core runs along Broadway and St. Nicholas from 155th to 181st Street; lined with bodegas and barbershops, the aroma of cuchifritos, all to the soundtrack of merengue.

The crown jewel of Washington Heights is the United Palace on 175th Street, where Zohran Mamdani, then the Democratic nominee, hosted a rally there last October headlined by Espaillat, the dean of Dominican politics. After endorsing Cuomo in the Democratic Primary, Espaillat switched to Mamdani ahead of the General. Now, the Mayor has backed Avila Chevalier, reportedly breaking a promise to the incumbent.

Mamdani’s majority in Washington Heights and Inwood masked a pronounced generational divide in the Dominican electorate: north of 155th Street, he lost Hispanic voters over-50 by 6 points, but won Hispanic voters under-50 by a staggering 36 points. With even a directionally similar split, Avila Chevalier can win.

While a Hispanic supermajority remains east of Broadway, the presence of Columbia University’s medical center has spurred gentrification, particularly adjacent to J. Hood Wright Park and along Fort Washington Avenue. Last year, Mamdani won these renter-dense precincts by an overwhelming average of 50 points.

Still, the St. Nicholas Avenue corridor remains Espaillat’s firewall, and he’ll need a 30 point margin here to offset what will likely be significant losses in Hudson Heights.

Hudson Heights (~6% of district)

Race: White ~74% / Black ~2% / Hispanic ~17%

Age: 18–49 = 49%, 50+ = 51%

R1: Mamdani 48% / Cuomo 18% / Lander 25%

Final: Mamdani 73% / Cuomo 27%

74% college, median HH income $127,532, renter 66% (lowest)

Hudson Heights is the Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson enclave above 181st Street, a high-ground plateau anchored by Bennett Park (Manhattan’s highest natural point), home to several middle-class cooperatives (Hudson View Gardens, Castle Village). Settled by German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s, the neighborhood was rechristened ‘Hudson Heights’ only in the 1990s: a real-estate-broker invention to attract “a different kind of buyer.” The demographic composition of Hudson Heights is stark when compared to the rest of the neighborhood that, literally, sits in its shadow: 74% White, 74% college-educated, with a median household income of $127K (more than double Washington Heights proper). Home to many middle-aged families and civil-service retirees, Hudson Heights is one of the city’s most progressive enclaves, which reflects the class politics of Manhattan’s West Side, where Mamdani’s vote share increased among white and Jewish voters the farther north he went.

Hudson Heights was also Brad Lander’s finest neighborhood in NY-13 (25% in the first round), but the elevated enclave is best known as a stronghold of Robert Jackson, the local State Senator. Jackson, a progressive Black Muslim respected for decades of educational advocacy, is revered among the progressives of Hudson Heights and Inwood, and has long been a foe of the incumbent Congressman. Now, he has put the full breadth of his support behind Avila Chevalier, who will need every bit of help to maximize her advantage here. While there are only ten election districts (block-level precincts where votes are tallied) in Hudson Heights, the volume of voter turnout is remarkable, as these few blocks alone account for 6% of NY-13’s electorate.

Verdict: Both candidates have a high floor in Washington Heights, but from very distinct pockets. Were Avila Chevalier to run up the score in Hudson Heights (let’s say 70-30), which I predict to be her strongest neighborhood, she could offset losses across the rest of Washington Heights (as high as 58-42).

#1 Harlem

Share: ~23%

Race: White ~24% / Black ~56% / Hispanic ~12%

Age: 18–49 = 50% / 50+ = 50%

R1: Mamdani 45% / Cuomo 33% / Lander 9% / Adams 8%

Final: Mamdani 60% / Cuomo 40%

Median HH income $72,162; College 47%; Renter 81%

We end where it all began: Harlem, the historic capital of Black America.

The landscape is part of our nation’s canon, home to: the Apollo Theater, where Michael Jackson and Aretha Franklin once performed; the Schomburg Center, dedicated to the research and preservation of Black culture; Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose pews hum with the sounds of gospel music every Sunday; and Strivers’ Row, the historic corridor of the African-American professional class.

However, the demographic arithmetic over the past three decades has been brutal to Harlem’s identity: from 1940 through 1990, Harlem was over 90% Black; today, less than half of the neighborhood is African American. The Whole Foods on 125th and Lenox has been open for almost ten years, while the Frederick Douglass Boulevard corridor (south of 125th Street) has been reshaped entirely, home to Levain Bakery, Douglass Elliman Realty, and a plethora of luxury developments. Unsurprisingly, the white population has doubled over the past decade, but the (predominantly Muslim) African immigrant population has grown too, stabilizing the Black population.

Harlem is the largest electorate — barely edging Washington Heights — of any neighborhood in NY-13, and the place where the campaign will be decided.

If Avila Chevalier is favored to win Harlem’s white voters (~26%), a combination of the progressive Brownstone class and college-educated renters, while Espaillat holds Hispanic voters (~12%), primarily clustered in public housing and along the neighborhood’s eastern edge, then the whims of Harlem, and most likely the election itself, will come down to the voters who have built the neighborhood as we know it.

Can The Left finally win the hearts and minds of older Black voters: the most ideologically moderate, institution-aligned bloc in the Democratic coalition? For the past decade, the reception from the party’s most loyal constituency to its insurgent left-leaning faction has been lukewarm, to say the least. And yet, there are signs, nowhere more so than in the Village of Harlem, that the times are changing.

Last summer, Mamdani won younger (under-50) Black voters in Harlem by 29 points, and only lost older (over-50) Black voters, a larger share of the electorate, by 6 points. Similarly to the breakdown of the Hispanic electorate, if Avila Chevalier can replicate Mamdani’s age-correlated inroads, then Espaillat will be in grave danger of defeat. Perhaps most notably, Mamdani activated (Black) Muslim voters across Harlem, particularly around 116th Street; another coalition piece Avila Chevalier can potentially mirror. Still, political science research has shown that, when given a binary choice, Black voters prefer incumbents in primaries more than other racial groups.

This is where the deluge of outside spending, much of it resurfacing deleted tweets about abolishing prisons and defunding the police, could genuinely hurt Avila Chevalier among an older electorate still getting to know her. “Fuck Kamala Harris” may be a common sentiment on the steps of Columbia University, but it will inevitably be, to some extent, a liability in the halls of Lenox Terrace and Esplanade Gardens. Mamdani, too, faced a similar avalanche of last-minute negative advertisements, which failed to dampen his support among Upper Manhattan’s working-class voters. However, even by the conclusion of the Democratic primary, Mamdani had achieved a remarkable amount of earned media — voters had heard, over and over again, directly from him — which helped insulate the insurgent from the attacks mounting against him. The concern for Avila Chevalier is that, in a lower-profile Congressional race, she is altogether a lesser-known candidate with okay name recognition, which makes her more vulnerable to an onslaught of ads seeking to define her negatively.

Nonetheless, Espaillat does not inherit Harlem’s Black voters cleanly, either.

The last time Espaillat was on the ballot in Harlem, the incumbent struggled to break 50%. And this time there will almost assuredly be a meaningful protest vote against him, too. For Espaillat, his critics charge, has spent a career building Dominican power at the expense of Harlem’s African-American establishment. And the wounds of the previous decade, which pitted Espaillat against Charlie Rangel first, and Keith Wright second, have not so much healed as receded into the background. With his career on the line, Espaillat is attempting to broker a truce with his erstwhile enemies, for the dueling factions that have long battled for control of Upper Manhattan politics now face a shared threat: the rise of NYC-DSA. Keith’s son, Jordan, the Harlem assemblyman, is also facing a democratic socialist challenger, Conrad Blackburn.

The Wright dynasty faces a fork in the road: (1) put old grudges aside, temporarily, to save Espaillat, knowing the incumbent is a marked man on the decline, and that NYC-DSA represents the greater long-term threat; OR (2) don’t lift a finger for Espaillat, dooming him to defeat, and then quietly plot to defeat Avila Chevalier in 2028.

Verdict: While voter turnout will decrease across NY-13 compared to the mayoral primary, I anticipate the dropoff will be the steepest in Harlem. But who would benefit the most from a lower turnout environment: Adriano Espaillat, assuming that equation favors older voters; or Darializa Avila Chevalier, whose supporters are more motivated? A voter cross-pressured between an incumbent they dislike and a challenger they do not know is a voter who, more often than not, will stay home.

Turnout, not persuasion, is the real battle.

If this campaign cycle has underscored anything, it is that Adriano Espaillat’s days in office are numbered. The machine that orbits him, once the envy of every boss, has been pushed to the brink by a political neophyte. Espaillat is an old-fashioned power broker, an ethnic trailblazer, the dean of Dominican politics. And for so long, that has been enough. But at some point, sooner than he would like, it will no longer be.

Either way, the era ends. The only question is whether it ends now.

On June 23rd, this rich tapestry — the bodega and the wine bar, the seniors and the socialists; the churches of African American political progress, the cathedrals of Dominican ethnic empowerment, and the college campus that radicalized its insurgent challenger — will be the stage for the dress rehearsal for who leads the Democratic Party. Soon, the thirteen neighborhoods of NY-13 will deliver the answer.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

You can walk it all in less than a day.

Watch the sun rise in Sunnyside, where the youngest Congressional District in America will choose between The Socialists and The Progressives. Cross the bridge into Midtown Manhattan, where the most Jewish district in New York has quietly ceased arguing about AIPAC, and started litigating Artificial Intelligence. Spend your final hours in Harlem before the polls close, and see whether The Left can win the trust of older working-class voters. The Democratic Party will spend the next two years overlooking what happened here, even though it may hold the blueprint to 2028.

Every couple years, the Democratic Party wages a never-ending argument about what it is and whom it serves. Each time, the loudest voices rehearse their lines somewhere else beforehand. Ahead of the upcoming Presidential Primary, that rehearsal space is New York City; a dynamic the rest of the Party resents but depends on in equal measure. And if Zohran Mamdani’s stunning triumph was akin to a viral Broadway show, then the Congressional Primaries here later this month constitute a more low-key, but equally consequential dress rehearsal for what comes next.

I have written previously — in The Mamdani Model — that New York City is not merely a Democratic stronghold, but the cutting edge of American politics: the place where each party’s coalitions, from Outer Borough populism to Rockefeller Republicanism, are stress-tested before they are exported; whose neighborhoods shape Presidents (Donald Trump), an old-guard establishment (Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer) and the movement leaders (Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who threaten it.

Zohran Mamdani did not invent the young, renter-heavy, diverse, left-leaning coalition that carried him to City Hall. But he did work tirelessly to organize it: speaking to their economic grievances, meeting them in their own media ecosystems, and giving them a stake in the political process. The Democratic Party, slowly but surely, is now studying that model — and it goes far beyond repeating “affordability.”

Any good argument acknowledges its limitations. A mayoral primary in a deep-blue city, even the largest in the country, is not a national contest. The electorate that comes to the polls for a Congressional Primary in Manhattan is not the electorate that turns out for a Presidential Primary in South Carolina; nor is Astoria, Queens comparable to Scranton, Pennsylvania — much less Savannah, Georgia. New York City is sui generis: blue, denser, younger, home to more Jews and Catholics than Protestants, with double the number of renters as homeowners. And yet, one can still find almost every constituency imaginable represented across these five boroughs.

However, the parallels are real, and they absolutely matter. The Democratic Party is becoming younger, more urban, and more college-educated with every cycle; but simultaneously hemorrhaging the Black and Hispanic voters who were, until recently, its core constituency. The 2024 defection of working-class voters of color to Donald Trump is the central trauma the Party is still recovering from, and nowhere was that pain more acutely felt than the five boroughs: the forgotten people of Fordham Road in the Bronx and Roosevelt Avenue in Queens rebuked Manhattan’s limousine liberals.

That is what makes New York City worth watching on June 23rd. Not that it perfectly resembles the nation, but that it strips away the noise that muddies a Presidential Primary and lets us see each argument in isolation: the Youth Vote absent a historic turnout machine; support for Israel and Palestine in the country’s most Jewish neighborhoods; an AI proxy war in a district of elites and oligarchs; The Left’s earnest pitch to Black voters who have spent fifty years eschewing insurgents.

All to answer the question pulsing below the pavement: who gets to define the Democratic Party for the next two years, and whom does that party belong to?

Subscribe now

The Youth Vote

We begin with New York’s 7th Congressional District, so young and left-leaning that its neighborhoods have taken on a nickname of their own: The Commie Corridor.

Rep. Nydia Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, announced she would not seek re-election last fall after more than three decades in office. Into her vacuum stepped a field that neatly maps the Left’s internal tensions: pitting Claire Valdez, a freshman Queens assemblymember, UAW organizer, and NYC-DSA member endorsed by Mayor Mamdani; against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough President backed by the outgoing Velázquez, along with the Working Families Party, plus a lion’s share of organized labor and progressive non-profits.

As I told The New York Times, because the erstwhile “establishment” is receding across many neighborhoods and districts, electoral duels between Socialists and Progressives will become “the new [frontier] in New York City and urban politics.”

The race for NY-7 is a proxy battle with ramifications far beyond a sole Congressional District, a quasi-referendum on the question of “Who leads The Left in New York City?” between NYC-DSA and the Working Families Party. Undoubtedly, Valdez vs. Reynoso has shades of Sanders vs. Warren during the 2020 Presidential Primary.

Still, the 7th Congressional District’s lasting impact on 2028 may have less to do with which faction of The Left prevails than with whether the electorate that increasingly defines it — the young, college-educated renters — shows up to the same extent.

Every progressive campaign in America says it will expand the electorate, particularly amongst younger voters. But it almost never comes to fruition. Zohran Mamdani, armed with over 90,000 volunteers and attentional hegemony across social media, upended this orthodoxy in a manner even Bernie Sanders never could.

The under-50 vote is the Sleeping Giant of the national Democratic Party: the youngest, fastest growing, most progressive, but least reliable bloc in the coalition. Mamdani demonstrated that, with enough elbow grease and economic populism, it can be roused; but those intangibles cannot be inherited. What will happen, on June 23rd, when the Mayor is not on the ballot, even if his movement is?

This is precisely the problem staring down The Left nationally ahead of 2028.

Picture a scenario in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the original, giant-slaying democratic socialist who retired Joe Crowley — eschews running for President.

Who, then, wakes the sleeping giant?

The energy, burgeoning and desperate, will not evaporate. It will inevitably look for an outlet. The challenge for The Left is that the outlet might be no one; dissipating among Ro Khanna, Chris Van Hollen, or even Kamala Harris. How much of The Left’s success is built upon force of personality, as opposed to policy alignment? NY-7 is a case study as to whether the Mamdani electorate is a durable electoral realignment or a one hit wonder. And the answer will reverberate well beyond The Commie Corridor.

AIPAC and AI

There is a prediction I shared with Haaretz in January that has aged quite well: A Presidential Candidate Cannot Win a Democratic Primary by Taking AIPAC Money.

Already, the shadow Presidential field has re-arranged themselves around this notion. J.B. Pritzker, the Jewish Governor of Illinois and a former AIPAC board member, now calls the pro-Israel outfit’s spending “interference” and backed Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to limit offensive weapons sales to Israel. Gavin Newsom routinely repeats that he never has and “never will” take AIPAC money. Even Cory Booker, long a reliable recipient, cut AIPAC off earlier this year. Furthermore, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for Congress to withhold funding for the Iron Dome, in accordance with the Leahy Law (announced on an NYC-DSA endorsement call no less), was quickly echoed across the Democratic Party. Once a litmus test, swearing off pro-Israel money is now par for the course among Democrats with national aspirations. AIPAC itself, pushing back, can only protest that it has “never given to a presidential campaign,” less a rebuttal than a confession of where the wind is blowing.

The casualty of this shift in public opinion is Josh Shapiro. The Pennsylvania Governor is, on paper, the most “electable” Democrat in the field, having consistently outperformed his Party’s baseline in the Keystone State, often the tipping point in Presidential races. Nonetheless, Shapiro’s staunch support for Israel may be a deal-breaker in a national Democratic Primary, regardless of whether he ever cashes an AIPAC check. “He would be my top pick, but he’s not getting through a primary,” one longtime Democratic donor told The Hill. Once firmly inside the Democratic mainstream on this issue, Shapiro now finds himself beyond the Overton window.

This development is underscored by two House primaries in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Consider New York’s 10th Congressional District, where incumbent Dan Goldman, the Levi Strauss heir who burnished his profile as the lead counsel during the first Trump impeachment, is on the verge of losing his seat to Brad Lander, a liberal zionist backed by Mayor Mamdani. The former City Comptroller (who finished third in last year’s mayoral primary), Lander has accused the incumbent of “doing AIPAC’s bidding,” and called for ending weapons aid to Israel, offensive and defensive. According to a recent Emerson poll, Lander is leading Goldman by a staggering 34 point margin, an almost unprecedented deficit for a non-scandal-scarred incumbent. Lander’s most lopsided margins, tellingly, were among voters under 40, who broke for him 73% to 15%. Goldman, for his part, never endorsed Zohran Mamdani, was a leading defender of Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, and is among the top recipients of AIPAC money in the New York delegation. His forthcoming defeat, at the behest of Lander, stems from a callous indifference to the Palestinian plight.

This zeitgeist shift can also be seen in New York’s 12th Congressional District: a seat represented by Jerry Nadler that straddles the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan. Home to one of the largest Jewish (and zionist) communities in the United States, and a political class that rarely moves ahead of consensus, pro-Israel money is conspicuously absent, with every candidate rejecting AIPAC’s support.

The fault lines have moved — towards Artificial Intelligence.

Alex Bores is arguably the most interesting candidate in New York City this cycle because of how he has overcome significant outside spending against him. Best known for authoring the RAISE Act — which implemented modest safety guardrails for large AI models — Bores has become the first target of Leading the Future, the pro-industry super PAC bankrolled by Marc Andreessen, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, among others. The PAC pledged at least $10 million to bury him before he ever reached Washington.

However, this dynamic has helped Bores overcome a structural disadvantage. His chief opponent, Micah Lasher, hails from the West Side and is backed by Nadler, a revered figure across Manhattan; whereas Bores represents the East Side, the ancestral home of the old moneyed GOP that counts fewer Democrats among its ranks. (A cursory review of past campaigns reveals the West Side candidate always defeats the East Side candidate in NY-12). But the spending deluge against him spurred a plethora of favorable earned media (like Ezra Klein’s podcast), successfully raising his profile across the district, which threatens to upend the traditional geographic binary of the West Side vs. the East Side. Ads hammering Bores for his past work at Palantir failed to drive up his negatives; if anything, the spectacle of tech oligarchs trying to buy a Manhattan congressional seat has polarized undecided voters towards him. Now, Bores is statistically tied with Lasher, despite almost $2 million in attack ads against the former. Even if he does not prevail, the manner in which Bores has shaped the race for NY-12 is worth internalizing ahead of 2028.

The issues that generate hostile spending are precisely the issues on which that spending backfires, because the financial flood itself becomes the scandal. AIPAC discovered this, which is why they go to great lengths to disguise their advertisements. The AI lobby is learning this as we speak. Still, the weakness of this argument lies with the fact that the NY-12 electorate — high-information and well-educated — can decipher this (well-reported) influx of dark money better than most constituencies. Nonetheless, AI regulation will only increase in salience over the next two years: with every mass layoff and utility bill swollen by a data center.

Thus the 2028 Democratic nominee will not only refuse AIPAC money, they will pair that refusal with an affirmative platform to regulate artificial intelligence: the two litmus tests of a party whose voters have decided, on Israel and Silicon Valley, they are done being told what they are allowed to want. But while the litmus tests may tell us what the next nominee believes, they won’t tell us which voters they need to win.

Share

Left Insurgency with Black Voters

The most pressing question The Left faces is not whether it can win young renters in Brooklyn or college graduates in Manhattan (they already do), but whether it can make durable inroads with older Black voters: the most ideologically moderate, institution-aligned constituency in the Democratic coalition, and the electoral firewall that has decided every contested Presidential Primary this century. And that question is being asked, with remarkable clarity, in New York’s 13th Congressional District.

NY-13 has the highest percentage of renters of any congressional district in America, a population skewing young and millennial, and an incumbent whose particular style of power — transactional, ethnic, machine-rooted — is more structurally vulnerable than it has been in a generation. The five-term incumbent is Adriano Espaillat: the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who is both the first formerly undocumented and first Dominican-American member of Congress. He has no clean national corollary, which is part of what makes him interesting: Espaillat is relatively progressive with respect to immigration, with a biography that earns it; but simultaneously a top recipient of AIPAC money and an old-school machine pol who has built his entire career around ethnic politics. His challenger, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is a 32-year-old Muslim convert who cut her teeth organizing the Columbia encampment alongside her friend, Mahmoud Khalil. First recruited by Justice Democrats, the same outfit that helped AOC defeat Joe Crowley, she was soon thereafter endorsed by NYC-DSA. Last fundraising quarter, Avila Chevalier was the only challenger to outraise a House incumbent, a monetary manifestation of momentum that matches the feeling on the ground. Thus, I have taken a keen interest in New York’s 13th Congressional District, even foreshadowing the incumbent’s demise — and that was before Mayor Mamdani endorsed Avila Chevalier.

However, I have danced around the constituency that will most likely decide the race: Black voters, concentrated in Harlem, and over one-quarter of the electorate.

Adriano Espaillat has spent a career, his critics charge, building Dominican power at the expense of Harlem’s African-American establishment. Whereas Avila Chevalier, leading on Palestine and affordability, remains vulnerable with respect to crime and defund. Nor is there an identity-based advantage, because their identity is shared: both Espaillat and Avila Chevalier are Dominican-American and Afro-Hispanic.

Can the millennial democratic socialist speak to Black voters more persuasively than the ethnic political machine that has ignored them for a decade?

Now think ahead to 2028. Kamala Harris will inevitably consolidate the lion’s share of the Black vote, across the rural south and urban north. But what if the former Vice President stumbles early, as many of her skeptics believe, and is forced to exit the race? Then, for the first time in decades, Black voters become a genuine swing constituency rather than a settled bloc, the skeleton key to which faction emerges from a bloody and fraught Democratic Primary. Does the opening favor an institutionalist like Gavin Newsom? An insurgent like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Or a center-left Southerner who can credibly straddle both camps, like Jon Ossoff?

Harlem, at the heart of the 13th District, is a prime opportunity for The Left to make real inroads with middle-class Black voters of all ages. Can Avila Chevalier win over the grandmothers of Esplanade Gardens and Riverton, who have voted for every Democrat since Percy Sutton? Will she resonate with the college-graduate who moved to Lenox Terrace from Georgia and the low-income single mother who lives in the Polo Grounds? Win here, at the heart of Black political power no less, and the coalition is realized. But lose, and skeptics deride the movement for falling short with the party’s most loyal constituency; a subtle acknowledgment of how far The Left has come over the past decade, and a stern reminder of how far it still has to go.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

Most moments in political campaigns are fleeting, and ultimately lost to history.

But every so often, one breaks through the noise to stand the test of time: a perfect encapsulation of the present conditions that endures to become something greater than the campaign itself.

Such was the case, famously, in the least likely of settings: a half-empty parish hall in the Bronx on a sweltering evening in June 2018. There, a twenty-eight year old bartender debated an empty chair, left for Congressman Joe Crowley.

Crowley’s resume had created an aura of invincibility. In Washington, he was the fourth ranking House Democrat, destined to inherit the Speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi. Back home, he was the mythical “King of Queens,” who reigned over the infamous machine that ruled the World’s Borough with a clenched fist. Crowley controlled the lawyers tasked with policing access to the ballot, and appointed the judges who ruled on those cases. He handpicked the leader of the City Council, armed with a rolodex where every labor leader and elected official was on speed dial.

He was the boss. Less Bruce Springsteen, more Richard Daley.

But all this power had made Joe Crowley quite complacent. On this fateful evening, Crowley had dispatched a surrogate, Annabel Palma, a former Council Member once ranked among the city’s worst, to a debate hosted by The Parkchester Times. This was actually considered an improvement; for Crowley had skipped the previous debate, leaving a literal empty chair in his place. Somehow, this was even worse.

Palma did little more than read the incumbent’s resume into the record; a laundry list of “accomplishments,” offered in place of the man himself; for Joe Crowley, like many a representative before him, had traded the concrete jungle for the sprawling D.C. suburbs. His district, once the fictional home of Archie Bunker and the white-ethnic working class, was now plurality Hispanic; but Crowley could not be bothered to learn even the most basic Spanish phrases. With each minute, the restless audience grew more and more frustrated with their Representative, who was nowhere to be found.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cut a sharp contrast with the absentee incumbent. She was young and progressive, energetic and unapologetic, and always on the offensive. Ocasio-Cortez, never one to let a gift go unopened, slammed the incumbent for sending “a woman with a slight resemblance to me.” With a single tweet, the woman who would soon become known as A-O-C, turned Joe Crowley’s smugness into a referendum on his leadership. The New York Times Editorial Board publicly rebuked Crowley, asking on behalf of the district’s voters, “what are we, chopped liver?”

This moment, powerful and symbolic, was later immortalized by Knock Down The House. For it was less a gaffe, and more a diagnosis. Crowley’s complacency was not incidental to his defeat. The complacency was the defeat: a multi-year forfeiture of the relationship between an incumbent and his district, expressed in the most legible gesture available to a politician: not even bothering to show up.

In the wake of Crowley’s stunning defeat, incumbent Democrats around the country took notice. They would show up more, even if the underlying intent was self-serving.

No one wanted to be The Next Joe Crowley.

But perhaps those crucial lessons have faded over time.

Thus, imagine my bewilderment when, upon attending a local Democratic club forum in Morningside Heights — a neighborhood where the race for New York’s 13th Congressional District will be won or lost — I found that Adriano Espaillat, the five-term incumbent with his own aura of invincibility, was nowhere to be found. This was in February, early on in the campaign season. Nonetheless, Espaillat’s absence was notable, given he was on the receiving end of a rigorous challenge from Darializa Avila Chevalier, backed by both NYC-DSA and Justice Democrats. An inopportune time for an incumbent to be absent. But Adriano Espaillat was no ordinary incumbent.

He is the dean of Dominican elected officials and the first formerly undocumented immigrant to serve in Congress. An ethnic trailblazer who built the most formidable machine in Upper Manhattan, and now chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

A resume coupled with a mythos of inevitability. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Reminiscent of Joe Crowley before him, Espaillat had even sent a surrogate to the forum in his place, City Council Member Shaun Abreu, whose career the legendary power broker helped build. Abreu, now the Majority Leader of the City Council, stood before the club — an audience of older liberals and progressives (many of whom are Jewish), the very constituency Espaillat needs to relentlessly court ahead of June 23rd — and promptly read prepared remarks from his phone, before swiftly departing.

Suddenly, the memory of Annabel Palma and Joe Crowley came flashing back.

A surrogate reading canned talking points; the incumbent somewhere else, certain his revered machine will take care of business. And maybe it will. Adriano Espaillat has buried more bodies across Upper Manhattan than anyone would care to count.

Still, I could not help wondering:

Could it be happening again?

What Makes a Machine

Before we eulogize, it is worth being precise about what a political machine in New York City actually is. The word has morphed into an epithet — something you accuse your enemies of running — and in the process has been stripped of its meaning.

A machine is not corruption, though corruption tends to find it. A machine is not money, though money surely helps it run. A machine is, at its core, an answer to a fundamental (and recurring) problem: how do you motivate a bloc of voters to the polls in a low-turnout election, year after year, without having to re-litigate your right to their vote each time? The answer which the great machines of yore arrived at — Tammany Hall first, and then its ethnic successors — was organization blended with community. Persuading voters in the final few weeks of a campaign is futile. Rather, embed oneself in the institutions where voters are: the block association, the local parish, the union hall, the senior center. Cultivate the ten percent of registered voters who actually vote. Solve their problems (the housing-court summons, the nephew who needs a summer job) and bank the gratitude. Then, every two years, when ninety percent of the district is asleep, wake up your ten percent and win.

What makes this ethnic, in the New York City sense, is not incidental. The immigrant machine is the oldest and most durable form of local politics because it solves a secondary problem at the same time. An ethnic machine offers a newly arrived community a path into a political system that was not built for them. The machine becomes the institution that says we see you, we are you. Vote for us, the saying goes, and we will be the voice for you, the little guy, in the halls of power. The Irish embodied this better than anyone, building the most powerful machine in American history, reigning for the better part of a century. Tammany dispensed patronage to their ethnic brethren from City Hall, but the fiefdoms that followed were far more localized. The Italians and Jews opened storefronts across the Outer Boroughs. Puerto Ricans, trading San Juan for the South Bronx, and Black Americans, fleeing Jim Crow for Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, cohered political power in the city’s post-war ghettos. Even a class of educated, good government professionals (nicknamed “goo-goos”) emerged as their own constituency; after dethroning Tammany Hall’s leader, Carmine De Sapio, many regulars were left asking, weren’t these reformers a machine, too? The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which removed Eurocentric immigration quotas, birthed a new class of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, China, and the Caribbean. Gradually, they too amassed political power. Over the following decades, these ethnic machines wrestled power from one another; less a function of political acumen than the demographic changes endemic to the five boroughs. While representation spurred upset victories, constituent services were the key to re-election. A machine, at least a well-oiled one, was not merely a vote-extraction operation, but a durable link, oftentimes the only link, between overlooked ethnic communities and political power.

But power built on a single, cohesive, arriving community carries a hidden expiration date — one written into the demography itself. This is the part, inherent to New York City, that nobody likes to say out loud. But that is what our story is ultimately about.

Subscribe now

In The Heights

No one in recent history has built an ethnic political machine in New York City more methodically, or from less, than Adriano Espaillat.

At nine years old, the scion of Dominican political royalty arrived in Washington Heights, the Caribbean island’s conduit in Upper Manhattan. His family overstayed their tourist visa, eventually becoming green card holders; (Espaillat is the first formerly undocumented member of Congress). An aspiring politico, Espaillat embedded himself in local institutions: serving on the community board, leading the police precinct council, advising Governor Mario Cuomo on Dominican issues, plus a gamut of nonprofit work: legal services, conflict resolution, victims’ services. After unsuccessful runs for City Council and State Assembly, his breakthrough came in 1996, as Espaillat dethroned sixteen-term incumbent John Murtaugh. Murtaugh, the last remaining Celtic pol in the area, had represented Inwood and Washington Heights since they were predominantly Irish and Jewish; but by the end of the 20th century, Murtaugh’s district had become 80% Hispanic, and majority Dominican. When he ran out of money, Espaillat, sensing this was his best chance at elected office, sold his car to keep campaigning. The gambit worked, as Espaillat won by 401 votes; a margin now etched in the folklore of Upper Manhattan politics. From there he never stopped running, making an ill-fated play for Manhattan Borough President before eventually ascending to the State Senate. But the crown jewel was always Congress.

There would be no amicable changing of the guard. For roughly seven decades, the Congressional seat in Upper Manhattan had only changed hands once: beginning with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the firebrand who chaired the House Education and Labor Committee and was, for a time, the most powerful Black member of Congress; followed by Charlie Rangel, who unseated Powell in 1971, co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus, and became the Dean of the New York delegation. Harlem, and this seat, was the capital of Black political power in America, and the local establishment did not regard a Dominican insurgent from Uptown as its natural heir. Thus, when Espaillat challenged the aging Rangel — in 2012, and again in 2014 — the contest was not so much haunted by race as openly conducted on its terms.

The arithmetic beneath the bitterness stemmed from New York’s 2012 Congressional redistricting, which increased the percentage of Hispanic residents in NY-13: a burgeoning population of Dominican immigrants pitted against a Black institution overnight. Rangel survived both contests: the first round by fewer than one thousand votes, the rematch by fewer than two thousand. Each time Rangel netted a supermajority of the Black vote while Espaillat won a supermajority of the Hispanic vote: a pronounced ethnic cleavage as old as the five boroughs themselves. Rangel, cornered in a debate, said the quiet part out loud, that Espaillat “wants to be the Jackie Robinson of the Dominicans in the Congress,” and ought to tell voters “just what the heck he has done besides saying he’s a Dominican.” Espaillat’s allies, for their part, accused Rangel of running a “tale of two Harlems,” lavishing Central Harlem’s Black institutions with empowerment-zone money while starving Hispanic East Harlem and Washington Heights of funds. In 2012, critics charged that Espaillat leaned too hard into ethnic pride; to the point where in 2014 he conspicuously tried to downplay it: “ethnic pride has its place,” he conceded, “but when your rent goes up, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Latino or Black or White.” Still, he lost each time. The Dominican first framing that galvanized Washington Heights had alienated the broader Black, Puerto Rican, and White voters he needed to earn a majority.

Did Adriano Espaillat learn this lesson? As it turned out, he never needed to.

It all came to a head in the 2016 Democratic Primary, as Espaillat faced promotion or his third consecutive rejection. Rangel had finally retired, and Espaillat was no longer facing an institution. Nevertheless, the Lion of Lenox Avenue endorsed Harlem’s own Keith Wright as his chosen successor. While the race would narrow to Espaillat versus Wright, the field of other candidates arguably determined the outcome. In a battle of turnout between Black and Hispanic voters, the four Black candidates outpaced the two Hispanic candidates 56% to 42%. Nonetheless, Espaillat squeaked by head-to-head against Wright (35.9% to 34.1%), another racially polarized result. Wright, and Harlem’s Black establishment, did not concede graciously, demanding a recount of absentee ballots while the celebrations had already begun farther Uptown.

Of his three consecutive runs for Congress, Espaillat won both his lowest vote share and lowest vote total, in 2016. Not only had he failed to grow his coalition, he watched it diminish. For the first time in seventy years, Harlem would not have an African American representative in Washington. One community leader compared Espaillat’s victory to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon; others decried the changing of the guard as a hostile takeover. In a district both Hispanics and African Americans had to share, these resentments did not evaporate with the result; they merely went dormant.

Share

The Franchise

Promptly, Adriano Espaillat did what political machines do best: he franchised.

Jeff Coltin chronicled the result for City & State, and gave it a name that stuck — the Squadriano, a loose-but-durable network of younger, mostly Dominican-American officials Espaillat has cultivated, funded, and elevated across Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx: Carmen De La Rosa, Shaun Abreu, Oswald Feliz, Pierina Sanchez, Manny De Los Santos, George Alvarez. Six candidates in fifteen months, by Coltin’s count, all Dominican-American, all in districts overlapping Espaillat’s own. They meet for strategy sessions, share a text thread, and hire the same consultants. Ritchie Torres, an ally, hailed his House colleague for building “a turnout machine the likes of which have rarely been seen in New York City politics.” After steering a successful slate of City Council candidates, Espaillat’s legend peaked in June of 2022. During that primary election, only one candidate in all of New York City unseated an incumbent; an honor bestowed, not to insurgent an leftist endorsed by NYC-DSA or the Working Families Party, but George Alvarez, previously a little known perennial candidate who was promptly carried to victory by the full breadth of the Espaillat machine, defeating Jose Rivera, a longtime Puerto Rican incumbent. Overnight, the kingmaker reputation, percolating in the background, was burnished.

This was, in the words of Bill Simmons, Adriano Espaillat’s “Apex Mountain.”

If this was the height of the Espaillat mythology, the following years exposed several, subtle cracks. The “Squadriano,” once cohesive, slowly frayed. When Carmen De La Rosa ran for City Council Speaker, Espaillat eschewed the Dominican solidarity he routinely champions in public, and instead backed Julie Menin, a wealthy white woman who represents the Upper East Side. When Pierina Sanchez, a progressive Council Member from the West Bronx, faced a serious challenge from Fernando Cabrera, the conservative pastor who formerly represented her district, Espaillat did not lift a finger, let alone return a phone call. When Espaillat convened a mayoral forum in Washington Heights last year, he promised the audience this would “be one of many public conversations.” Some of his alleged allies, out of earshot of the Congressman while he worked the room, grumbled that the entire affair was a farce, that the Dominican power broker had already decided to endorse Andrew Cuomo, to their collective dismay. They were correct: there were no more public forums, only a coronation; Espaillat endorsed Cuomo shortly thereafter, only to watch the former Governor get trounced in the 13th Congressional District by Zohran Mamdani.

But the most consequential crack in his armor — should Espaillat be dethroned on June 23rd — opened four years ago, when the Congressman foolishly backed a challenger to State Senator Robert Jackson. A brief bit of background: Jackson, a progressive Black Muslim known for decades of educational advocacy, succeeded Espaillat in the State Senate when the latter was elected to Congress; in 2022, Jackson’s district was redrawn to include more Hispanic voters, namely Dominicans, closely resembling the top-third of the 13th Congressional District; Espaillat, always a foe of Jackson, aggressively supported a well-funded Dominican challenger, Angel Vasquez, to the incumbent. A glance at the Census toplines, a majority Hispanic district, coupled with six-figure independent expenditures backing Vasquez, lent credence to the narrative that Jackson was vulnerable. Instead, Jackson won by 25 points, a landslide of epic proportions. In a midterm environment, Hispanic voter turnout lagged, while Jackson ran up the score (topping 90% in some precincts) with older liberals in Inwood and Hudson Heights, the White enclaves west of Broadway. This Senate District was the heart of Espaillat’s base — Washington Heights and Inwood — and his hand-picked challenger was crushed. Fast forward four years later, and now Jackson, one of the few beloved figures remaining in local politics, is wholeheartedly backing Darializa Avila Chevalier. “RJ” may have the last laugh.

When A King Meets A Queen

Here’s what should also keep Adriano Espaillat up at night, and serve as a cold sweat-inducing reminder of the perils of forum-skipping and general absenteeism.

Joe Crowley was not, in 2018, supposed to be vulnerable. He was the “King of Queens,” whose institutional reach stretched from the World’s Borough to Washington. He was a prodigious fundraiser and an old school back-slapping retail politician, marrying the stature of D.C. leadership with the infrastructure of an Outer Borough machine. The incumbent had even avoided facing a primary challenger since 2004. Internal polls from both campaigns estimated that Crowley was ahead by between forty and fifty points. He was, by every conventional metric, safe.

And he lost, convincingly (57.5% to 42.5%), on thirteen percent voter turnout.

The Crowley autopsy reads like a checklist that someone overlooking Fort Tryon Park (and his plethora of high-priced consultants) ought to be reading very carefully right now. By 2018, Crowley’s district was majority-Hispanic and increasingly young, flush with immigrants from South America and college-educated renters. His base aged out and moved out of the district; the white-ethnic Queens of old had been thinning for years, dying off and decamping to the suburbs. Once upon a time, New York’s machines worked tirelessly to bring new immigrant populations into the political process; and this arrangement, to varying extents, was mutually beneficial to both parties. Whereas Crowley’s organization, atrophied and complacent, lacked both the vernacular and, most importantly, the will to reach out to these new voters. His D.C. colleagues were blunt. “Joe is a great guy,” reflected James Clyburn, “but I don’t think he paid enough attention to those constituents at home.”

There remains an argument about which voters did Crowley in: The Intercept credited the gentrifying precincts of Astoria and Sunnyside, while Data for Progress countered that it was due to turnout from younger voters across the board, not explicitly gentrification. Regardless, the distinction matters less than the enduring thesis which binds both arguments: an atrophying political machine optimized for a past electorate was defeated by the electorate it had stubbornly refused to learn.

Compare the past plight of Joe Crowley with the present predicament of Adriano Espaillat, and the similarities are eerie. A political machine built around a community whose share of the primary vote is no longer growing. A district transformed by an influx of younger renters. An establishment apparatus that has never learned how to reach voters beyond their sphere of influence. An incumbent who skips forums and sends a surrogate in his place. And a hungry challenger he was slow to take seriously.

Now, the only question left is whether Espaillat will suffer the same fate.

The End of Ethnic Politics

There is a key difference between the two machines worth naming explicitly, because it describes why Espaillat’s vulnerability is structural rather than merely circumstantial.

Crowley’s power, in the end, was negative. The Queens machine’s greatest strength lay not in turning people out to vote so much as in keeping opponents off the ballot: they would challenge petition signatures, appoint the judges tasked with ruling on the cases, and clear the field of all competition. Those who erred against those rules would face retaliation. One young woman from Parkchester said that challenging Crowley would be nothing short of “political suicide for anyone with a semblance of a career”. But when a challenger — in this case, the charismatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — finally gained access onto the ballot, the underbelly of the machine was soft.

Espaillat’s power is the opposite: affirmative, and built painstakingly over many campaign cycles. His reputation as a power broker, much disputed, is nonetheless earned; no elected official in recent memory has ground out more difficult races than Espaillat. Compared to the paper tiger apparatus Crowley presided over, Espaillat boasts the far more impressive operation. Nonetheless, his vaunted machine is impressive at mobilizing only one community: the Hispanic (namely Dominican) vote in Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx. Three consecutive wars with Harlem’s Black establishment has trained Espaillat for that fight — but none other.

A cursory review of the Census and Espaillat appears unassailable: NY-13 is a majority-Hispanic district (52%), with Dominicans alone accounting for almost half its immigrants. A political machine that turns out Hispanic voters in Upper Manhattan would appear to be turning out a majority of the vote. But residency is not akin to citizenship, let alone who shows up at the ballot box, aka the electorate. The 2025 Democratic Primary voters in NY-13 were roughly 34% Hispanic, 30% White, and 27% Black; arguably the most racially-diverse Congressional District in New York City with no single voting bloc in command. Many pollsters expect 2026 to look similarly; for with each passing cycle, the electorate uptown gets younger and whiter. And it is those voters, not the Census toplines, that a Democratic Congressman must win.

Adriano Espaillat is favored to lose the White vote by a significant margin, from the gentrifiers of Harlem to the young families of Hudson Heights to the liberal cooperators of Inwood. He is, by the most generous reading, barely above water with Black voters, a startling weakness for any longtime Democratic incumbent, and has failed to break fifty percent overall in any public survey; a five-term Congressman struggling to hold on against a thirty-two year old insurgent with no prior name recognition. Espaillat’s machine, coalitionally narrow, can dominate a third of the electorate and still lose, because a third of the electorate is no longer enough.

Espaillat has always been a stranger to Harlem — home to over twenty percent of all voters, and the most important neighborhood in NY-13 — because it was forever the power base of his African-American opponents. East Harlem, almost fifteen percent of the electorate, has never been a point of strength, either, despite its large and diverse Hispanic population. This was true ten years ago, and it is still the case today.

But back then, he could get away with it and still win. Now, it might cost him his job.

Even his Hispanic base is moving. The Dominican voters of Upper Manhattan are following the arc of every immigrant community in New York City’s illustrious history: aging and assimilating. And, like Hispanic voters across the country, they are drifting from the Democratic Party, their vote share gradually declining each June. Latino Victory Fund, a Super PAC spending $750,000 to boost Espaillat, is hoping to reverse those trends; but they are, like Antonio Reynoso in Brooklyn, running uphill against the changing demographics of the five boroughs. A friend raised in one of NY-13’s many public housing developments described these underlying physics to me better than any consultant ever could. “A real problem for immigrant machines is that their voters really want to drive and live in a house,” he said. “A core difference about machines is: do your voters live in apartments because they want to, or live in apartments because they have to?“ The Espaillat machine was built on the second kind of voter: rooted in place not by choice, but circumstance. Now, the erstwhile Espaillat base has migrated to the Bronx, let alone Somerset County in New Jersey.

The 13th Congressional District is filling more and more, year over year, with the first kind of voter: younger renters who live in urban apartments by choice, drawn to Upper Manhattan for its relative affordability. Once dismissed as transient and indifferent, they made up the heart of the Mamdani coalition.

And soon, perhaps, that of Darializa Avila Chevalier.

Avila Chevalier embodies the other Upper Manhattan. She too is Dominican-American; a Muslim convert and encampment organizer at Columbia University. Arguably no campaign in New York City has embraced Palestine this cycle in the manner Avila Chevalier has. But can this salient issue, in the Congressional District with more renters than anywhere else in the United States, motivate a critical mass of working-class voters to the polls? Between Avila Chevalier and Espaillat, who will carry the day across the many public housing developments of East Harlem, or the Black seniors of Esplanade Gardens and Lenox Terrace in Harlem? The whims of the district’s older liberals, of Riverside Drive and Fort Washington Avenue, loom large over the outcome, too. Will they view Avila Chevalier as a campus radical lacking experience, or an inspiring woman reminiscent of another young socialist, whose name can also be shortened to a three-letter acronym? And, in this battle between the past and future of Dominican-American politics, the most important constituency will be Hispanic voters under the age of 50, a demographic Mamdani won by 40 points. Were Avila Chevalier to win Hispanic voters under-50, she would deal a fatal blow to Espaillat amongst a constituency where he can ill-afford to lose more ground.

In the first quarter of this year, Avila Chevalier was the only primary challenger to outraise a sitting member of the House of Representatives (although Espaillat still has roughly a million dollars on hand compared to her more modest quarter million). Justice Democrats, the national outfit that helped elect AOC and Jamaal Bowman, has backed her, too, announcing a $250,000 ad buy this week. The one endorsement conspicuously absent is Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, of course, has his hands full downtown, with no shortage of aspirants clamoring for his all-important blessing. But can the Mayor still feel the pulse of the people from the bullpen of City Hall? Mamdani has an innate sense of candidate quality, and Avila Chevalier has undoubtedly run a strong race. It would be uncharacteristic of Mamdani, always one to push the bounds of socialist electoral expansion, to miss the undeniable energy pulsing through Avila Chevalier’s campaign across The Next Commie Corridor.

Which raises the question, if the ethnic political machines of yore have finally run out of road — if Adriano Espaillat is, in fact, the next Joe Crowley — then can Darializa Avila Chevalier be the next…

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

“I am the underdog.”

This remark, shared candidly with a roundtable of journalists, was a telling admission from Antonio Reynoso, one of the leading candidates for Congress in North Brooklyn and Western Queens. Reynoso is the district’s native son, raised by Dominican immigrants on the South Side of Williamsburg. For over a decade, he has represented its neighborhoods; first in the City Council, and then as Brooklyn Borough President. Reynoso co-founded New Kings Democrats, which wrestled power from the atrophying machine of Vito Lopez, setting the stage for a progressive boom across North Brooklyn. He was instrumental in the passage of The Right to Know Act, which required NYPD officers to identify themselves to civilians. Of the three candidates running, Reynoso has by far the deepest roots in the district. And no one has more endorsements from organized labor and local elected officials, either. Perhaps most importantly, the son of Los Sures has received the full-throated support of the outgoing incumbent, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, a progressive stalwart who has represented many of these neighborhoods for the better part of three decades.

He should be anything but the underdog.

And yet, Reynoso was absolutely correct. He is the underdog.

Claire Valdez, the choice of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is the favorite.

“If it was just me and Claire and Zohran didn’t endorse her, we’re not even having this conversation,” Reynoso told The New York Editorial Board. “It’s over. But Zohran means something. He has like an 80% favorability rating in this district. He won [this district] with the biggest margin against Cuomo. That’s why it’s a toss-up.”

Mamdani, in Reynoso’s telling, has achieved “celebrity status… at the levels of AOC and Bernie Sanders.” And nowhere is his voice more revered than New York’s 7th Congressional District, which straddles the Brooklyn-Queens border.

It is less a district than a nuanced world unto itself. A place where the former stomping grounds of the Irish of Sunnyside and the Polish of Greenpoint have given way to post-industrial hyper-gentrification in Long Island City and Williamsburg. Where residential Ridgewood blends seamlessly into hipster Bushwick; both neighborhoods left for dead half a century ago, yet now boasting higher median rents than parts of the Upper East Side. Where the Latino working-class of Los Sures and Hope Gardens strive to become the Latino middle-class of Cypress Hills and Woodhaven. Where the full spectrum of the Mamdani coalition is represented: from the masjids of City Line, home to a large Bangladeshi community; to the secular, professional class of Fort Greene’s brownstones. Where the college-educated White population has steadily climbed, becoming more and more involved with local Democratic politics; while the blue-collar Hispanic population has gradually decreased, and drifted from the Party once synonymous with their support.

It is also, per this newsletter’s coinage, the heart of The Commie Corridor: the densest concentration of millennials and renters in any district in America.

The Mayor, according to the Brooklyn Borough President, is “a movement.”

But Reynoso’s answer, key to accurately framing the contest, is also incomplete. Valdez, in addition to Mamdani, has the support of their shared political home, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA).

Since Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2016, the Socialist Left has grown unevenly, but exponentially. A volunteer-led organization with only two paid staffers, NYC-DSA embraces the party surrogate model: changing the Democratic Party by winning primary elections (often in deep blue districts), rather than forming a third party that competes in November. In less than a decade, NYC-DSA has parlayed a handful of victories down the ballot, marrying message discipline and viral charisma with a small army of door knockers, into the political earthquake of Mamdani’s victory last summer.

That anti-establishment lane, prior to NYC-DSA’s meteoric rise, was solely occupied by the New York Working Families Party (WFP), which has enthusiastically endorsed Reynoso. Unlike NYC-DSA, the Working Families Party is a political party, with its own ballot line. This allows WFP to raise and spend money like a Super PAC (funding television advertisements, internal polling, paid canvassing, direct mail); but, unlike a Super PAC, they can coordinate with candidates directly.

Reynoso, by his own admission, is a “WFP pup,” a loyal friend of the progressive third party since the beginning of his career. Valdez, meanwhile, is a “cadre” member of NYC-DSA: a longtime UAW organizer elected to the State Assembly in 2024.

The Socialists vs. The Progressives, indeed.

Reynoso named this dynamic in his aforementioned interview: “The DSA and Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders versus the WFP, and Tish James, Jumaane Williams, the group of progressives that have been doing a lot of work for a long time.”

This piece is structured around the NYC-DSA vs WFP framing, which is why Julie Won, the Western Queens Council Member who is also running for NY-7 but is endorsed by neither organization, is not featured prominently.

Five years ago, Antonio Reynoso would have been a shoo-in for this seat. But in 2026, acknowledging the uphill battle before him is simply an honest read of the room.

Now, he’s on the wrong side of the demographic curve, and the wrong side of the Mamdani coalition, which — if betting odds and internal polls are to be believed — may lead him to be on the wrong side of the outcome on June 23rd.

We’ll get there. But first, some housekeeping and history.

Subscribe now

The Working Families Party was founded in 1998 by a coalition of labor unions (the Communications Workers of America’s District 1, UAW Region 9, the Hotel Trades Council, RWDSU, 1199 SEIU), community organizations (ACORN and its eventual successor New York Communities for Change, Citizen Action of New York), and a handful of operatives, most notably Dan Cantor, from the defunct New Party.

The New Party, formed years prior by Cantor, a former labor coordinator for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential campaign, pursued an “inside/outside” strategy pushing Democrats to the left through the fusion voting system, which allowed candidates to run on multiple ballot lines. (The New Party endorsed Barack Obama in his successful 1996 election to the Illinois State Senate). However, the Supreme Court decision, Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, closed the door on nationwide fusion voting, and killed The New Party. But in New York, fusion voting remained not only legal, but alive and well; in fact, the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party played a pre-eminent role in municipal and state politics for significant periods of the 20th century. Cantor’s bet was that the Working Families Party could run a permanent third party in New York, with ballot access, that almost never ran its own candidates, but instead used the threat of a withheld cross-endorsement to drag Democrats leftward.

WFP’s plan to build a more left-leaning, labor-friendly Democratic Party was ambitious: Rudy Giuliani had just cruised to a second term as Mayor, Republican George Pataki reigned as Governor, and Clintonian neoliberalism dominated the national party.

In 1998, the threshold for securing a third party ballot line in New York was 50,000 votes. The task fell to Peter Vallone Sr., the City Council Speaker from Astoria, Queens; uninspiring and relatively moderate, the party’s rank and file were less than enthused. Vallone Sr., who was crushed by Pataki, nonetheless won 51,325 votes on the newly-minted Working Families Party ballot line. “For the most part, Vallone’s politics represented the antithesis of what we hoped to build — and we took an enormous amount of shit from a lot of activists about that contradiction,” Bob Master recalled to Buzzfeed News. “But the tactic worked.”

Over the next decade, the New York Working Families Party became, arguably, the most influential third party in the nation. A decade of highlights included: electing future Attorney General Letitia James solely on their ballot line in 2003 (granted, James had scores of establishment support); powering the freshman City Council class in 2009 — Brad Lander, Jumaane Williams, Jimmy Van Bramer, Daniel Dromm — which would help overturn Mayor Bloomberg’s veto of paid sick leave, and later formed the nucleus of the Progressive Caucus; while lending crucial support to Bill de Blasio throughout his early career. When the former Park Slope Councilman was elected Mayor, one of WFP’s best organizers, Emma Wolfe, became his Chief of Staff.

But then came Andrew Cuomo, and a long, ugly divorce from labor.

Elected Governor in 2010, Cuomo — a cost-cutting, fiscal centrist — soon made it a personal mission to break the Working Families Party. After the party reluctantly endorsed his 2014 re-election versus Zephyr Teachout (the party’s activist wing wanted Teachout, but labor preferred Cuomo), the vengeful Governor retaliated by creating the similar-sounding Women’s Equality Party, expressly to confuse Working Families Party voters. The rupture came to a head in 2018, when the Working Families Party endorsed actress-turned-activist Cynthia Nixon over Cuomo; immediately, 32BJ SEIU, the Communications Workers of America District 1, the Hotel Trades Council, RWDSU, and 1199 SEIU walked away from the progressive third party. Bill Lipton, then WFP’s New York State Director, told CNN that “[Cuomo] said ‘if unions or anyone give money to any of these groups, they can lose my number.’”

Overnight, the party that had been founded by labor was no longer a labor party.

It was now The Alphabet Left, a collection of non-profits and NGOs.

The exodus of unions restructured the Working Families Party, ideologically and financially. Without labor dues, a significant piece of the Party’s finances, WFP was forced to rely more on foundation grants and high dollar donors. And, absent their former union member base, integral to getting out the vote, the Party developed a smaller, more ideological staff of professional organizers. Dan Cantor stepped aside as National Director in 2018; Maurice Mitchell, a Movement for Black Lives veteran, took over. Bill Lipton, the sharp-elbowed New York State Director who had been there from the beginning, followed suit two years later. By 2023, the New York outfit was co-led by Ana María Archila (Center for Popular Democracy) and Jasmine Gripper (Alliance for Quality Education); both products of the progressive non-profit ecosystem, rather than the labor movement. The transformation was complete.

Still, the Working Families Party continued their solid electoral track record: preserving their ballot line (despite Cuomo’s best efforts to the contrary); winning several more seats on the City Council; expanding their foothold in the Hudson Valley and Upstate New York; and electing Brad Lander, a longstanding ally, as City Comptroller.

Unfortunately, these efforts were marred by a series of higher-profile defeats. Jumaane Williams, a longtime WFP ally, was crushed in the 2022 Gubernatorial race by Kathy Hochul. But, most devastating to the WFP brand was the result of the 2021 Democratic Primary for Mayor. The Party unveiled a ranked-choice voting slate of Comptroller Scott Stringer (#1), non-profit executive Dianne Morales (#2), and well-respected civil rights attorney Maya Wiley (#3). Stringer, an old school liberal struggling to gain traction with younger voters, was accused of sexual assault and promptly dropped from the slate. Morales, more fluent in the language of the left, inherited the coveted first rank only to watch her campaign immediately implode following accusations of union busting. Wiley, the sole candidate on the slate untainted by scandal, became WFP’s first choice by default. Despite a late push (spurred by an endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), she finished third, eliminated in the penultimate round behind Eric Adams, the law-and-order Brooklyn Borough President, and Kathryn Garcia, a technocratic ex-Commissioner. None of the three candidates originally backed by the Working Families Party made the final two.

This result, bluntly, was devastating to WFP’s reputation. Given that Adams, the antithesis of the party’s progressive ethos, emerged victorious, WFP needed to play the next mayoral race correctly. But by 2025, it was no longer alone on The Left…

Share

The Working Families Party, compared to NYC-DSA, is less democratic. A prospective candidate must first be recommended to the New York City Regional Advisory Council (RAC) by the local chapter that has “jurisdiction” over the given race. The RAC consists mostly of non-profits and some unions. The respective voting power of each union and non-profit on the RAC is weighted based on “membership and money” (the more dues paid to WFP, the greater the number of votes). For example, the New York State Nurses Association has 8 votes, while UAW Region 9A has 2. Despite having a similar number of members, NYSNA pays more dues to WFP than UAW, giving them 8 votes on the RAC. The RAC then either approves or overrides the local chapter’s recommendation. According to Peter Sterne’s reporting for City and State, “the RAC routinely disregards local chapter recommendations, making them all but irrelevant.” The opaqueness of WFP’s endorsement process extends to national politics: after endorsing Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders, the party drew extended scrutiny for refusing to release the vote totals of rank-and-file members. Even now, Sanders is closely associated with DSA, while Warren is synonymous with WFP.

While each candidate endorsed by NYC-DSA receives a comparable baseline of institutional support from the organization, the range of outcomes for a WFP-backed candidate is far greater. Some candidates receive the full breadth of the party’s resources: full-time field organizers, direct mail, internal polling, digital and television advertisements, even an independent expenditure — all funded by the Working Families Party. To a cash-strapped campaign, particularly at the local level, this support is not only invaluable, but often makes the difference between winning and losing. Additionally, WFP boasts a year-round staff of its own political operatives, who can provide day-to-day support to priority campaigns. This model, ironically, complements NYC-DSA’s strengths quite well; when partnered together, the two left-leaning orgs have a far stronger electoral record than when they are on their own.

Nonetheless, other less-fortunate campaigns receive little more than a paper endorsement and a couple of volunteers from the local chapter. Given that WFP’s financial resources are not infinite, the party brass have to strategically invest in their endorsed campaigns: if an insurgent surges across the final weeks, they may receive an influx of spending from the party to help push them over the top; whereas if a poll comes back showing a campaign far behind, investments may be directed elsewhere.

Prior to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for President, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America was little more than a reading group of two dozen members arguing about the legacy of Eugene Debs.

A decade later, NYC-DSA is the largest chapter of the largest socialist organization in the nation, with more than 14,000 dues-paying members in the five boroughs, and the “political home” of the Mayor of New York City. That trajectory — from study group to City Hall in ten years — has no real analog in modern American politics.

That arc is worth rehearsing, briefly. The Bernie campaign exploded membership in the socialist organization, both locally and nationally. Increasingly, those eager volunteers, oftentimes Millennials who found themselves disillusioned by Obama but revived by Sanders, gravitated to the organizing they knew best: knocking on doors. At first, NYC-DSA flirted with backing third party candidates (such as Jabari Brisport on the Green Party line) before internalizing that running in closed Democratic Primaries had far more upside. The big breakthroughs came in the summer of 2018: NYC-DSA was a junior partner to Justice Democrats on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Rep. Joe Crowley, a political upset so pronounced it helped electrify the campaign of Julia Salazar, running for State Senate against a machine-aligned incumbent in North Brooklyn. Salazar’s victory in September was the first of many for NYC-DSA in the belt of gentrifying neighborhoods in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, now coined The Commie Corridor. A razor-thin defeat in a contentious race for Queens District Attorney in 2019 proved that the socialist organization had the juice to credibly compete with the establishment across entire boroughs, not just individual neighborhoods. In the depths of COVID, NYC-DSA’s first slate of candidates — Jabari Brisport, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Zohran Mamdani — went undefeated in the 2020 Democratic Primary (unseating three incumbents). Door knocking, NYC-DSA’s most effective mode of outreach to voters, was shelved on account of the pandemic. And it did not matter — every candidate still won.

The setbacks that followed embodied the nadir felt across The Left during the Biden administration. In 2021, while WFP stumbled in the mayoral race, the progressive third party still bested NYC-DSA in two key Council races, contributing to a less than stellar 2-for-6 record. One year later, NYC-DSA once again ran an ambitious slate of multiple candidates, but struggled to persuade working-class natives and re-activate their base of younger voters. Nonetheless, by 2022, the entirety of Astoria — colloquially known as The People’s Republic — had democratic socialist representation at the City Council, State Assembly, State Senate, and Congressional levels simultaneously, an arrangement that has not existed anywhere in American politics since Milwaukee in the early 20th century. (Today, Bushwick and Ridgewood are within shouting distance of the same). After October 7th, many commentators pronounced NYC-DSA, which unapologetically supports Palestinian human rights and the BDS movement, too politically toxic to win elections. While such doomsday predictions did not come to pass, 2024 marked the lowest point of NYC-DSA’s brief intervention in New York City politics. A smaller, more manageable slate of three candidates was fielded (a fourth, embattled Rep. Jamaal Bowman, was added later). All lost, deluged by outside PAC spending from the Real Estate and Pro-Israel lobbies, except for one: an unassuming labor organizer for UAW Local 2110 from Lubbock, Texas named Claire Valdez.

Subscribe now

NYC-DSA is a member organization: anyone in the five boroughs can pay dues, attend their local branch meeting, debate with comrades, and vote. The endorsement and candidate recruitment process is famously rigorous, with the most successful applicants engaging both volunteer leaders and rank-and-file membership. If granted an endorsement forum by the Electoral Working Group (EWG), candidates pitch themselves to a room of hundreds of members, who then debate amongst themselves at the EWG forum and vote thereafter. Each prospective candidate needs to exceed a 60% threshold for their endorsement to be “recommended,” which advances them to the branch level, and then the Citywide Leadership Committee (CLC) for ratification. To be eligible to vote on the all-important EWG recommendation, one must be a dues-paying member of NYC-DSA for at least two months, and have participated in one electoral activity in the past two years (per the honor system). For context, Claire Valdez won the NY-7 endorsement vote with 94% — a mandate in NYC-DSA terms. Functionally, the EWG forum is the most important step in the process (their recommendation is seldom overturned). Once elected, legislators join the Socialists in Office (SIO) committee, a weekly meeting between NYC-DSA elected officials, their staff, and chapter leadership.

The best NYC-DSA candidates thread the needle of viability (a pre-existing base of support in their district, and the work ethic to campaign rigorously), strategic opportunity (a district relatively amenable to socialist politics, with upside for the movement, win or lose), loyalty to the organization (prospective candidates are often asked if they will continue to run regardless of whether they are endorsed or not), and capacity to inspire (the candidate’s intangible ability to motivate a critical mass of people to donate their time and money).

Upon receiving the support of NYC-DSA, the endorsed candidate will benefit from the socialist organization’s greatest competitive advantage: an influx of volunteers willing to knock doors and talk to voters, over and over again, for free. These organizers, who further develop their skills with each successive campaign, have proven invaluable in ousting complacent incumbents. The extent of this advantage varies greatly based on campaign scale (races for Mayor and Congress garner the most attention, whereas down-ballot state legislative contests are less attractive), location (it is far easier to recruit NYC-DSA volunteers to canvass in member-dense areas like North and Central Brooklyn, than, for instance, the East Bronx), and macro-political conditions (enthusiasm and engagement across The Left peaked during both Trump eras, but noticeably declined in between).

The maturation of NYC-DSA has also borne an emerging class of savvy political operatives. On Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, many of his core staffers (Campaign Manager Elle Bisgaard-Church, Deputy Campaign Manager Katie Riley, Field Director Tascha Van Auken, Communications Director Andrew Epstein) cut their teeth organizing with NYC-DSA. Amidst a field flush with veteran operatives, Mamdani’s fresh-faced team was underestimated. These “inexperienced” upstarts collectively steered one of the best campaigns in recent memory on their way to a historic upset. The internal development of talent within NYC-DSA, similar to the incubation once offered by WFP, is arguably the most important, yet least discussed, development in New York City politics. Now, many top staffers from the Mamdani campaign (Andrew Epstein, Morris Katz, Ravi Sahai, Melted Solids), have turned their attention to their next shared political project: electing Claire Valdez to Congress.

As The Left approached the 2025 Democratic Primary for Mayor, in need of a rebound after several difficult cycles, two candidates emerged, from distinctly different factions, to vie for the mantle of opposition versus Andrew Cuomo: Brad Lander, the left-liberal City Comptroller and longstanding ally of the Working Families; and Zohran Mamdani, a NYC-DSA organizer turned Assembly Member from Astoria.

Many assumed Lander, a Park Slope policy wonk who had already won a citywide campaign, would be advantaged in a five-borough campaign compared to Mamdani, a relatively unknown legislator who spent his weeks in Albany. Both candidates responded to the 2024 Presidential election, and the backlash against progressives, differently: Lander sought to moderate on issues of crime and policing, playing defense against The Left’s weaknesses; whereas Mamdani diagnosed Trump’s victory (and his pronounced inroads across the city’s multi-racial working class) as downstream from runaway costs, around which he would orient his entire campaign.

As time wore on, the candidate quality gap between Mamdani, the dynamic democratic socialist, and Lander, the mild-mannered bureaucrat, proved to be significant. Lander seemed to be parodying Mamdani’s style, only worse, rather than leaning into his own strengths. The progressive Comptroller struggled to cultivate a lane: Cuomo captured working-class Black and Hispanic voters, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, and ideological moderates; while Mamdani inspired college-educated progressives, South Asian and Muslim voters, and young socialists; too liberal for moderates, and not progressive enough for leftists, Lander was stuck in a proverbial no man’s land. Starved for oxygen, he wilted under the pressure of the attention economy. Even the Working Families Party, reading the writing on the wall, eventually ranked Mamdani first and Lander second, dealing a final blow to the latter’s campaign.

Mamdani’s victory re-oriented New York City’s political hierarchy, nowhere more so than on The Left. NYC-DSA — powered by 14,000+ members and a Mayor who is now the leading avatar of the American Left and still calls the chapter his “political home” — controls the bully pulpit. NY-7 is the first major campaign to test this pecking order.

Running for office is an inherently emotional process, particularly in a place where you have launched your career, much less spent your entire life. Every day, you are asked to put yourself out there, inviting thousands of opinions from other people: calls from erstwhile allies go unreturned, leaflets bearing your face are discarded like trash in the street, strangers with anonymous avatars on the internet call you names. Worst of all, no one can relate to this strange experience, condemning the candidate to isolation.

Still, most candidates, media trained and pre-programmed for maximum inoffensiveness, rarely show themselves, overtly or tacitly. Antonio Reynoso, speaking with The New York Editorial Board, did not heed this tried-and-true orthodoxy.

His answers, candid but contradictory, revealed a politician making sense of the ever-changing landscape around him and struggling to adjust to a new era. In his telling, Mamdani was “lucky,” blessed by “good timing” and a weak field of opponents, circumstances akin to “a perfect storm.” And yet, simultaneously, the Mayor was the reason Reynoso currently trails a one-term state legislator. The Mayoral race, according to the Borough President, “was not a fight between the WFP and the DSA,” even though Lander and Mamdani, respectively, were ostensibly linked to each faction. Lander “could not meet the moment,” said his longtime ally, but that failure was not indicative of a broader political realignment, away from Progressives and towards Socialists. The history of the district, Reynoso intoned, was still important; even though the average voter, aged 34, had no recollection of Bertha Lewis or Jon Kest. The Brooklyn native spoke earnestly about how much the support of Nydia Velázquez meant to him, but acknowledged that one third of likely voters were born after she was first elected. These clear-eyed ruminations read like an exit interview, a candidate coming to terms, in real time, with what the internal polling has shown: the more voters understand that his opponent is supported by Mayor Mamdani, the worse Reynoso’s odds become. And if the electorate — shorthand for the age and demographic composition of voters — mirrors last year’s, Claire Valdez is destined to win. The Mayor’s shadow loomed over every word. Perhaps the most instructive line was merely a throwaway: “The timing has to be right,” Reynoso mused. “You have amazing, qualified people that run and lose because the timing isn’t right…”

Was the son of the South Side talking about himself?

Which brings us back to the question on the masthead: Who leads The Left in New York City? A decade or two ago, the implicit answer was the Working Families Party, although no one bothered asking such an obvious question. Five years ago, it was contested. Today, the answer is NYC-DSA: the organization that won City Hall, anchors The Commie Corridor, and is on the verge of sending Claire Valdez to Congress versus the candidate of Brooklyn’s progressive institutions.

But these moments can be fleeting, which is why NY-7 is existential for all parties. Post-Mamdani, NYC-DSA may be on top, but only victory can preserve their rapid ascent in the ever-changing hierarchy of New York politics. The Seventh District is the most explicitly left-leaning in the nation; any survey of the L train at rush hour underscores why Valdez is the favorite. Failure here, and even the Mayor’s victory, a triumph of the collective, could be re-written as more man than movement. In many respects, the Working Families Party of yore, non-profits and labor unions, has lined up behind its favorite son. But can those institutions still move masses of votes, like in the good old days, or is a new era upon us? The class-conscious Socialist Left, too, prides itself on building broader coalitions than their identity-based Left-Liberal counterparts; and yet in the Seventh District, it will be Reynoso, the local kid from Los Sures, pulling the most votes from the tenants of Williams Plaza and the seniors of Hope Gardens. The path to victory for Valdez, perhaps uncomfortably, runs through the newcomers, those less tethered to past and place. Once artists and hipsters with little interest in trad electoral politics, the neighborhoods of NY-7 are now the epicenter of the urban, college-educated class reshaping the Democratic Party.

Ben Max, when confronted by Reynoso’s bleak pronouncement, pressed him further. “How, despite all your accomplishments and advantages, are you the underdog?”

The honest answer is that the neighborhoods changed beneath Reynoso’s feet; the Mamdani movement, at least here, is a force he will struggle to replicate, let alone defeat. His own decades of work helped build the world in which NYC-DSA grew, but the rewards may no longer be his to claim. If Reynoso doesn’t dethrone Vito Lopez, does Julia Salazar beat Martin Malavé Dilan? And if Salazar never wins, does Mamdani even get elected? If the Progressives tilled the soil, the Socialists are bringing in the harvest. This unforgiving process is what political succession in New York City — Tammany Hall to The Little Flower, the regulars to the reformers, Rangel to Espaillat — has looked like for generations. The only difference, now, is the speed.

A decade ago, NYC-DSA had only a couple hundred active members. Now, the Socialists have the chance to elect the next Congresswoman from NY-7, all while the Mayor of New York City looks on. The Commie Corridor was not built in a day.

But it was built in less than ten years.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

It was a night to forget for Zohran Mamdani.

The young Mayor, on the evening he was ceremonially crowned the city’s top political power broker, watched helplessly as his candidate of choice, Lindsey Boylan, suffered a convincing defeat in a Special Election for a City Council seat on Manhattan’s West Side. To add insult to injury, Carl Wilson, the declared victor and Chief of Staff to the former incumbent, was supported heavily by Speaker Julie Menin, Mamdani’s soft opponent in The Permanent Campaign of governance.

The headlines were merciless.

“Zohran’s political brand took a drubbing,” wrote POLITICO.

“Mamdani Loses a Fight He Shouldn’t Have Joined,” headlined Ross Barkan’s column.

“Imagine Antonio Reynoso and Dan Goldman are feeling pretty good right about now,” quipped David Freedlander, referring to candidates Mamdani had endorsed against.

The knives even came out for Morris Katz, the Mayor’s trusted and youthful advisor. Even Katz, who normally courts favorable coverage, could not escape the fallout.

The race was seen as a rare opportunity to expand Mamdani’s foothold of allies on the City Council, a persistent issue for the Mayor in his jockeying with the Speaker. Had Boylan won both the Special Election and the Democratic Primary, she would have been eligible to serve two additional terms starting in 2029 (tantamount to twelve years), an invaluable loophole. Furthermore, she pledged to vote against the educational facility buffer zone bill vetoed by the Mayor; whereas Wilson stated he would be one of the four votes needed by the Speaker to overturn Mamdani’s veto.

Mamdani’s endorsement of Boylan — a former senior official in the Cuomo administration who was one of the eleven women to accuse the former Governor of sexual harassment (which led to his resignation) — has been routinely framed as a loyalty-driven decision to support a key surrogate. Boylan was intensely outspoken about the perils of Cuomo’s prospective return to office last year, particularly when the former Governor’s victory appeared assured, which eventually led her to support Mamdani, who dramatically toppled New York’s last political dynasty. Soon thereafter, Boylan even joined NYC-DSA, which Mamdani credits as his “political home.”

According to City and State, Boylan’s campaign “suggested the endorsement was a thank you for that effort.” However, Mamdani’s support for Boylan was not a loyalty play, but emanated from the genuine belief that she could win. So what went wrong?

The lessons of Boylan’s loss are plentiful, and Mamdani would be wise to take them to heart. From the beginning, Boylan’s odds were long: she had already run for office twice beforehand (Congress in 2020, Manhattan Borough President in 2021), and struggled to coalesce support in her City Council District (earning only 22% in 2020, and an even more meager 12.5% in 2021); close to half a million dollars in outside spending flooded the race on her opponent’s behalf, with no comparable counter, either attentional or financial, to mitigate the deluge; while polling conducted weeks prior to the election showed her trailing by a prohibitive margin. Most importantly, Boylan lacked, in the words of Fiorello La Guardia, a “personal organization,” a small army of volunteers and surrogates in the district itself, an essential ingredient to engineer an upset. Most of her backers, particularly the marquee names (Mayor Mamdani, Brad Lander, The Working Families Party), counted their most loyal supporters beyond Manhattan’s West Side. This dynamic gave the campaign between Boylan and Wilson the air of a Congressional race where national progressives get their hopes up and coalesce late behind a promising challenger for an open seat, only to lose to the little-known Local Guy™ with scores of support in the district itself.

While Mamdani earned a plurality of the vote in Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea last summer, an impressive result in a vacuum, he nonetheless underperformed his citywide average there; in fact, Mamdani’s vote share in the first round of the Democratic Primary (40.3%) in CD-3 ranked 28th out of the city’s 51 Council Districts. Nor did NYC-DSA, the volunteer engine that helped power Mamdani to City Hall, endorse Boylan. The 3rd Council District, while relatively young and renter-majority, has a more affluent, liberal, and cosmopolitan bent than other, more socialist-friendly neighborhoods in the Outer Boroughs. Whereas Wilson, uniformly supported by the neighborhood’s local elected officials and Democratic clubs, neatly fit into the seat’s time-tested lineage of openly gay Council Members. Undoubtedly, the history of the district (which includes the Stonewall Inn), created in 1991 to empower the West Side gay community, loomed large over the race. While it is impossible to determine what percentage of the electorate was gay (five, ten, or fifteen percent), it was undeniable that this demographic (particularly men) broke overwhelmingly for Wilson. Hell’s Kitchen, the most reliably progressive and renter-dense part of the 3rd Council District — and a Mamdani stronghold in the Democratic Primary — was nonetheless won by Wilson, partially due to the gay vote. The campaign for CD-3 was another chapter in the perpetual story of Relationships, Institutions, and Why All Politics is Local. Indeed, popularity does not always correspond to power.

Before becoming a State Assemblyman (let alone the Mayor of New York City), Mamdani had waged fights as a campaign operative just like this — on behalf of aspiring insurgents battling their local neighborhood establishment, to no avail.

His historic victory last June, a high-profile and polarizing war waged across all five boroughs, transcended this paradigm — but it did not erase it.

Now, many will urge the Mayor to retreat from his aggressive political program and preserve his political capital, weary of another public defeat. His foes, crowing as the boy wonder was knocked down a peg, will relish the chance to sideline Mamdani.

The case for hoarding political capital is not an unserious one. Proponents of caution would argue the young Mayor has his hands full governing the city, with scant time for proxy battles. In their telling, Mamdani, who barely earned a majority of the vote in last November’s General Election, should be working to add to his coalition, rather than fighting a multi-front war against different pieces of the political establishment. Some fear another high-profile loss could further electorally embolden his opponents.

And yet, Mamdani, a driven personality to say the least, must remain undeterred.

Bernie Sanders, his political hero, serves as an instructive example of a sitting elected official who consistently stumps for progressive, anti-establishment candidates (including Mamdani), often against the wishes of his Congressional colleagues. Granted, the Senator from Vermont is not an executive like Mamdani, who has to keep the peace with the Governor, the State Legislature, and the City Council.

But Mamdani’s endorsements matter far more than the average politician, and not just because he’s the sitting Mayor. Mamdani derives a lion’s share of his power from the voters themselves — rather than wealthy donors, labor unions, and the media class. Despite his winning smile and charming demeanor, Mamdani is feared by his opponents because, at a moment’s notice, he can marshal an army of dedicated volunteers capable of threatening their source of power — at the ballot box.

Thus, when Mamdani backs a candidate — and leverages his time to film videos, headline fundraisers, and make public appearances — who then loses by a comfortable margin, his enemies have less of a reason to fear him. Still, the silver lining of Boylan’s defeat was that it nonetheless showed Mamdani was willing to fight.

Does the broader New York City electorate care (or even notice) which candidates (or not) the Mayor supports for lower offices? Of course not. But the media, whose tone has shifted from marvel at the charismatic insurgent to skepticism of his governing philosophy, does. And, at least until the 2029 campaign, chatter like theirs will play an outsize role in The Narrative War between Mamdani and his adversaries. Boylan’s loss represented a small window into what will come if Mamdani’s other endorsees flop in June. Mamdani would be painted as talented, but not transformative; a mortal man, not a movement. The best way to mute said discourse, let alone turn it around into a display of electoral strength, will be to deliver a resounding sweep in seven weeks.

The Mayor has already pushed his chips in for Claire Valdez, a fellow democratic socialist running for New York’s 7th Congressional District, which spans many of the city’s youngest and most renter-dense neighborhoods in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; and Brad Lander, challenging vulnerable incumbent Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District, which includes Brownstone Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Currently, both candidates are on course to emerge victorious; internal polling has Lander leading comfortably, while Valdez — backed by NYC-DSA, UAW, and Bernie Sanders — is firmly the favorite to win over the nation’s most left-leaning electorate. And yet, Mamdani, a former three-term state legislator, knows that, while extra allies in New York’s Congressional delegation will help (particularly when Gregory Meeks and Hakeem Jeffries are hostile to the Mayor), the real power lies in Albany, where the Mayor is currently waging a still-unresolved battle to Tax The Rich.

While Mamdani has not made any state legislative endorsements yet, expect that to change soon with the completion of the state budget. But which candidates thread the needle of viability and political alignment? And what risk, if any, is the Mayor willing to assume in supporting those whose paths to victory are most challenging?

Let’s start with the lowest hanging fruit. Fellow socialists Samantha Kattan, running to succeed Claire Valdez, and David Orkin, pitted against Jenifer Rajkumar (and her red dress), are strong candidates who should win comfortably; both are running in Ridgewood, the city’s most left-leaning neighborhood, and overlap with NY-7, further juicing voter turnout. The Mamdani brand is robust in each district as well; the Mayor’s vote shares in the 37th and 38th Assembly Districts (~64.1% each) were his 5th and 6th highest, respectively, of New York City’s 62 Assembly Districts.

But these are easy wins. And Mamdani should not shy away from harder races.

A record number of open seats, lacking an incumbent running for re-election, give the Mayor another opening to reshape the legislature. Illapa Sairitupac is poised to perform well versus a relatively weak field in a progressive-sympathetic district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Aber Kawas, a Palestinian organizer who pivoted her campaign to the recently-vacated 12th State Senate District, which stretches from Astoria to Woodside to Ridgewood, is in a closer-than-anticipated primary with Assemblyman Steven Raga. Given Mamdani knows Sairitupac well from their days sharing a socialist slate, and, reportedly, made an effort to coax Kawas to run in the first place, I would expect him to support both candidates: each favored to win, running in open races, and tethered to his self-proclaimed “political home,” NYC-DSA. And with a helpful boost from the Mayor (plus competitive Congressional races at the top-of-the-ticket increasing turnout), both are more likely than not to win.

Nonetheless, as the de-facto leader of The Left™ in New York City, Mamdani should not stop there, nor should he weigh in on exclusively NYC-DSA races.

Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, challenging fledgling incumbent Jessica Ramos in the 13th State Senate District (covering Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst and Corona), is on course to win comfortably, too. Gonzalez-Rojas is well-funded and endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; whereas Ramos, the chair of the Labor committee, is cash-strapped (in debt from her failed mayoral campaign), and hemorrhaging support from unions, once her base of support. Ramos alienated progressives by backing Cuomo over Mamdani, and now the Mayor could help end her political career. Shamsul Haque, the co-founder of the Bangladeshi American Police Association, appears to be another strong fit for the Mayor’s endorsement. Now running in an open Assembly seat in Woodside and Elmhurst, Haque helped convince other Muslim NYPD officers to vote for Mamdani, and later served on his community safety transition committee.

But not all contests will be that easy. The 69th Assembly District, home to the Mayor’s parents, spanning Morningside Heights and Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has become the next front in the proxy war between progressives, rallying behind public defender Eli Northrup, and institutionalists, backing rabbi Stephanie Ruskay. Northrup, who contested the seat two years prior (coming within eighteen points of Micah Lasher, now running for Congress), has been an ally of the Mayor prior to his victory last year (hosting conversations, leading canvasses); whereas Ruskay left Mamdani off her primary ballot entirely. Westside Progress PAC, the conglomerate of corporate and Cuomo donors that poured half-a-million dollars into sinking Boylan, is poised to back Ruskay aggressively. Furthermore, Solidarity PAC, which “resembles a New York state-level version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee” and spent heavily on the 2024 primaries, has also raised money on Ruskay’s behalf.

The Mamdani vs. Cuomo race never ended, its contours merely shifted.

Still, not every race is a good fit for the Mayor’s precious political capital. New York’s 12th Congressional District — a clown car campaign at the heart of Manhattan, featuring liberals and technocrats, pitting West Siders versus East Siders, testing the salience of Artificial Intelligence against the everyday chaos of Donald Trump — is a poor fit for Mamdani’s endorsement, with few discernible ideological fault lines. The fact no leading candidate even mentioned the illegal land sales at Park East synagogue is perhaps the best example of why NY-12 is a poor fit for Mamdani. Peter Sterne recently floated that he could “see [Mamdani] endorsing Yuh-Line Niou.” But endorsing Niou, who currently trails Grace Lee for Lower Manhattan’s State Senate seat, feels like ignoring the lessons of Boylan’s loss: the pitfalls of backing a non-DSA candidate, against an opponent (let alone an incumbent) with the lion’s share of local support, in a district where Mamdani performed well, but did not rank among his best. Jibreel Jalloh, a former Obama scholar, has momentum against Jaime Williams, a DINO (Democrat In Name Only) who represents Canarsie, Flatlands, and Mill Basin. The incumbent is best known for (mistakenly) being called a “Republican” by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during her testimony before the House of Representatives, where Williams argued vociferously against migrant shelters (she endorsed Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa for mayor last year). While the Mayor may be inclined to back Jalloh, an undoubted upgrade over the NIMBY and conservative Williams, this was Mamdani’s single worst Assembly District. Indeed, the most important part of wielding power is having a clear-eyed understanding of its limits.

However, the greatest political challenge lies with backing challengers to incumbents, which risks the ire of State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

With Eon Huntley in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Christian Celeste Tate in Bushwick, gentrifying hotbeds of democratic socialism, Mamdani has the opportunity to notch two more wins against opponents of his agenda. Tate, pitted against longtime incumbent Erik Dilan, the last vestige of local machine whose base resides in Cypress Hills, stands to benefit from the aforementioned NY-7 contest, which will help bring younger voters to the polls; whereas Huntley rematches a weak ally of Hakeem Jeffries, Stefani Zinerman, in a neighborhood Mamdani won by 51 points in the Primary, his third best performance in the entire city.

Were Mamdani to target only a handful of incumbents, few are as vulnerable as Zinerman and Dilan, whose days have been numbered for several cycles.

Yet, of the contests mentioned thus far, a disproportionate number (save for Lander, Northrup, Gonzalez-Rojas, Haque) come from a handful of communities whose reputation for left-leaning politics is well-established. Already, you can see a narrative percolating amongst the media that, beyond the confines of The Commie Corridor, Mamdani is not actually *that* powerful. A crucial component of building a political program is demonstrating the breadth of, not only your appeal, but your movement’s.

So what if Mamdani can help create The Next Commie Corridor?

Last June, Mamdani’s greatest overperformance came not in the hipster precincts of Brooklyn or Queens, but the supermajority renter, working-class blocks of Upper Manhattan. In New York’s 13th Congressional District, which stretches from Morningside Heights to Marble Hill and has been represented by Rep. Adriano Espaillat for the past decade, Mamdani blitzed Cuomo by 19 points; in the 70th Assembly District, spanning most of Harlem, represented by native son Jordan Wright, Mamdani won by an even greater 23 point margin. Now, NYC-DSA (and Justice Democrats) have fielded challengers — student organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier and public defender Conrad Blackburn — for both seats, hoping to realize the electoral gains foreshadowed by Mamdani the year prior. In prosecuting both campaigns, The Left is taking on two of the local fiefdoms that have long dominated politics north of 110th Street: Espaillat has been both the standard bearer and trailblazer of Dominican political power, whereas Wright comes from a storied lineage of African American politicians in Harlem (his father, Keith LT Wright, represented the seat for 24 years, and now chairs the Manhattan Democratic Party; his grandfather, “Turn ‘Em Loose” Bruce Wright, was a legendary judge who served on the New York State Supreme Court). Both Espaillat and Wright supported Cuomo in the Democratic Primary before defecting to Mamdani ahead of the General Election.

The polling for Espaillat, long considered a power broker by the political class, is particularly alarming. AIPAC, the incumbent’s top donor, has grown adept at disguising their spending (through eleventh hour shell PACs with misleading names), and will surely deluge the district in the campaign’s final weeks, as they did in Illinois. Handicapping Wright’s race is more difficult: on one hand, the incumbent failed to crack fifty percent versus a weak field two years ago; on the other, a Super PAC (formed by Cuomo-ally Charlie King), intends to spend half-a-million dollars bludgeoning Blackburn for his two-month unpaid internship in the Florida Attorney General’s office (led by Pam Bondi) while he was in college.

While the Age and Renter profiles of NY-13 and AD-70 are comparable, the Democratic electorate in NY-13 is more racially diverse (~31% White, ~27% Black, ~34% Hispanic), diluting Espaillat’s advantage with Hispanic voters; whereas the AD-70 electorate is plurality Black (~47%), consistently The Left’s weakest demographic.

If the electorate this year is comparable to last year, NYC-DSA can not only win these races, but sweep everywhere. This phenomenon hinges on whether the “Mamdani Voters,” disproportionately young and previously disaffected, who flocked to the polls for a high-stakes mayoral race, return for less-salient downballot contests. In places like Upper Manhattan, as high as one-quarter of the electorate had never voted in a primary before. These are the people Mamdani has a unique ability to reach.

But these are brutal contests, with well-connected opponents who can create headaches for the young Mayor, should they so choose. Mamdani’s support for the campaigns mentioned earlier, in the author’s estimation, is relatively cut-and-dry.

I suspect that, if the Mayor awakes in a cold sweat at Gracie Mansion, with political matters wracking his brain, these two Upper Manhattan races are top of mind.

Can Mamdani, on good terms with Harlem’s machine and disincentivized to move against the Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, stomach the backlash?

He could just stop there. He doesn’t need to. His supporters would understand.

“Even when you have a very powerful political figure like the mayor, it’s really an organized base that can be a multiplier effect, and it’s in coordination between the movement and the individual, powerful elected that we can really maximize campaign power,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of NYC-DSA, told NY1 in a recent interview.

Very true. But NYC-DSA also needs Mayor Mamdani — at least as much as he needs them, if not more so. Right now, NYC-DSA is spread thin across several boroughs and neighborhoods, running close to a dozen campaigns, each with a unique set of circumstances and challenges. The overarching message and thematic agenda — taken for granted last year under a citywide campaign that inspired masses of people — is far less focused this cycle. Supporting Mamdani, for better or worse, is the unspoken thread that unifies NYC-DSA’s campaigns. But only the Mayor can bring that together. Political capital, absent a strong movement, is hollow.

Subscribe now

I spent a lot of time with Zohran Mamdani during the spring and summer of 2024.

This was the nadir of the socialist left since 2016. Joe Biden, hemorrhaging approval by the day, was still on the ticket, his administration complicit in the genocide of Gaza. Democratic voter turnout, compared to when Trump was President, was atrocious. Morale among the rank-and-file was even lower. NYC-DSA, after running ambitious slates in prior years, fielded only three candidates (which pales in comparison to the ten candidates running today). Only one, Claire Valdez, ultimately won.

Mamdani, unburdened after knocking his opponent off the ballot, spent these crucial months lending assistance to the insurgent candidates: headlining fundraisers, identifying South Asian and Muslim voters, advising on where to get the most petition signatures, and coaching each candidate through the many difficult moments that inevitably come with running for office. As a campaign manager myself, I had a front row seat to his lonely, but purposeful crusade. Of course Mamdani, even then, had grand ambitions to run for Mayor. Yet these were not the machinations of an opportunist, but someone who genuinely cared, even at the movement’s lowest point.

Mamdani, too, was once the insurgent candidate left to fend for himself, spurned by The Left’s most powerful institutions. When he ran for State Assembly in 2020 against Astoria’s inoffensive incumbent, Aravella Simotas, Mamdani had few endorsements, save for NYC-DSA and the Muslim Democratic Club. Without a doubt, iron sharpens iron, and the difficulty of Mamdani’s first campaign shaped his worldview and made him a better politician and leader. Still, were it not for 423 voters who bubbled in the little-known circle on their ballots, history would have changed — dramatically.

The electoral winds, both nationally and locally, have shifted significantly since then. Miraculously, momentum is squarely behind left-leaning insurgency, and Mamdani is a huge reason why. The social and political forces have lined up, producing a moment ripe for electoral overhaul. But these moments, evidenced by how incredible triumphs in 2018 and 2020 gave way to grave disappointments in 2022 and 2024, are fleeting.

The Mayor, as well as anyone, knows this. You may only get one shot at victory, and by the time you realize it, the chance has already passed by.

Mamdani may not be on the ballot, but his Movement is.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

On Sunday, April 12th, Zohran Mamdani took to the stage at Knockdown Center, a former glass factory turned music venue in Maspeth, Queens. The festive evening had the air of one of Mamdani’s former campaign rallies — only now he was the Mayor of New York City, the dream finally realized. Supporters had traded their “Freeze The Rent” and “Fast and Free” signs, the erstwhile markers of ambitious insurgency, for slogan of “Pothole Politics,” a movement maturing for the governance that lies ahead.

Mamdani’s whirlwind campaign — from the viral videos that defined the democratic socialist’s swift rise to the entrenched and bitter opposition of the city’s political class — never truly abated during his first 100 days. Nor will it over the next 45 months.

But a permanent campaign requires more than raucous energy and righteous indignation — it demands a governing vocabulary and theory of change, one that translates movement politics into the unglamorous language of municipal services.

To his credit, Zohran Mamdani recognized this immediately.

The Mayor clearly believes in the power of deliverism, or in this case, sewer socialism: the notion that voters tend to support candidates or parties not just on their promises, but on their track record of delivering on those promises, while providing administrative function and constituent services. Policy implementation, as borne out by the failures of the Biden administration, must be paired with an equally robust communications arm to sell said successes. Hence, Mamdani has placed a high priority on making the nuts and bolts of municipal government visible: paving over a stubborn bump on the Williamsburg Bridge bike path, clearing the streets efficiently during two consecutive snowstorms, while filling 100,000 potholes since the new year. Fittingly, he spent his 100th day in office picking up trash in the Soundview section of the Bronx. His plan for one municipal grocery store per borough is already off the ground, headlined by a flagship store at La Marqueta (a stretch of city-owned land under the Metro North tracks) in working-class East Harlem. These stories and accomplishments, predictably, are told through video, Mamdani’s most potent medium, which often features the Mayor, front-and-center, doing the work: shoveling snow alongside the Satmar, answering 311 calls at the command center, paving potholes on Staten Island’s country roads. This is both the storytelling of sewer socialism and a prime example of how Mamdani, perpetually smiling, has eagerly picked up many of the easy wins his slothful and corrupt predecessors neglected. Your accomplishments are only as good as voters’ ability to recognize them as yours.

Undoubtedly, the elbow grease is paying off. According to polling from Marist College, “74% of New York City residents say Mayor Mamdani is working hard,” including 82% of Democrats, 65% of Independents, and 48% of Republicans. While the numbers validate pothole politics, governing effectively requires not only constituent services, but navigating Albany. Even as a new Mayor, Mamdani has still eagerly extended his political capital to the realm of electoral politics, with one noticeable exception: Governor Kathy Hochul. Mamdani, wary of the pernicious power dynamic that has haunted Mayors past, has been rather deferential to the Governor, despite Hochul’s consistent resistance to raising taxes on the wealthy. The leftist leader, in an attempt to curry favor with Hochul, went so far as to personally (and publicly) quash the flailing bid of her former opponent in the Democratic Primary, Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, eliminating one of the increasingly scarce points of leverage for the “Tax The Rich” movement (albeit a weak one at that). Does the ascendant left have second thoughts about the Governor’s race, where the challenger terrain was ceded to Delgado only for him to abandon his bid at the most inopportune time? Absolutely.

Still, the Mamdani–Hochul partnership has not all been for naught; a $4.5B expansion of 2-K childcare, across many of the city’s working-class neighborhoods, was announced to great fanfare within the first week of the new administration. For Mamdani to deliver a piece of this plank, the most ambitious of his agenda, was a tremendous accomplishment and boon to the notion that the socialist Mayor can deliver. Now, with New York City staring down a five billion dollar budget shortfall, Mamdani is holding his tongue, keenly aware of the fruit his more cautious approach has already borne, going so far as to skip a Tax The Rich rally in the Bronx hosted by Bernie Sanders (his political idol, rallying on his platform, in his city). At least for now.

Instead, the Mayor has trained his fire at City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who, with much of the Council behind her (including many of the Mamdani’s progressive allies), has insisted that New York City need not raise taxes on the wealthy nor impose austerity measures to slash five billion dollars from the city budget.

These dubious accounting practices, in part, are what landed the five boroughs in this current budgetary debacle, and Mamdani, whose tenure could stretch to 2033, is wise to not kick the can down the road. The Speaker — Pro-Israel, uber wealthy, ideologically moderate, from Manhattan’s Upper East Side — represents a sharp political contrast to the Mayor. Menin, ambitious and adept at leveraging institutional power, is advantaged in the budget fight, an insider’s game; whereas Mamdani’s greatest strength, shaping the views of voters and the public writ large, has diminished potency behind closed doors, particularly with respect to a two-thirds, term-limited City Council and a Governor unopposed in the Primary. “The ethos of this campaign,” Mamdani’s top political advisor, Morris Katz told Erroll Louis, “was ‘we’re not gonna be like every other politician who might acknowledge an issue but refuses to name the villains responsible for making this an issue. I think you can’t tell someone ‘You’re being screwed’ without telling them who’s screwing them.”

Herein lies the tension inherent to The Permanent Campaign: the base remains energized and engaged, but it requires a degree of antagonism towards the institutions governing alongside you. So far, the “you’re being screwed” rhetoric has been directed solely at Speaker Menin and the City Council. But functionally, the body is just as helpless in solving the matter as the Mayor. Whereas the Governor, on track for a landslide re-election amidst the cresting blue wave of Trump’s second midterm, can. In fact, millionaires across New York State, at the behest of the President’s tax cuts, are saving an estimated twelve billion dollars in federal taxes. Such a detail, when combined with the fact that 69% of Democrats statewide and 64% of New York City voters support a millionaires tax, would be potent in the hands of the best communicator in American politics. On the campaign trail, Mamdani had Andrew Cuomo, a perfectly cast relic of the out-of-touch establishment, as his foe. Now, the Mayor has colleagues he must appease rather than competitors he must crush.

With Cuomo no longer the atrophying avatar of the anti-Mamdani resistance, the opposition has lost its center of gravity. This increasingly diffuse cohort — business-friendly, real estate-aligned, avowedly pro-Israel, homeowner-heavy — is flailing in the wind, less tethered to the oxygen of power than ever before. They have tried to make hay of Mamdani’s missteps (20 snowstorm deaths, old problematic tweets from top aides, budgetary disputes that complicate the narrative), but have struggled to gain traction beyond a single news cycle. Absent The New York Post, they lack the institutional heft to inflict real damage. Cuomo, diminished from the scandals that expelled him from office, was still a multi-decade institution, capable of cohering a loose (but diminished) coalition of older Black and Hispanic voters, ultra-orthodox Jews and hardcore zionists, and Bloomberg Democrats and Trump Republicans locked out of power. The campaign season was conducive to this consolidation, a shotgun marriage of convenience to stop Mamdani. Now, these groups are rudderless. They strive to “organize” against the Mayor, but lack the affirmative vision to do so effectively, defaulting to grievance politics. These alleged movers and shakers are used to throwing money at their problems to make them go away.

But money can’t buy a movement.

Subscribe now

For a Mayor in office for only three months, Zohran Mamdani’s coalition is remarkably baked in — on all sides — the consequence of a polarizing campaign where tens of millions were spent to tarnish the insurgent democratic socialist, and an unprecedented and evolving earned media environment (that insulates Mamdani from the left, and scapegoats him on the right). The Mayor’s base (younger, college-educated socialists and progressives; South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims oft-overlooked by the political class) is, quite literally, growing by the day: a consequence of Trump-era realignment within the Democratic Party and the demographic trends of the five boroughs. Mamdani has close to an iron-clad grip over this constituency, as evidenced by their persistent loyalty (and lack of public outcry) with respect to a handful of potentially fraught decisions: the early retention of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heiress with universal support from the city’s media and business elite, but a noticeably more carceral approach to policing than the Mayor; uneven statements with respect to two separate “officer involved” shootings in January (the latter of which, the shooting of 22 year old Jabez Chakraborty, was condemned by DRUM); and the aforementioned deference to Governor Hochul. Mamdani, dare I say, is incapable of truly alienating his base; for the Mayor is armed with genuine core principles and a coherent, democratic socialist worldview that anchors him through storms. However, as one can glean, the real “risk” lies with disillusionment, which would stem from the perception of indefensible compromise with an untrustworthy establishment. But, as the Mayor’s array of opponents attempt to manufacture controversies, his supporters, steadfastly loyal to the man who sparked hope in their hearts and overcame the odds, rally even closer to his side.

The Mayor’s emphasis on pothole politics has further endeared him to technocratic and affluent liberals, whose greatest electoral reservation about Mamdani concerned his lack of experience. Still, a majority backed the fresh insurgent over the tired establishment last June; and so far, Mamdani is validating their faith. After twelve years of Bill De Blasio and Eric Adams, the new Mayor’s work ethic is a welcome change. Pointedly, in New York’s 12th Congressional District — the city’s wealthiest and well-educated neighborhoods — Democratic voters gave the Mayor robust marks of favorability (+30). And, while The New York Times, the most powerful media organ of these civically-engaged and well-heeled constituents, remains broadly skeptical of Mamdani’s ability to enact his agenda, the Gray Lady is not hostile to him.

Among the bloc-voting Orthodox and Hasidic sects of Brooklyn and Queens, Mamdani enjoys infinitesimal support, and was subjected to an electoral avalanche in both the Democratic Primary and General Election. Still, to the descendants of Abraham horrified by the bloodshed in Gaza and lawless annexation of the West Bank, Mamdani is not only an ally, but a moral leader in a Democratic Party compromised by complicity. And yet, the Mayor’s most enduring challenge will be keeping those in the proverbial middle, liberal zionists who abhor the Netanyahu regime but believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (the Micah Lashers and Jerry Nadlers of the world), in his corner. While many of these voters have strong feelings with respect to the Middle East, geopolitics did not factor decisively into their choice of a municipal leader. Historically, these voters have oscillated between the city’s progressive-left coalition (John Lindsay, David Dinkins, Bill de Blasio) and the more centrist backlash (Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg). Last November, this heavily-Democratic bloc made up a key piece of Mamdani’s coalition in the General Election: among voters in Jewish surname (10%+) precincts that voted for Kamala Harris (60%+) — i.e. Jewish Democrats — Mamdani ran less than three points behind Cuomo: 47% to 49.5%. Here, Mamdani’s fast and ambitious start will pay its greatest dividends, so long as the budget fight does not prove too fraught. While Mamdani is often criticized by opponents for his lack of Jewish support, this critique fails to grasp that, if the Mayor so much as retains his current level of support from Jewish Democrats, unseating him in 2029 will be almost impossible. Without a doubt, Mamdani has completely re-shaped New York City’s political geography.

Yet, while the city’s Jewish electorate gets considerable media attention, the numerically decisive constituencies lie elsewhere. In the Mamdani era, Black (~21%) and Hispanic (~17%) voters — stratified by generation, lukewarm on Mamdani in the Primary, but more supportive in the General — will be the crucial swing constituencies of Democratic politics in the five boroughs. Mamdani, armed with the attentional hegemony of the mayoralty and a celebrity that feels omnipresent, is viewed rather favorably by working-class Black and Hispanic voters, and now has full access to the institutional elements (churches, senior centers, cookouts, ribbon cuttings, parades) that so often shape the whims of politics at the neighborhood level. This is why Menin, floated as a future challenger to Mamdani, would be a poor choice; sure, she might win Manhattan, but Mamdani would crush her in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Still, the Mayor gave the Speaker (and other foes) fodder when he abruptly threatened to raise property taxes by 9.5% to close the previously mentioned budget deficit, an increase that would be disproportionately painful to cash-strapped (non-white) homeowners in the outer boroughs. Strategically, this was the new Mayor’s most pronounced misstep of his brief tenure; for once, Mamdani lost control of the narrative, as backlash to his proposed hike overwhelmed the other pieces of his argument. Outer boroughs electeds, particularly Black leaders, were incensed; to the point where Mamdani had to gather officials at City Hall to mitigate the damage. Nevermind that Mamdani had no intention of actually raising property taxes (and even if he did, the City Council would soundly reject him), the doomsday scenario for working-class homeowners, blared across local news ad nauseam, was laid at his feet; and the Mayor only had himself to blame. According to monthly polling from Siena College, Mamdani’s favorability among Black voters fell 18 points between late February and late March. And still, his 60% favorability was the highest mark among Black voters of any Democrat in New York State, evidence of Mamdani’s incomparable popularity; (Siena rarely polls Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, but routinely gauges the favorability of Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Letitia James, and Kathy Hochul). Such is the Mamdani paradox: even the Mayor’s mistakes reveal the depth of the goodwill he has accumulated, a reservoir that cannot be captured by any single poll, nor depleted by any one controversy.

However, the act of political coalition building is not monitoring numbers on a spreadsheet from one month to the next month, but an intensely active, deeply emotional, and all-consuming endeavor. The rare politician that doubles as a brilliant tactician and creative communicator, Mamdani understands this subtle and beautiful art better than his contemporaries, evidenced by his rise to power over the last year.

Even now, the Mayor treats each interaction as though it is a first impression, because those moments, fleeting anecdotes to Mamdani, are durable memories etched in the minds of individuals. But those finite memories add up, piece by piece, until they build a seemingly infinite mosaic: a gorgeous tapestry known as the five boroughs.

For the first time in decades, New Yorkers, nature’s most prideful creatures, find themselves believing earnestly in something far greater than themselves. New York City not only feels like the center of American politics, it objectively has been during Donald Trump’s second term: a hopeful municipal alternative to federal tyranny. Unlike his predecessors, Mamdani does not mistake hard work for boastful bluster; eschewing the allure of Manhattan’s trendy nightclubs for picking up trash in the South Bronx. For many lifelong New Yorkers, pride in their Mayor, deferred for a generation, has been restored; among the young and disillusioned, an unfamiliar optimism burns inside their beleaguered psyche. Mamdani is both the symbol and engine of this civic revival. And while the Mayor may not be able to deliver every promise, that will not be what most voters ultimately judge him on (despite the protests of the chattering class). The inertia of the mayoralty, the second hardest job in America, is designed to grind even the most earnest reformers into dust. For months on end, eight figure advertisements pilloried Mamdani, castigating him as a dangerous radical that would inevitably return Gotham to the crime-ridden city of yore. The young Mayor has not only withstood such attacks, he endured them; inspiring masses of ordinary people along the way. These emotional undercurrents that underpin Mamdani’s resonance are far more powerful than any sole news cycle.

Zohran Mamdani’s day job may keep him from walking the length of Manhattan, the inspiring closing act to his insurgent campaign. Yet whenever he so chooses, the Mayor can pace the six mile trek home from City Hall to Gracie Mansion. The contours of both journeys, from that humid summer night down the West Side to the recent brisk evening stroll up the East Side, are markedly different, from the surrounding faces of the security detail protecting the Mayor to the staffers flanking their principal. But two things have not changed. The joyous reception that greets Mamdani, from everyday people on the street, themselves also on their way home from work, reflects the same authentic mix of hope and astonishment that has made the Mayor into a political and cultural figure. Nor has the man himself, now blessed with exponentially more fame and power, compelled by circumstance to compromise, departed from the worldview that defined his rise. To his core, the Zohran Mamdani you see — the self-deprecator, earnest hand-shaker, omnipresent innovator, and tireless worker — is the one we have always known. And for most people, that is more than enough.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

Over the past nine months, The Commie Corridor, defined by the author as “the young and hungry leftist base in North Brooklyn and Western Queens reshaping New York City politics,” has taken on a life of its own. Coined prior to Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in last June’s Democratic Primary, what was once Signal chat shorthand is now the subject of primetime CNN segments and The New York Times articles.

But how was The Commie Corridor created? And what’s stopping a sequel from developing somewhere else? While partially a story of gentrification and demographic transition (an influx of college-educated voters), The Commie Corridor is equally a tale of institutional atrophy (the decline of traditional political machines), movement rebirth (the rise of organized democratic socialism), and the steady left-leaning realignment of younger, urban Democrats since 2016.

For most of the 21st Century, as local and national politics retained some degree of distance, the Democratic “establishment” in most New York City neighborhoods amounted to no more than a handful of local groups (political clubs, homeowners associations, senior centers) that collectively, at best, could marshall a couple dozen volunteers. The bustling storefronts of yore, embedded in the fabric of their respective communities, were gone. Competitive Democratic Primary elections seldom took place, and when they did, voter engagement was startlingly low, significantly declining over the preceding decades. (Some communities, such as the Upper West Side and Southeast Queens, still retained a genuine connection between their civic institutions and the voting public, but they were the exception to the rule). In hindsight, such an arrangement was a house of cards on the verge of collapse, especially if the electorate could be sufficiently expanded to include more renters and young people, untethered to status quo. The rise of Bernie Sanders and the reign of Donald Trump not only created a political vacuum, but the conditions for greater civic consciousness among Democrats, particularly with respect to local politics. This phenomenon proved fatal for incumbents coasting on conditions that had, almost overnight, been swiftly erased.

In less than a decade, South Asian and Hispanic democratic socialists succeeded Italian and Greek moderates at every level of government in Astoria, colloquially known as The People’s Republic. Once an afterthought, younger voters quickly asserted themselves as the dominant Democratic bloc in dozens of neighborhoods in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, hotbeds of relative affordability with transit access to the urban core. Still, their collective influence was underestimated by the political class, who insisted that the Democratic Party shift to the right following the 2024 Presidential Election. Most importantly, these voters organized themselves and built their own institutions rooted in shared class politics, with volunteer armies that doubled as a source of community, and social media savvy that authentically reached their peers. By June 25th, 2025, you could see The Commie Corridor from space.

And, in late October, I attempted to foreshadow where this “next era of progressive and socialist electoral expansion” (Commie Corridor Jr. per se) would be.

The answer, then and now, is Upper Manhattan.

In both the Democratic Primary and the General Election, Zohran Mamdani validated this hypothesis: in June, he won precincts north of 110th Street by 25 points; in November, his prohibitive margin widened to nearly 40 points. These were, after all, the blocks Mamdani trekked during the first two hours of The Walk: the baseball fields of Inwood Hill Park, where Manny Ramirez learned to play; the rush hour crowds pacing Dyckman Street, the famed nightlife corridor; the sloping hills of St. Nicholas Avenue, the heart of rent-stabilization in Manhattan; the bright lights and picturesque sunsets along Broadway in Hamilton Heights, where Mamdani, on the precipice of history, was cheered heroically; and Morningside Heights, a sophisticated enclave nestled atop a plateau, home to both the Mayor’s parents and Columbia University.

Crucially, all of these aforementioned neighborhoods — as well as Harlem, the gentrifying capital of Black America, and (Spanish) East Harlem, lie in New York’s 13th Congressional District, which spans Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx. Mamdani’s dominance across these neighborhoods is no surprise, for NY-13 possesses the dual ingredients of left-leaning electoral success — renters (99th percentile) and millennials (94th percentile) — both fundamental to the sociological and political identity of each neighborhood. In fact, no Congressional District in the United States has a higher percentage of renters (89%) than NY-13.

One might presume that the “organized left”, omnipresent in other corners of the five boroughs, would have a discernible base of allies here. However, most of the elected officials in Upper Manhattan owe their position to some faction of dynastic, ethnic politics (the Harlem Democratic machine, the “Squadriano” of Dominican-Americans, plus a handful of liberal, Upper West Side expats). In fact, each individual neighborhood resembles its own political fiefdom, dividing the proverbial “establishment.” This diffusion, combined with a working-class and increasingly young electorate, engenders vulnerability — and opportunity. Last year, many of these politicians sided with Cuomo, or were coerced into neutrality by the specter of retaliation. And yet, Mamdani crushed the former Governor, a sign of disconnect between rank-and-file voters and the politicians who represent them. Now, the most prominent among them, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, is facing a spirited, underdog challenge from organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier. The race between Espaillat, the first Dominican-American elected to the House of Representatives, and Avila Chevalier, endorsed by both NYC-DSA and Justice Democrats, has pushed many of the latent fault lines in the Democratic coalition to the forefront.

Here, the ingredients of progressive success will collide with the institutions that have upheld the political establishment. Espaillat, a multi-decade fixture of Upper Manhattan politics, uniquely embodies the style of power — inherently local, nakedly transactional, ethnic-oriented, machine-rooted — that now finds itself under siege in an era of sweeping, mass politics. Such a fraught and nuanced contest, decided by one of the most working-class and racially-diverse electorates in the nation, will prove insightful with respect to the Democratic Party’s future. Yet, despite a degree of vulnerability and favorable fundamentals, defeating Espaillat will prove difficult.

For the power broker’s career is defined by an innate ability to outlast his enemies.

Subscribe now

Adriano Espaillat, 71, lacks the national profile afforded to many of his New York colleagues, despite chairing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. As the first Dominican-American and formerly undocumented immigrant to serve in Congress, Espaillat has long been considered a political trailblazer, particularly in the predominantly Dominican communities of Washington Heights and Inwood. For decades, Espaillat has outhustled and strong-armed political rivals across Upper Manhattan, slowly climbing the ladder of public and elected office.

A native of Santiago, the second largest city in the Dominican Republic, Espaillat has politics in his blood, literally. He is the second great-grandson of military hero Pedro Ignacio Espaillat; the great-grandson of former Dominican Senate President Mario Fermín Cabral y Báez; which also makes him a descendant of 19th-century Dominican President Buenaventura Báez. Moving to the United States in 1964, the Espaillats overstayed their tourist visa before eventually becoming green card holders. They raised their son in Washington Heights, part of a wave of Dominican immigrants escaping war and economic strife who settled in Upper Manhattan, aided by the Hart–Celler Act which abolished past Eurocentric immigration quotas. An aspiring politico, Espaillat embedded himself in local institutions: serving on the community board, leading the police precinct council, advising the Governor on Dominican issues, plus a gamut of nonprofit work: legal services, conflict resolution, victim’s services.

His first opportunity came in 1991, amidst a crowded and competitive field for a City Council seat in Washington Heights and Inwood. Espaillat hustled hard, but lost by five points to Guillermo Linares, who became the first Dominican-American elected to office in New York City (let alone one of the first in the nation); an honor the descendant of Caribbean political royalty almost certainly believed should have been his. This would be the beginning of a long and bitter rivalry between Espaillat and Linares for the mantle of leading Dominican power broker in the five boroughs. The former’s breakthrough would come in 1996, as Espaillat challenged sixteen term incumbent John Brian Murtaugh. Murtaugh, the last remaining Celtic pol in the area, had represented Inwood and Washington Heights since they were predominantly Irish and Jewish. However, by the end of the 20th century, Murtaugh’s district had become 80% Hispanic, and majority Dominican. When his insurgent bid ran out of money, Espaillat, sensing this was his last and best chance to ascend, sold his car so he could keep campaigning. His investment proved wise and life-changing, as Espaillat ultimately dethroned Murtaugh by 401 votes; completing an ethnic succession in Upper Manhattan on his way to the State Assembly. He would remain in Albany’s lower chamber for fourteen years, championing issues foreign to many New Yorkers, but near and dear to his community: driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, greater protections for livery cab drivers, health care for low-income daycare workers. Espaillat’s 2010 campaign for State Senate pitted him against Mark Levine, a liberal and Jewish political upstart fluent in Spanish. The campaign was fraught, Levine decried Espaillat as the consummate Albany Insider, even calling on the State Attorney General (then-Andrew Cuomo) to investigate his rival for corruption. The Northern Manhattan Coalition for Economic Development, a nonprofit “largely funded by state grants secured by Espaillat” was “mostly staffed by members of his campaign and inner circle,” according to The New York Post. High-turnout Jewish voters, particularly in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, were a key slice of the electorate. To the surprise of many observers, Espaillat won Riverdale (and the election as a whole), proof that a gentile could defeat a Jew among Abraham’s descendants. Notably, their differences were purely identitarian, rather than substantive; Levine and Espaillat were, and continue to be, strong supporters of the Israeli state. While Espaillat, eager to crush his rivals, traditionally kept former opponents at arm’s length, he embraced Levine as one of his own, gaining a longstanding ally.

Espaillat had barely settled into Albany’s upper chamber before he began plotting his next move: the House of Representatives. New York’s 13th Congressional District, which encompassed all of Upper Manhattan, had been represented by Charlie Rangel for four decades. But Rangel, who had succeeded the increasingly ill and unscrupulous Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1972, began showing similar signs of fatigue and decline. Now in his 80’s, nursing a back injury and a viral infection, Rangel was absent from Washington. After decades of accruing seniority, Rangel no longer held the gavel on the lucrative Ways and Means, having been censured for corruption in 2010. “This is The Harlem Seat,” the Black establishment protested.

But was it still? By 2012, there were twice as many Hispanic residents than Black residents in NY-13. And that gap would only widen in the years to come.

The old and scandal-scarred Rangel had more fight left than Espaillat anticipated. Furthermore, the Dominican power broker, used to the horse-trading of Albany and presiding over his local fiefdom, proved ill-equipped at building broad support beyond his immediate base of Washington Heights and Inwood. In 2005, Espaillat had briefly tried his hand at city politics, running for Manhattan Borough President against eight other candidates. While Espaillat won the 72nd Assembly District, the densest Dominican blocks in Manhattan, he struggled to make inroads elsewhere, earning a meager nine percent of the vote. Now, that similar lack of coalitional appeal threatened to derail his ambitions once again. When the ballots were tallied, Espaillat had lost by only one thousand votes, with a racially polarized result between Black Harlem and Hispanic Washington Heights and Inwood. In the West Bronx (recently drawn into the district) and East Harlem (historically Puerto Rican, with a growing Mexican population), Espaillat left meat on the bone with Hispanic voters. Two years later, he challenged Rangel, then aged eighty-four, again, only to fall short once more by a comparably close margin. Things would soon get dicey, as Espaillat fell victim to New York’s bizarre elections calendar (federal primaries in June, State primaries in September). After every losing Congressional primary, he would have to turn around and defend his State Senate seat a few months later. Those races, too, were bitter and divisive: with Espaillat forced to fend off his old foe, Guillermo Linares (62% to 38%); and then dispatch City Councilmember Robert Jackson (49% to 43%). Each time, his margin of victory decreased. There was not only Adriano Espaillat fatigue, but the Dominican power broker had made some powerful enemies.

Everything built up to the 2016 Democratic Primary, as Espaillat faced promotion or his third consecutive rejection. Rangel had finally retired, and Espaillat was no longer facing an institution. Nevertheless, the Lion of Lenox Avenue endorsed Harlem’s own Keith LT Wright, Espaillat’s former colleague in the state legislature, as his chosen successor. While the race would narrow to Espaillat versus Wright, the field of other candidates arguably determined the outcome: Guillermo Linares, facing Espaillat for the third and final time; Adam Clayton Powell IV, the grandson of the former representative; Clyde Williams, a former Democratic National Committee official endorsed by The New York Times; and Suzan Johnson Cook, the former U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom in the Obama administration. In a battle of turnout between Black and Hispanic voters (with a non-insignificant number of middle-class, professional White voters), the Black candidates (Wright, Williams, Powell IV, Cook) outpaced the Dominican candidates (Espaillat, Linares) 56% to 42%. And yet, Espaillat narrowly prevailed head-to-head against Wright (36.7% to 33.9%). His old foe, Linares, earned a meager five percent, not even enough to be a spoiler.

Of his three consecutive runs for Congress, Espaillat won both his lowest vote share and lowest vote total, in 2016. Not only had he failed to grow his coalition, he watched it diminish. Still, the war of attrition had been won. For the first time in seventy years, Harlem would not have an African American representative in Washington.

Adriano Espaillat’s ascendance is a testament to an era of New York City politics, one of relationships and transactions, that has diminished with time. Yet, the old school power broker remains standing: holding court with mayoral aspirants over coffee in Inwood, directing votes in the invisible race for City Council Speaker, building a bench of loyal (oftentimes Dominican) allies, coined the “Squadriano.” Espaillat lives for the sweltering heat of summer, white shirtsleeves rolled up, charming seniors in Spanish while stumping for votes along Dyckman Street, flanked by his entourage. For real power lies not in the cloakroom, but how many people back home know your name.

Perhaps no politician in the five boroughs is so well acquainted with bitter, closely-contested campaigns; across thirty years, Espaillat has competed in ten primaries decided by less than six points. He knows how to win. Or at least he did.

Share

Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, endorsed by both the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats, erstwhile engines of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman’s upset victories against Congressional incumbents, is hoping for a similar wave of momentum to help her dethrone Adriano Espaillat. But are those campaigns, multiple cycles removed from the present, applicable comparisons? And is Espaillat, the legendary Dominican power broker, as vulnerable to a left-leaning challenge as Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel?

Yes and No. Crowley, an Irishman who never learned to speak Spanish, proved no more than a stranger to his working-class, Hispanic constituents and an insufficient relic of the establishment to college-educated progressives. Engel, a sixteen term incumbent, uttered a damning off-color remark (“if I didn’t have a primary I wouldn’t care”) after the murder of George Floyd, a fatal mistake in a majority-minority district during the protest summer of 2020. By the time of their demise, both Crowley and Engel had largely absconded to suburban Virginia, leaving a political vacuum at home within their respective districts. Neither spent heavily, either through their campaign or allied independent expenditures, against their surging insurgent opponents. Each campaign was defined by unforced errors (Crowley infamously skipped a debate with Ocasio-Cortez, sending a surrogate instead, earning him a rebuke from The New York Times that lent credence to Ocasio-Cortez’s charges of absenteeism).

Has Adriano Espaillat lost a step? Without a doubt.

In my part of the district, Morningside Heights and Manhattan Valley, a vote-rich corridor of No Kings marchers and college students which broke heavily for Mamdani, the Congressman is nowhere to be found, already skipped two candidate forums organized by local clubs (Crowley-esque). In Harlem, long the base of power for Espaillat’s African American rivals, the incumbent will assuredly pick up token endorsements from local elected officials, a gesture of goodwill towards their representative, but few will actually go to bat for him. Working-class East Harlem, an eclectic mix of Puerto Ricans, professionals, and public housing residents, was Espaillat’s worst neighborhood in 2020. And even within his alleged stronghold of Washington Heights and Inwood, upper-middle class white voters (west of Broadway) in park-lined cooperatives have never been enamored with Espaillat, much preferring his progressive rival, Robert Jackson. Sure, Espaillat will likely hold his own in the West Bronx, which includes lower-income Dominican neighborhoods that, while on the other side of the Harlem River, are culturally akin to his core constituencies. But, the Bronx portion of NY-13 totals only 15% of the predicted electorate. Altogether, this is a wholly unimpressive position for a five-term incumbent. And yet, absent a fatal error by Espaillat, it may not be enough for Democrats to expel him from office.

NYC-DSA, despite Mamdani’s incredible triumph, has never won a race in Upper Manhattan. Justice Democrats, once a vaunted stalwart of the national left, fell on hard times during the Biden years. (Avila Chevalier was recruited by Justice Democrats, then endorsed by NYC-DSA). Steadfast allies of the progressive left — The Working Families Party, The United Auto Workers, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice — all of whom have discernible pockets of support in NY-13, have refrained from endorsing Avila Chevalier. Nor is Zohran Mamdani, the most powerful voice on the left, likely to get involved in the race to unseat Espaillat, a featured Speaker at Mamdani’s October 14th rally in Washington Heights. Espaillat’s influence over a handful of lawmakers in Albany and the City Council acts as a bulwark against an intervention from the young Mayor, who has moved with caution his first three months.

Thus, Avila Chevalier will need a wedge issue that makes Espaillat appear out of touch and makes her insurgency attractive to liberal Boomers in Morningside Heights, middle-aged Black voters in Harlem, and Hispanic renters in East Harlem and Washington Heights. For many left-leaning candidates, from the suburbs of New Jersey (Analilia Mejia) to metro Chicago (Daniel Biss, Kat Abughazaleh), that wedge issue has been the abolition of ICE, particularly after the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good. Espaillat, a former undocumented immigrant, boasts a respectable record with respect to immigration, forged across several decades.

However, there is one notable blemish on Espaillat’s record, that simultaneously points to the race’s subtle but key fault line: the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil by ICE. Last March, Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University and pro-Palestinian student activist known for his role in the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment protests, was arrested by ICE agents inside the lobby of his apartment building, before being taken to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he was held for three months (missing the birth of his child), until a federal judge ordered his release. Crucially, Khalil was a constituent of New York’s 13th Congressional District.

Traditionally, members of Congress and their staff would work tirelessly to secure the release of a detained constituent, particularly given the explicitly political nature of Khalil’s abduction. Still, Espaillat could only muster a tepid statement: “I expect the Department of Justice to work within the confines of the law and that due process is guaranteed to him and his family. The rule of law must be respected.”

In fact, the office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez soon took over Khalil’s case, despite the Columbia student not being her constituent. Why? Perhaps because Espaillat’s top donor, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), vehemently objected to Khalil’s rhetoric with respect to the War in Gaza. Avila Chevalier, who cut her teeth as a student organizer at Columbia University alongside Khalil, certainly feels strongly about Espaillat’s mistreatment of her friend and ally.

Nonetheless, will a referendum on AIPAC, increasingly persona non grata among the Democratic mainstream, resonate broadly with one of the nation’s most working-class constituencies? Mamdani proved that moral politics were also winning politics, particularly with younger and disillusioned voters Uptown. Still, the nexus of his Upper Manhattan inroads came from a relentless focus on costs-of-living, which helped the lesser-known democratic socialist earn the trust of middle-aged Black and Hispanic voters, whose orientation to politics is less ideological, and more relational.

The conditions of the 2026 midterm elections, along with the broader social forces of the country — daily chaos emanating from the Trump administration, a vacuum within the Democratic Party, and the salience of progressive messaging (affordability, anti-oligarchy) — are reminiscent of both 2018 and 2020, when the socialist left in New York City enjoyed scores of success. Now, in a post-Zohran world, the conditions today are arguably even more favorable, with anti-incumbent sentiment and voter engagement climbing by the day. Still, attention, in a city filled with candidates pleading for more money and more time, is both thin and finite. There is a reason incumbents win re-election 97% of the time, after all. For Avila Chevalier to prevail, she will have to overcome such inertia in a matter of months.

Mamdani, with his effortless aura, conditioned us to believe that such great feats were not only possible, but probable. Time and again, the struggles of political insurgency have been airbrushed away by the fleeting highs of success. The clasped hands covering up one’s exclamation and astonishment, as a life-changing reality sets in. A songbird perfectly landing on a speaking podium. The triumphant “my friends, we have done it,” addressed to a packed house of supporters on a sticky summer night.

These successes, mere moments, live on for years to come: sustaining the souls of those who have sacrificed; bestowing meaning onto those previously feeling adrift; serving as a reservoir of hope in challenging times; and most importantly, inspiring the next generation to step forward. Whether or not Darializa Avila Chevalier carries the day on June 23rd, there will soon be a new day dawning in Upper Manhattan.

Even The Commie Corridor was not built in a day.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

Ever since Donald Trump returned to power, the Democratic Party, in fervent anticipation of 2028, has anxiously searched for clues as to the mood of its angry, perpetually disappointed base. However, gauging voter sentiment from only a handful of elections — often shaped by hyper-local interests and regional nuances — let alone extrapolating broader implications, is difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, in the pre-midterm vacuum, two riveting and high-profile contests have stood out, defined by scores of national attention, record voter turnout, massive campaign spending, expanded electorates, and an incredibly diverse coalition of Democratic voters: the 2025 New York City Mayoral Primary and the 2026 Texas Senate Primary.

Any good argument acknowledges its limitations, and the State of Texas and the City of New York may appear to be an odd match for comparison. After all, New York City is entirely urban (despite pseudo-suburban swaths in Staten Island and Eastern Queens), whereas Texas is defined by increasingly sprawling suburbs and hundred-mile-long rural stretches. Hispanic voters (Mexican or Tejano, not Puerto Rican and Dominican) play a far greater role in Texas (~31% of the electorate), whereas the White (~45%) and Black (~21%) electorate in the five boroughs retains greater influence in shaping Democratic primary elections (although the city is on pace to be plurality Hispanic within a decade). Most notably, only one-third of Texans rent their homes or apartments, whereas close to two-thirds of New Yorkers give, in the words of their new Mayor, “a check to a landlord every month” — by far the highest rate in the nation. Yet, for the purposes of evaluating a primary electorate overwhelmingly indexed to a handful of metro areas, there is much to be gleaned from both the Lone Star State and the Big Apple about the future of the Democratic Party coalition.

In the New York City Mayoral race, the candidates — Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo — were polar opposites in almost every respect. Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old Muslim democratic socialist, ran a campaign “relentlessly” focused on the cost of living, becoming a viral sensation ubiquitous among younger voters, seldom compromising his avowed left-leaning values (most notably his support for Palestinian human rights). Cuomo, the former three-term Governor, not only supported the pro-business, pro-Israel status quo, but embodied the institutional mindset of the Democratic Party establishment. While the insurgent Mamdani campaigned across the five boroughs, hoping to bring new voters into the process, the scandal-scarred Cuomo hunkered down and avoided public appearances. (Public polls, modeled on past Democratic electorates, showed Cuomo leading comfortably until the very end.) According to exit polling by Data for Progress, among voters who had participated in the previous Mayoral contest, Cuomo defeated Mamdani by 2 points. However, Mamdani won past “non-voters” by 40 points, fueling his dramatic upset.

The Mamdani–Cuomo voter coalitions were prescient in foreshadowing the rift afoot in the Democratic Party. Per the aforementioned polling, Mamdani won younger voters (under-45) by 48 points, college-educated voters by 36 points, and men by 17 points. According to precinct analysis, Mamdani also performed exceptionally well among renters (both market-rate and rent-stabilized) and South Asian voters — pronounced constituencies in New York City, yet seldom appealed to so directly. In contrast, Cuomo won Black voters by 26 points, older voters (over-45) by 21 points, and non-college-educated voters by 17 points. (Hispanic voters, primarily from the Caribbean Islands and South America, were split down the middle, stratified by age.)

In many respects, these outlines resembled the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Except, Zohran Mamdani meaningfully improved upon Sanders’ past urban shortcomings on two crucial fronts: winning over middle-aged, college-educated liberals (mostly Gen X), while inspiring record participation from younger voters. Not only did Mamdani fundamentally reshape the electorate, he held his own in older and more affluent Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods where left-leaning candidates have historically failed to gain traction. Analilia Mejia, the former national political director for Sanders’ second Presidential campaign, proved this was not a distinctly urban phenomenon by winning the Special Election for New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District (which included Essex County, where Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders by 47 points). Mejia, a tried-and-true progressive, won voters with individual incomes between $100,000 and $250,000 — the middle-aged suburban managerial class of homeowners that crushed Sanders in consecutive Presidential elections. Most importantly, in her base precincts, Mejia maximized her support to the fullest extent, just as Mamdani did; in Bloomfield Township, NJ-11’s largest and most racially diverse municipality, Mejia netted more than 1,600 votes above her closest rival, more than double her margin of victory. In both 2016 and 2020, these constituencies proved hostile to Sanders’ anti-establishment, class-based message; the Vermont Independent struggled mightily in middle-aged, well-educated, higher-income suburbia (DuPage County in Illinois, Middlesex County in Massachusetts, Collin County in Texas), which, when combined with his urban shortcomings (Chicago, Boston, Houston), doomed him in a handful of winnable primary states. Six years later, the electoral map may be redrawn entirely.

Subscribe now

The Texas Senate Primary, pitting charismatic State Representative James Talarico against firebrand Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, featured almost none of the sharp ideological contrasts that defined the New York City Mayor’s race. Style — Talarico’s “love thy neighbor” Christian populism versus Crockett’s “take no prisoners” unapologetic resistance — superseded substance in the Lone Star State, where Democrats have not won a statewide election since 1994. Still, there are remarkable similarities in how Talarico and Mamdani ran their underdog campaigns, compared with how Crockett and Cuomo — frontrunners flush with name recognition — failed to capitalize on their pronounced early advantages. These nuances, not explicitly ideological, translated into how their coalitions manifested: Crockett’s base (older, Black) mirrored Cuomo’s, whereas Talarico’s coalition (younger, college-educated, White, Hispanic, lower-propensity) is reminiscent of Mamdani’s.

Mamdani and Talarico combined style and substance. They consistently released algorithm-oriented vertical videos, becoming omnipresent in the feeds of younger voters. (Talarico has credited Mamdani’s “Halalflation” video for inspiring a similar spot on high prices at the Texas State Fair.) Each made a point to campaign seemingly everywhere, while making deliberate and nuanced outreach to lower-propensity voters. Both modeled a positive campaign ethos, rarely going negative on their opponents, while eschewing barn-burning rhetoric for inclusive and direct public addresses — neither ever raises his voice in speeches. Told to downplay their religion, neither Mamdani, a practicing Muslim, nor Talarico, a devout Presbyterian (and seminarian), obeyed such tired orthodoxy. Ahead of the Democratic Primary in June, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan — a seventeen-mile sojourn — alongside his supporters; when first running to flip a state legislative seat from red to blue, Talarico crisscrossed the entirety of his suburban district on foot. But most importantly, these common aesthetics and values were paired with a unifying, class-based message: Mamdani’s articulation of the affordability crisis has been widely adopted (to varying degrees of success), but Talarico’s “it’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom” has emerged as a well-calibrated, swing-state adaptation.

In the words of Mamdani and Talarico, the billionaires and oligarchs are the common enemy. If the lessons of the former are plentiful, the latter has proved a quick study.

And, most important to the Democratic Party, this fusion of style (everyman ethos) and substance (positive populism) produced a remarkably similar voter coalition. The Texas equivalent of the “Commie Corridor” is Travis County (the Austin metro area), flush with college-educated Gen Z renters and higher-income Gen X suburbanites, who mirror the class and educational attainment of Brownstone Brooklyn. Talarico won 76% of the vote in Travis County, eclipsing 90% in precincts adjacent to the University of Texas, while earning more than 80% in tonier Westlake Hills, where the median home price exceeds one million dollars. Given Crockett’s pronounced advantage with Black voters and Talarico’s strength with White voters, the swing demographic in the Texas Senate Primary was Hispanic voters, who are disproportionately young and working-class. And, while Talarico won Hispanic Texans by a greater margin than Mamdani won Hispanic New Yorkers, the symmetry is strengthened by the details: the Hispanic electorate in Texas, particularly in the counties handily won by Talarico (Hidalgo, Webb, Cameron, El Paso), is among the youngest in the United States (99th percentile for Gen-Alpha, 96th percentile for Gen-Z), whereas the age distribution of Hispanic voters in New York City is noticeably broader. (Mamdani won Jackson Heights and Corona, where younger South American immigrants shape the electorate, but lost the South Bronx, where older Puerto Rican and Dominican voters are the majority.) Even South Asian voters — Indian American tech workers in Collin County, Pakistani homeowners in Fort Bend, and working-class Bangladeshis in the Bronx and Queens — heavily favored Talarico and Mamdani.

Nonetheless, absent a pronounced advantage among middle-class White suburbanites, Talarico would not have prevailed. Since 2020, the trend of urban professionals relocating to adjacent suburbs and exurbs has noticeably reshaped the political landscape of several metro areas. Among the towns in New Jersey where Analilia Mejia performed best, and the counties in Texas where James Talarico decisively defeated Jasmine Crockett, the vast majority had high percentages of newer residents, either from out of state or nearby cities. In Texas, such suburban settlement is a consequence of a robust jobs market, particularly in the Dallas–Fort Worth area; whereas in the Tri-State area (NY-NJ-CT), the affordability crisis and post-COVID transition to remote work has fueled these migration patterns, particularly among middle-aged families. In these key counties, the politics of residents have changed along with the composition of the residents.

Call it Realignment and Relocation.

Many political pundits have focused on the individual brilliance of Mamdani and Talarico, routinely at the expense of the voters who came together to support them both. In doing so, they have sorely underestimated the replicability of their respective coalitions elsewhere in the United States.

These currents promise to have profound implications for the upcoming Presidential Primary. For decades — exemplified by Bernie Sanders’ consecutive defeats — consolidating the Black electorate, dominant in the rural South and pronounced in the urban North, was tantamount to guaranteeing the Democratic nomination. Kamala Harris has the inside track to do just that, but will it be enough? The growing decoupling of Black voters (more institution-aligned and broadly moderate) from their White, college-educated (liberal-progressive) and working-class Hispanic (economic populist, culturally moderate) counterparts presents a grave danger to Harris’s prospects, and the Democratic establishment writ large. Harris, who endorsed Crockett last Friday, is far more cautious than her South Dallas ally, yet both suffer politically for a similar reason: the widespread perception of unelectability (Harris infamously lost every swing state; Crockett, in an R+12 state, expressed little desire to appeal to voters beyond her pre-existing base), which breeds scores of negative media coverage that multiplies like wildfire. Nonetheless, for the next Democratic nominee to upend this coalitional dichotomy — regardless of who emerges as the institution-friendly standard-bearer (Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Wes Moore) — he or she will have to earnestly build a Talarico/Mamdani-esque coalition.

Not long ago, this potent cohort was largely confined to young, urban renters; shorthand for college-educated, professional-class (secular) Whites. Now, it includes middle-aged, suburban homeowners and working-class, devoutly religious Hispanic voters. This younger, anti-system coalition — inherently insurgent to the older Democratic Party establishment — uses the power of attention to overcome a deficit of institutional support. Democratic voters crave a more earnest resistance, and an affirmative vision for a post-Trump world. And right now, the populist left is the only faction in the Democratic Party rising to meet the moment.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

Two weeks ago, I served as the moderator for a candidate forum for New York’s 12th Congressional District, a two-hour discussion at Bank Street College.

Forums, hosted in-person by local political clubs, were once a time-tested tradition of the Democratic Party, a synthesis of organizing and community. Now, these erstwhile neighborhood rituals are diminished (or even non-existent) in many corners of the five boroughs, let alone the country. However, in New York’s 12th Congressional District, which contains perhaps the densest concentration of such “clubs” in America, such an ethos remains alive and well. This event was co-hosted by three such clubs: Broadway Democrats, Columbia University Democrats, and Hell’s Kitchen Democrats.

While all of the aforementioned clubs hail from up-and-down the West Side (an important distinction I will discuss later), New York’s 12th Congressional District straddles both sides of Central Park, stretching as far south as 14th Street. Jonathan Chait, a centrist commentator for The Atlantic, wrote that the Manhattan-based district “probably has more Democrats qualified to serve in national leadership than any congressional district in America.” While such a sentiment is rife with elitism, NY-12 is undoubtedly the epicenter of THE ELITE: home to The New York Times headquarters, Billionaire’s Row, and Museum Mile. Of all the 435 Congressional Districts in the United States, New York’s 12th ranks 1st in both individual income and educational attainment. The sheer scale of affluence — eight-figure penthouses, doormen lining avenues and side streets, three-piece suits and SUVs with tinted windows — is both intoxicating and numbing, particularly in such close proximity to the working-class precarity of the South Bronx, less than 15 minutes away by public transit. Wealth breeds health and longevity: not only is the 12th District the healthiest in the nation (dead last in most diseases and disabilities), it ranks in the 95th percentile with respect to its share of residents from the Silent Generation (over 80 years old). The top eight districts for the Silent Generation are all in Florida, so imagine segments of NY-12 as their political kin folk, just those who prefer to spend 183 taxable days in New York City. Unsurprisingly, NY-12 has the lowest percentage of Gen Z residents (14 to 29 years old) in the nation, a consequence of the highest market-rate apartment prices in America, which has proven unattainable to most recent college graduates. Most of the leading candidates in the congressional race are Millennials (30 to 45 years old), who are competing to succeed the 78-year-old retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. Perhaps that is why a Gen Z moderator was recruited…

As someone who was born and raised inside New York’s 12th Congressional District (formerly Roosevelt Hospital, now Mount Sinai West), attended middle and high school there, and still worships within its boundaries (Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West 71st), I want to color in some of the aforementioned statistics. For almost the entirety of my entire life, up until sixteen months ago, I lived in NY-12. In spite of its affluence and education, this is a district that contains nuance too, particularly with respect to class, neighborhood history, and political persuasion. Indeed, for as many second home owners who abscond to the Hamptons come Memorial Day weekend, there are even more seniors on fixed income, Mitchell-Lama tenants, young professionals, and upper middle class families, who collectively relish their public parks and walkable streets. Politically and culturally, the district is anchored by both the Upper West Side and Upper East Side — residential neighborhoods which, for decades, were deliberately placed in separate congressional districts. The West Side, historically Jewish, is decidedly more liberal (and overwhelmingly Democratic). The East Side, historically WASPy and old moneyed (with many ancestral Independents and Republicans) is more moderate; “Oligarch Alley,” my father’s coinage for the uber-wealthy stretch between Park and Fifth Avenue adjacent to Central Park (a naturally occurring retirement community), was once the heart and soul of Silk Stocking Republicanism and Gloria Steinem’s Radical Chic. As time has passed, and the Democratic Party has realigned towards the well-educated and affluent, these subtle distinctions have blurred. Home to more Jews than any other congressional district in the United States, support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime is eroding by the day, but the Jewish State’s right to exist is never questioned. Nonetheless, the divisions between the East Side and West Side are critical to understanding the contours of what will be one of the most consequential contests in the country. During last year’s Democratic primary for mayor, NY-12 was the most divided of any congressional district in New York City, with Zohran Mamdani ultimately prevailing by less than 200 votes (out of more than 155,000 cast in total). Writing about NY-12 is not ideal for Twitter engagement, given the population’s average age, but it is excellent for pageviews and subscribers, because older voters love using their email. (For the most consistent coverage of NY-12, I recommend Eli Miller’s blog).

As I stood behind the podium, the candidates fanned out across the stage and took their seats. This was the first time they would all appear together, as previous forums opted for the more mundane, one-at-a-time approach. Seated left to right were: Jack Schlossberg, a political commentator and grandson of former President John F. Kennedy; George Conway, a media-savvy lawyer and former Republican who was once married to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager; Laura Dunn, a civil and victims rights attorney; Micah Lasher, the state Assembly member for the 69th District on the West Side; Nina Schwalbe, a well-respected public health researcher who specializes in vaccines; Micah Bergdale, an entrepreneur with a background in public transit and electric vehicles; Jami Floyd, a legal analyst for ABC News who co-chairs the transportation community on Manhattan Community Board 7; Mathew Shurka, an LGBTQ+ rights activist who has worked to ban conversion therapy in countless states; and Alex Bores, the state Assembly member for the 73rd District on the East Side. Almost all have Wikipedia pages and advanced degrees.

If you’re thinking, “cool story bro, but I haven’t heard of most of these people,” that’s perfectly normal. Before last week, neither had I. The median voter, even in the epicenter of civic engagement, has more present concerns: Trump, ICE, Israel and Palestine, affordability, artificial intelligence. The two-hour forum sought to delve into those concerns and relate them to the district’s future representative. Each candidate began with a two-minute opening statement and ended with a one minute closing statement. In between, the candidates were questioned on a range of issues and given sixty seconds to respond. Some questions were answered by all, while others were only poised to three at a time. (With nine candidates, which is divisible by three, the format was smooth, ensuring equal opportunity and a wider breadth of topics).

For a full recording of the forum, click HERE.

Although the less well-known candidates (those outside of the Lasher, Bores, Schlossberg trio) will be hard pressed to accumulate a critical mass of attention between now and June 23rd, their presence on the stage was a testament to the depth of the 12th Congressional District’s talent. Laura Dunn stood out for her sharp delivery and unapologetic progressivism on a variety of issues, a talented public speaker unafraid to challenge the district’s ideological median. Micah Bergdale was compelling and thoughtful, marrying a compelling backstory with strong policy analysis. Dr. Nina Schwalbe, particularly to those unfamiliar with her campaign, stole the show on multiple answers, offering interesting and nuanced perspectives on public health (a top reporter at a very influential outlet pointedly told me afterwards that Schwalbe was “impressive”). Matthew Sherka, even in a moment of fervent polarization, recounted his successful efforts passing bi-partisan legislation banning conversion therapy. Jami Floyd, the self-styled “radical moderate,” would ultimately drop out of the race days later. In her closing message, she bemoaned “party insiders” and “political celebrities” having the upper hand, an advantage too great for lesser known (and lesser funded) candidates like herself to overcome.

Floyd is not necessarily wrong, either. But not exactly for the reasons she outlined.

Subscribe now

One might think New York’s 12th Congressional District, as a union of the well-educated and wealthy at the heart of the nation’s media capital, is readymade for a political outsider. But the exact opposite is true. Insurgents thrive in places where the establishment is weak and political networks are scarce. But NY-12 is a testament to relationships and institutions; it’s not just what you know, but who you know.

Which bodes poorly for George Conway.

Last Thursday was Conway’s first appearance at any candidate forum, a point of intrigue among the regular attendees as well as the organizers, who prided themselves on securing the former “Never Trump” Republican and Lincoln Project acolyte. At 63, Conway was the oldest person on the stage, having recently moved back to Manhattan to run for Congress. He has pledged to serve no more than two terms, with a laser focus on removing President Trump from office. Little else matters, Conway implies, so long as a fascist remains in the White House. Undoubtedly, almost all aspects of Conway’s life have revolved around Donald Trump for the past decade, for better or worse. His marriage to Kellyanne Conway publicly imploded after she helped guide Trump to victory in 2016. And in 2024, Conway donated more than one million dollars to Kamala Harris’ failed White House bid. During the forum, his anti-Trump experiences came across, but little else did. One could not escape the feeling that, in a room pulsing with Trump 2.0 energy — an angry Democratic Party base eager for an affirmative post-Trump vision — Conway was moored to the substantively shallower “resistance” of Trump 1.0. Even lighthearted lightning round questions (best pizza? favorite subway stop?), appeared to stymie Conway, who defaulting to “Rays” and the #7 train station in Hudson Yards. Laura Dunn turned to him, quipping “spoken like someone from D.C.”

The voters of the 12th Congressional District not only relish scores of substance, they demand it.

Which presents a challenge for Jack Schlossberg, who at age 33 is the youngest candidate in the field. The son of Caroline Kennedy, Schlossberg is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School who served as a Vogue correspondent during the 2024 presidential election after passing the bar exam. A digital native with the most famous family in American politics, Schlossberg has millions of followers across social media. Earlier this month, he was endorsed by House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, a longstanding ally of the Kennedy clan, who lauded Schlossberg as the voice of the next generation. But is Schlossberg’s voice truly in step with his generation?

Consider his response to my question about how he would “curtail illegal settlements in the West Bank that violate international law.” From the outset, Schlossberg appeared nervous, his voice halting: “Any funding the United States is providing Israel, which I don’t think we should abolish entirely, but I think we have to look at it very carefully. As long as [President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu] are in power, I would look very very carefully at the funding and weapons assistance the United States is providing … Israel is a democracy and in a very tough neighborhood.” Over the course of his answer, Schlossberg never mentioned the West Bank, despite the specific prompt. His lackluster response, unsurprisingly, prompted boos from some of the younger attendees. The contrast in quality was magnified by a far sharper answer from Assembly Member Micah Lasher, who asserted he would immediately re-introduce Rep. Jerry Nadler’s bill to sanction West Bank settlers, saying “I believe there is no path to a resolution of this conflict with the size and scope and expansion of settlement activity in the West Bank and the violence being committed against Palestinians there.” Schlossberg, who had failed to mention the Palestinian plight previously, then interjected upon the conclusion of Lasher’s answer to affirm his support for conditioning aid and express horror at the “human atrocities in Palestine.”

No matter where one stands with respect to the war in Gaza, West Bank settlements, and Israel’s right to exist, Schlossberg appeared, at best, unsure of himself on a crucial federal and international matter, and at worst, untethered to principle and attempting to play both sides of a contentious issue. Contrast Schlossberg with another Millennial politician who also came from economic and cultural privilege: Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the son of acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair and respected academic Mahmood Mamdani. Mamdani, a democratic socialist and avowed supporter of Palestinian human rights, is somewhat of a third rail in NY-12; narrowly winning the district in the Democratic Primary but losing the General Election by five points. Though NY-12 has a disproportionately small Millennial population, Mamdani was able to compete throughout the most affluent and educated blocks in the nation because he relentlessly engaged these younger voters — not just with slick slogans and short-form videos, but with genuine substance. If Schlossberg is truly the voice of the next generation as Nancy Pelosi proclaims, he will be able to activate this cohort, as Mamdani did the year prior. Opponents accuse Mamdani of many things, but “playing it safe,” lack of preparedness, and no core ideological foundation are not among them. This explains Mamdani’s success, and Schlossberg’s lack thereof, far better than anything to do with social media.

Jack Schlossberg’s campaign slogan is “BELIEVE IN SOMETHING,” a rallying call to the young and disillusioned. But what, exactly, is President Kennedy’s grandson asking them to believe in, besides his family’s legacy?

Absent “a record of public service or public accomplishment,” which Nadler has asserted Schlossberg “does not have,” the 33-year-old will have to innovate and become a political entrepreneur: someone who can not only ride the crest of the social forces, but turn them in their direction. Once upon a time, the neighborhoods of New York’s 12th Congressional District molded such political pioneers, spawning not only mayors and governors, but national leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Now, the political entrepreneurs come from other places in the five boroughs. They may work in the NY-12, perhaps at a taqueria in Union Square, but they live somewhere else far more affordable, like the Bronx. Even those fortunate enough to grow up here (a certain Bank Street alum raised in Morningside Heights comes to mind), will find their breakthrough opportunities elsewhere, in working- and middle-class neighborhoods like Parkchester, Astoria, and Bay Ridge. What has atrophied and eroded the political entrepreneurship of the 12th Congressional District?

The simple answer is that it’s easier to “make it” literally anywhere else. The competition for political office at the heart of Manhattan is fierce, defined by an abundance of ambition, credentials, and money (even races for Democratic district leader, an unpaid party position, are polarizing and fraught). In other parts of the city, there is often a sole interest group that dominates civic culture that one must appeal to. But in the neighborhoods of the 12th Congressional District, the array of institutions is vast, but – save for The New York Times – none are overwhelming enough to singlehandedly tip the scales. When combined with a relatively homogenous racial and class character, political preference often reverts to the mean of technocratic liberalism. As such, there is less ideological and political differentiation between elected officials across the 12th Congressional District than in any other congressional seat in New York City. One would think such robust competition would breed a plethora of political mavericks, but instead most candidates choose to play it safe and are thus relatively unknown outside of their immediate neighborhood. Even incumbent Rep. Jerry Nadler, a beloved liberal with an impressive and substantive legacy, is not considered a national leader of the Democratic Party.

Alex Bores, for one, is hoping to change that. Bores fits the “ladder climber” archetype that is a pre-requisite for success in the 12th Congressional District. He was a district leader on the Upper East Side, aligned with the influential and progressive-leaning Four Freedoms Democratic Club, before winning a bitterly contested race for an ultra-rare open Assembly seat in 2022. In the State Legislature, Bores represents many of the wealthiest communities in New York City: “Oligarch Alley,” along with tony Sutton Place and quasi-hip (but still expensive) Murray Hill, all on Manhattan’s East Side.

In a contest of this nature — regardless of nuance, qualification, or ideology — political geography often carries the day, pitting the West Side against the East Side. There are more votes to be had on the West Side, and the political institutions on that side of Central Park are more cohesive (i.e. all political clubs and elected officials typically move together). Micah Lasher, homegrown in the neighborhood, is the West Side candidate, blessed by their standard-bearer, Jerry Nadler. And the West Side always beats the East Side. (Just ask Carolyn Maloney, the former East Side congresswoman who lost badly to Nadler in 2022 after the two veteran congressmembers were both drawn into NY-12 during redistricting.)

But what if Bores could transcend geography, or at least mitigate it? He would need a potent wedge issue, a means to distinguish himself from the crowded field. Such a wildcard would have to be universal and existential, while increasingly commanding attention in the psyche of the district’s hyper-engaged electorate. Bores would need to be an expert on this emerging threat, even more than the notoriously wonky Lasher.

The ability of artificial intelligence, and its profound and escalating implications on white-collar employment and mass surveillance, to rupture the historic West-East electoral paradigm is the thesis on which Alex Bores has staked his campaign. And there is a bullish case why that could work. As data centers occupy rural communities and consume natural resources, anxiety increases about what artificial intelligence means for our collective future, particularly amongst the well-educated classes — also known as New York’s 12th Congressional District. Many are even saying “AI Pacs are the new AIPAC.” However, AIPAC’s financial resources, vast and not to be underestimated, are still more finite than that of the sprawling tech oligarchy.

Already, independent expenditures tied to AI behemoths have identified Bores as a target (or potential ally), flooding NY-12 with seven-figure ad buys months before the election. This onslaught has even further raised the salience of AI and placed Bores at the center of the conversation, a potent position in the attentional economy of politics, if harnessed correctly. Bores has parlayed this moment into several primetime hits on cable news and field-leading fundraising, complementing style with substance (his AI regulation plan, announced the morning of the forum, was well received). In making the case to the district’s voters that he is best equipped to be their representative, Bores leaned into the argument that “we will vote the same way 90% of the time,” but that the election is about “bringing a knowledge or experience that is different from what exists in [the Democratic Congressional Caucus].” This is undoubtedly compelling, but is it enough to overcome decades of relationships and institutions in a matter of months? And, even if artificial intelligence swiftly and ruthlessly automates away early career and mid-level white-collar jobs, wouldn’t the residents of NY-12 — older, more affluent, more educated — be among the most insulated from such havoc? Political outcomes, oftentimes reduced to talent and sweeping ideological implications, are shaped by luck and timing as much as anything else. And there’s one variable that weighs on the collective psyche of New York’s 12th Congressional District even more than the rise of artificial intelligence: Donald Trump.

Subscribe now

Bores’s top rival is betting that Democrats in NY-12 will not stray too far from their priors, and that President Trump, and the daily chaos emanating from his administration, will still dominate the zeitgeist of Manhattan voters over the next four months. These anxious and informed liberals, in a moment of peril, will seek continuity from the previous, respected and beloved tenure of Rep. Jerry Nadler, and turn to his well-prepared political protégé. So the thinking goes, at least.

That candidate, Micah Lasher, is no ordinary first-term Assembly member. He boasts an impressive résumé in New York politics spanning two decades, including stints as the policy director to the governor, chief of staff to the state attorney general, and chief Albany negotiator for the mayor. However, Lasher cannot be pigeonholed as a government bureaucrat naive to the dark arts of political power, for the West Side native has steered winning campaigns across New York since he was a freshman in college (even writing a book on magic tricks when he was fifteen). A savvy and sharp political operative, Lasher knows every trick in the proverbial playbook and has some of the most powerful politicians in Manhattan on speed dial. Case in point, during a surprisingly competitive campaign for Assembly in 2024, public defender Eli Northrup appeared to be gaining ground on Lasher, the prohibitive favorite, after the progressive insurgent sent a negative mailer attacking the frontrunner’s past support for charter schools. While the West Side traditionally adheres to a “gentleman’s game,” Lasher hit back, phoning both Rep. Jerry Nadler and former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger (the two also ran for Assembly against one another in 1976), who co-signed a letter admonishing the negative campaigning (“Eli Northrup should be ashamed of his dishonest, meanspirited attacks”), which included an image of a salt shaker (“Democrats should take them with a FULL shaker of salt”). The infamous “salt shaker” mailer immediately stalled Northrup’s momentum, and Lasher coasted to victory. But did he need to pull the Nadler–Messinger card to win?

Of course not. Micah Lasher sent that mailer because he could.

However, the generational opportunity that lays before him today almost never came to fruition. For close to a decade, Lasher’s career was defined by a series of what ifs and near misses: a shoe-in for City Council in the late 2000’s, term limit extensions foiled his plans to run; campaigning for a highly-coveted state Senate seat along the West Side several years later, Lasher fell short by less than 300 votes; a key adviser to both Scott Stringer and Eric Schneiderman, a top position in City Hall or Albany was inevitable, until personal scandal leveled both of their careers. Now, the path is finally clear, with Lasher on the precipice of his political dream. Can he realize it?

So far, Lasher is leaving nothing up to chance. Another West Side candidate, City Council Member Erik Bottcher, was also supposed to run for NY-12. He announced last fall and raised an impressive sum of money, more than three-quarters of a million dollars on the first day. However, over the holidays, Bottcher abruptly dropped out of the Congressional race to run for a vacant state Senate seat on the Upper West Side, formerly held by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal. Immediately, Lasher’s longstanding West Side allies, Nadler and Hoylman-Sigal, endorsed Bottcher, which promptly boxed out other potential Senate contenders, such as Assembly Members Linda Rosenthal and Tony Simone. Overnight, Bottcher found a soft place to land and Lasher became the only West Side elected official running for Congress. Another magic trick, perhaps?

But if Lasher is a smooth and well-connected operator, he is an even more prolific legislator. Already, Lasher has sent booklets (“The Fight Back Blueprint”) about his work to “Trump-proof” New York to thousands of households, specifically targeting East Side Democrats who are less familiar with his legislative record. These are not your traditional mailers. Rather, they are multi-part briefings (“Part II: A Roadmap for Congressional Oversight and Investigations” arrived recently), totaling four pages, stapled and double sided. (The specific content of these blueprints can also be found on Lasher’s Substack, fittingly named “Into The Weeds”). Such blueprints are paired with a “Dear Neighbor” letter from a current or former Manhattan borough president (Mark Levine, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, Gale Brewer) whom East Side voters would be better acquainted with. This attention to detail has helped Lasher peel off two clubs from the East Side, Eleanor Roosevelt Independent Democrats and Samuel J. Tilden Democratic Club. While the political power of each individual club varies significantly (and, to some extent, is diminished from the halcyon days of local organizing), the early East Side inroads bodes well for the West Side’s favored son.

But every time Micah Lasher looks over his shoulder, he still sees Alex Bores. Barring a minor miracle, the race will come down to these two men. The gloves may not be all the way off yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Already, they have traded multiple barbs in the press, with Lasher highlighting Bores’ past work for Palantir, whose facial recognition software has been controversially used by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (Bores left the company in 2019). Bores countered that Lasher originally hedged when asked whether he would call for the abolition of ICE, a position that is almost uniformly supported by the 12th Congressional District’s Democratic candidates (after the murder of Alex Pretti, Lasher went to Minneapolis for several days). Israel-Palestine, while a fault line and source of sense of tension throughout NY-12, is not widely viewed as a discernible differentiator between Lasher and Bores (both have sworn off contributions from AIPAC-adjacent PACs).

Thursday’s forum was their first moment sharing a stage together. Asked about “one thing they would do differently from Rep. Jerry Nadler,” both showcased their respective strengths: Lasher, despite his close relationship to the incumbent, did not attempt to deflect whatsoever, instead harkening back to the Glass-Steagall legislation of the late 1990s, which deregulated financial markets and contributed to the Great Recession. Bores charmingly quipped “first, I would endorse differently,” which elicited laughs from the audience. As Schlossberg stumbled and Conway choked, Bores and Lasher lived up to their reputations. For close to 90 minutes, the two ambitious frontrunners, representing Manhattan’s Upper West and East Sides, refrained from poking one another. But a climactic confrontation was inevitable.

Questioned on the “costs and benefits of artificial intelligence” and the “steps Congress should take to implement proper safeguards to protect workers and livelihoods,” Lasher began by praising his main opponent: “I was proud to co-sponsor Alex’s very good bill on catastrophic risk, that is something the federal government should take on.” Nonetheless, the good vibes swiftly came to an end. Lasher proudly listed the other artificial intelligence regulation bills he co-sponsored (on issues like employment, lending, displacement), each time repeating, “and I was surprised that Alex was the lone Democratic vote against that bill.” To further twist the proverbial knife, Lasher added that “you’re not gonna see either of the two major AI companies proposing a Super PAC to support my candidacy.” (Through affiliated Super PACs, OpenAI has spent heavily against Bores, while Anthropic has spent in support of him).

The open-endedness of Lasher’s assertion left the audience in limbo, with more questions than answers: Why did Bores vote against those bills if all of his colleagues did not? Does he have something to hide?

Bores, one hand in the air, aware that a blow had been struck, politely asked the moderator for an immediate rebuttal. The moderator smiled, but nonetheless declined: “You’ll get your minute, we’re not NY1.” Had Bores responded immediately, fresh off the personal challenge from his rival, perhaps his answer would have been more hurried or emotional. Instead, as the Q&A made its way from right to left, the East Side Assemblyman was blessed with another 240 seconds to strategize and answer. What came next was not a fiery rebuke, but a measured response. Prior to addressing his opponent, Bores began by touting his own AI regulation plan, released the morning of the forum to rave reviews. Then, he sought to draw a distinction between individual donations from the employees and engineers of AI firms (Bores has raised close to one million dollars in campaign contributions from California) and dark money PACs (whose donations are unlimited and donors are hidden). “I understand Trump megadonors want a say in this race, but I am disappointed that a Democrat would give them more airtime,” he said. In the Upper East Sider’s telling, his Upper West Side rival was not only “ignorant,” but “spreading misinformation.” The bespectacled Lasher, always mild-mannered and reserved (but armed with an occasionally short fuse), did not take kindly to Bores’ charges. Even before Bores finished speaking, Lasher reached for the microphone. “I’ve condemned BOTH of the Super PACs,” Lasher asserted, “and just today, $20 million by the PRO-BORES Super PAC to Senate Republicans,” his voice rising with every syllable. “There are two companies fighting a war, and Alex is right in the middle of it,” he declared. Bores’ chief of staff, sitting in the front row, yelled at Lasher.

A gentleman’s game had become a cage match.

Such an interaction, beyond legislative sponsoring or Super PAC ethics, belied the emotional current pulsing inside both men. Lasher was the guarded favorite, protecting his flank, unwilling to let any encroachment go unchallenged; Bores the persistent underdog, relishing the chance to get under his opponent’s skin.

Next January, the victor will be furnishing their new office on Capitol Hill, carrying bills alongside Senator Jon Ossoff, crafting legislation with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and fielding calls from potential House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Leader Chuck Schumer. For those whose ambitions outstrip our own, entering Congress in 2027, right as Democrats retake Congressional majorities and the Trump regime starts to buckle, is tantamount to political nirvana. Inevitably, the next representative of New York’s 12th Congressional District will be at the center of everything.

The loser will be cleaning out their desk in Albany, bidding farewell to departing staff, and waiting alone on the Amtrak platform, bracing for their final commute home. In these moments of silence, numbed by the unforgiving winter of Upstate New York, their bruised ego and brilliant psyche will regretfully and endlessly replay their fate.

What could I have done differently?

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

In a corner of Queens County, bounded by the East River, straddling the Long Island Expressway, with views of the Manhattan skyline, lies the neighborhood of Astoria.

Renamed for John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest man in the United States, class politics have always shaped Astoria. Always a home to immigrants, Astoria was first settled by the Dutch, English, and Germans in the 18th century, followed by the Irish in the 19th century, and Italians and Jews in the early half of the 20th century. Astoria’s modern day culture and demographics, nonetheless, can be traced back to the 1960s, when a large wave of Greek immigrants settled in the neighborhood. The Greeks and Italians soon opened tavernas and trattorias, erected churches, and purchased single family homes, becoming Astoria’s dominant ethnic groups.

For the decades thereafter, the political character of Astoria mirrored that of other outer-borough, white ethnic neighborhoods: erstwhile supporting liberal icons (Jack Kennedy, John Lindsay) before swinging right towards reactionaries (Mario Procaccino) and conservatives (James Buckley). The Democrats who represented Astoria opposed forced busing and abortion, but supported the Vietnam War and the death penalty; all positions that matched their socially-conservative (and often deeply religious) constituents. Archie Bunker, the fictional (and bigoted) father from the 70s sitcom All In The Family, lived in Astoria. In the show, Bunker is an “early supporter of Ronald Reagan and correctly predicts his election in 1980,” all while railing against “commies, women’s libbers, and ‘unpatriotic’ peace protestors.” (Bunker’s prediction was correct, as Reagan won Astoria both times when he ran for President). In political commentary, the Archie Bunker vote became shorthand for the bloc of urban, white, working-class men; and for the latter half of the 20th Century, such shorthand was an apt description of Astoria’s political culture, as voters oscillated between moderate Democrats and right-wing Republicans. By the 2000s, the neighborhood had settled into a familiar pattern: reliably blue at the federal level, with a pinkish hue at the local level. Al Gore and John Kerry comfortably carried Astoria versus George W. Bush, but so did Republican Michael Bloomberg in three consecutive mayoral elections (although by less and less every time). Down the ballot, the neighborhood routinely elected conservative Democrats, often from the Vallone family, a multi-generational staple of the Italian community (Peter Vallone Sr. and Peter Vallone Jr. represented Astoria in the City Council continuously from 1974 to 2013).

In the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, an instructive tilt between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the future president performed well in many of the neighborhoods that would soon become the face of the progressive left. Obama won Greenpoint, Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, and Park Slope, home to the city’s emerging professional class. But in Astoria, Clinton won every block: Greek and Italian homeowners, Hispanic families in Section 8 housing, market rate renters, and public housing residents. Obama, who campaigned on ending the War in Iraq and inspired scores of young people to organize and engage in the political process, was shut out.

Indeed, Astoria would have seemed like an odd place to start a political revolution.

There were few signs (and even fewer elections) to the contrary until 2016, when Clinton returned to once again seek the Democratic nomination for President. Her opponent, Bernie Sanders, an unabashed democratic socialist and longstanding critic of capitalism, was making his metaphorical “last stand” in New York. However, while Sanders won 49 of New York’s 62 counties, Clinton crushed the Vermont Independent in the state’s urban centers, particularly with Black and Latino working-class voters and the affluent liberal intelligentsia of Manhattan. In defeat, Sanders nonetheless cultivated support from younger, college-educated voters in Brooklyn and Queens (in addition to his pronounced rural appeal). The 2016 Democratic presidential primary cohered the first iteration of the “Commie Corridor.”

Clinton, compared to her 2008 performance, regressed considerably in Astoria, more so than any other neighborhood in the five boroughs. After winning every precinct eight years prior, Clinton held onto only a handful: Astoria Houses, the public housing development on the Hallets Point peninsula; Marine Terrace, a longtime Section 8 housing development, where a plurality of residents are Hispanic; Queensview Apartments, a mix of limited equity and open market cooperatives home to older voters; and Astoria Heights, a triangled enclave of Italian and Greek homeowners in the neighborhood’s northeastern corner, a 25-minute walk from the subway. (For decades, Astoria Houses and Marine Terrace were Black and Latino islands of Democratic blue in a neighborhood awash with Republican red).

On blocks where renters were a majority of the electorate, Sanders crushed Clinton. However, few attributed Sanders’ overperformance in Western Queens to a class-based politics that appealed to renters. After all, the Brooklyn native had also outpaced Clinton with (increasingly disaffected) white ethnic Democrats across the city (Sanders won Bay Ridge, Maspeth, Marine Park, and Tottenville). Given Astoria’s historic political and demographic identity as a bastion of white ethnic voters, Sanders’ strong performance did not trigger alarms for longtime Democratic incumbents. Perhaps it should have.

Nonetheless, there were those who sensed opportunity. Millennials were raised in the wake of September 11th, watched in horror as the United States pursued a futile and destructive War in Iraq, and came of age during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Those who believed in electoral politics were left disappointed by Barack Obama’s tenure, and embraced the decidedly left-leaning, class politics of Bernie Sanders. Throughout the 2010’s, many college-educated millennials, priced out of the urban core and confined to the renter class, found themselves in Astoria, a family-friendly neighborhood with a relatively short commute to Manhattan. They entered into a political vacuum, with few local institutions and an electorate amidst dramatic change. The older, more conservative Italian and Greek voters, which once reliably anchored Astoria’s electorate, were aging (and realigning) out of the Democratic base. But Rep. Joe Crowley failed to notice the shifting political tides.

A creature of machine politics, Crowley was hailed as the proverbial “King of Queens,” despite rarely competing in competitive elections (preferring to knock his opponents off the ballot through legal maneuvers). Nonetheless, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old waitress and native of the Parkchester section of the Bronx (who once described a run against Crowley as “literally political suicide”) was undeterred by the incumbent’s reputation. Outspent by a 10:1 margin, the Ocasio-Cortez campaign relentlessly pounded the pavement. Knocking doors, in a dense and residential neighborhood like Astoria, was straightforward, with walkup apartment houses and single-family homes easily accessible. In a single shift, a few dozen volunteers could cover thousands of doors (always leaving a palm card behind), having hundreds of conversations along the way. In a low-turnout Democratic primary, volunteer canvassing proved to be a tremendous competitive advantage. On June 26, 2018, such efforts paid off in the upset of the decade. In Astoria, Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist who called for the abolition of ICE, crushed Crowley, who had endorsements from every local elected official. At the block-level, the carnage was even more pronounced, as Ocasio-Cortez won all but two blocks (Marine Terrace and a sliver of Astoria Heights). On most blocks, she earned more than 75% of the vote.

“We beat a machine with a movement,” she smiled.

If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was an earthquake, Astoria was the epicenter.

The following year, NYC-DSA, amidst an epic membership revival during the first Trump administration, audaciously endorsed public defender Tiffany Cabán, a de-carceral reformer in the mold of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, for Queens District Attorney. In the wake of Crowley’s stunning defeat, the wounded “Queens Machine” rallied behind Melinda Katz, a former City Council member and sitting borough president. The race mirrored AOC vs. Crowley: an underfunded democratic socialist with robust grassroots support, facing a moderate liberal with near-uniform backing from the political establishment. But the narrative of the favored candidate being “asleep at the wheel” was gone. In a contest that spanned an entire borough, with existential implications for the Democratic machine, the Katz campaign strategically retreated to Southeast Queens, home to the city’s Black middle class, conceding Western Queens to Cabán, a clear indication of the left’s growing political power. Armed with “a large number of young people who, for the right candidate, would be willing to work very hard for free,” Cabán won more than 75% of the vote in Astoria, with the highest voter runout of any neighborhood in Queens County. NYC-DSA wasn’t just winning over new residents and bringing people into the political process, but growing their support among the neighborhood old guard: Cabán won the working-class renters of Marine Terrace and the homeowners of Astoria Heights. In the end, Cabán lost by just 60 votes, less than one-tenth of one percent.

Even in defeat, the People’s Republic of Astoria was born.

Subscribe now

It’s one thing to win a campaign that spans a congressional district or borough, where your opponents may be focused elsewhere, but what about at the neighborhood level? This, in many respects, is the last level of building durable political power.

On a brisk morning in October, the three figures who helped usher in a new political era for Astoria — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Tiffany Cabán — took the stage at Queensbridge Park. In the crowd was the fourth, Zohran Mamdani.

As Sanders implored the audience, in his trademark Brooklyn accent, to “fight for someone you don’t know,” Mamdani canvassed the crowd, urging the smallest of donations to his own campaign. “I’m running on Bernie’s platform in Astoria,” he said with a smile. Mamdani was running against the incumbent, Aravella Simotas, a lifelong resident of Astoria. Homegrown in the neighborhood’s Greek community and with ties to the Queens Democratic Party, Simotas had a plethora of connections that Mamdani, who moved to the neighborhood the year prior, did not. Establishing a clear contrast with Simotas, an inoffensive left-liberal who had been hailed for her work combating sexual harassment, proved to be a difficult endeavor for Mamdani; City & State even published an article, with the subtitle: “Aravella Simotas and DSA-backed Zohran Mamdani compete over the same platform in Astoria,” underscoring this dynamic. Further complicating life was the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced all campaigning inside. Mamdani’s greatest assets, volunteer door knocking and in-person interaction, were eliminated per public health guidance.

Simotas, given her ties to the community, was a far stronger opponent than Crowley or Katz. She would win Queensview Apartments by 46%, charming left-liberal cooperators who were apprehensive about a socialist incursion, and Marine Terrace by 30%, reminding working-class voters she was a known quantity (unlike her fresh-faced opponent). In Astoria Heights, Simotas crushed Mamdani, as the Greek community rallied to her defense. Blocks that had loudly voted for AOC and Cabán eschewed their comrade, Mamdani. Old Astoria would not go down without a fight.

But Zohran Mamdani was working to expand the electorate. His campaign knocked on the doors of Muslim independent voters in the dead of winter to re-register them as Democrats so they could vote in the primary. During Ramadan, at the height of the pandemic, the campaign distributed six hundred meals every day. “Bringing forth Bernie Sanders’ vision,” Mamdani said, “means not only fighting for a political revolution but transforming the electorate.” Since the 1970s, thousands of Arabs and Muslims had immigrated to Astoria, establishing a commercial corridor along Steinway Street, the same thoroughfare where the NYPD illegally surveilled Muslims on the basis of their faith after September 11th. And, amidst the narrative of a political tug-of-war between the millennial, college-educated renters and their baby boomer, home-owning counterparts, a crucial piece of Astoria’s fabric had been left out.

No longer. Mamdani’s best precinct, which delivered the Muslim socialist more than two-thirds of the vote, included the “Little Egypt” blocks of Steinway Street. When the votes were tallied at Queens Borough Hall, Mamdani prevailed by the slimmest of margins. “423 Astoria Patriots,” in the words of Mamdani’s photographer, Kara McCurdy, “changed the course of history.” The close result was cited as a reason for The Left to not become too bullish, but the opposite was true. Mamdani’s victory was the culmination of a sea change; a democratic socialist political movement had not only arrived, but was there to stay. They too, were now part of the community.

The “Mamdani Coalition” — young people, renters, Muslims, South Asians — that eventually propelled ZOHRAN to City Hall was first built in Astoria.

Five years later, Zohran Mamdani was once again on the ballot in Astoria — along with every other neighborhood in the five boroughs (by then, two more NYC-DSA candidates had won office in Astoria: Tiffany Cabán for City Council, and Kristen Gonzalez for State Senate). Running for mayor, Mamdani re-created his Astoria Coalition across New York City: running up the score with renters (both market rate and rent-stabilized) in places like Upper Manhattan; sweeping the Commie Corridor from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bushwick; outpacing the competition among college-educated professionals in Fort Greene and Park Slope; while inspiring record turnout from Muslims in Jamaica Hills, South Asians in Kensington, and Arabs in Bay Ridge.

In Astoria, where it all began, the results were profound: 81% of the vote, the highest of any neighborhood in New York City (tied with Bushwick and Ridgewood). Mamdani had not only engaged an impressive number of newer voters (expanding the Astoria electorate by more than 50% compared to four years prior), but worked tirelessly (and successfully) to win over longstanding residents of the neighborhood. In the Primary, he swept the familiar faces of Astoria Heights, Marine Terrace, and Queensview Apartments, the first NYC-DSA candidate ever to do so. In the General, the lone blocks of the neighborhood captured by Andrew Cuomo months earlier — Astoria and Ravenswood Houses, public housing developments home to older, lower-income Black and Latino voters — swung to Mamdani. While still a neighborhood of contradictions and limitless nuance, Astoria was awash in blue.

In many respects, the demographic and cultural changes of Astoria, from a blue-collar community of white ethnic immigrants, to a polyglot of professionals, young families, Muslims, South Asians, and tenants, reflects that of New York City as a whole. The throughline, between the old and new Astoria, is a diverse and nuanced middle-class. Once a political afterthought, let alone an outer borough outlier, Astoria now shapes the whims of discourse and possibility far beyond the five boroughs.

This week, Diana Moreno, another democratic socialist, won the special election to succeed Mamdani in the Assembly. Moreno easily prevailed, netting 74% of the vote, winning every block of Astoria and Long Island City, the latest in a decade-long line of victories for The Left in Western Queens. In the telling of the Queens Eagle, “Moreno’s stiffest competition was herself. Carrying both the Democratic and Working Families ballot line, Moreno, the Democratic nominee, beat out Moreno, the Working Families nominee, by a mere 200 votes.” In 2018, Astoria led the charge against the infamous “Queens Machine,” dethroning their once-vaunted leader; now, the neighborhood is powerful enough that County Chair Greg Meeks (Joe Crowley’s successor) declined to even put up a fight, bending the metaphoric knee by giving Moreno the Democratic line. He knew a democratic socialist victory was inevitable.

Moreno, undoubtedly, has big shoes to fill as Mamdani’s successor; perhaps larger than any other first term legislator in New York history. On Monday, Jacobin published my profile of her, which I encourage all of you to read. I rarely publish magazine-length pieces on state legislature candidates, but I wanted to write something that people, even years from now, could reference to gain a better understanding of who she is. Moreno’s future, and the movement she represents, are undeniably bright.

Ten years ago, Astoria had no democratic socialist elected officials. Now, the People’s Republic is the only neighborhood in the United States with socialist representatives at the city, state, and federal levels of government.

Last June, scores of volunteers fanned out across Astoria, wearing summer shorts and carrying water bottles, braving triple-digit heat to welcome voters at polling sites, hand out literature to commuters, and chalk intersections and street corners. In November, hundreds more reconvened to repeat the routine, armed with jackets and jeans, navigating less daylight and twice the number of voters. This February, as piles of frozen snow lined the sidewalks, and the temperature “peaked” at 30 degrees, many of the same volunteers (new and old) eagerly greeted parents at school dismissal, this time wearing hats and gloves. Such was the case no matter the season nor the campaign. To these committed locals, such acts have become a part of life, at a time when everyday people are drifting further and further apart. They come early and stay late for the beloved face on the palm card, sure, but they return, over and over again, because of one another. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. In the words of Astoria’s newest Assemblywoman, Diana Moreno, “my comrades come from different backgrounds, faiths, and ethnicities, but we find such a healing point of connection in our belief and vision for a world where people have their basic needs met. When you play a role in the movement, you feel alive.”

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

There is never a dull moment in New York City politics.

Last week, Rep. Nydia Velázquez, the outgoing member of New York’s 7th Congressional District, fired a warning shot at Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Velázquez and Mamdani found themselves on opposite sides of the upcoming Democratic Primary for the former’s successor: with Velázquez supporting Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a son of the Southside and longstanding mentee of “La Luchadora”; whereas Mamdani backed one-term Assemblymember Claire Valdez, an organizer with NYC-DSA and UAW, and the first elected official to endorse his campaign for mayor. Velázquez, who has represented various iterations of the 7th District since 1993, did not take kindly to the mayor’s intervention. In an interview with The New York Times, Velázquez excoriated Mamdani, despite their close alliance in the mayoral primary. “Honeymoons are short, and people need to pay attention to the work at hand,” she warned. “Primaries sometimes can be a distraction from the work that you need to do.” In addition to going after Mamdani, Velázquez had harsh words for his “political home,” NYC-DSA, the organization supporting Valdez: “It’s very nice to get to New York for a few years and to have opinions about other elected officials without knowing the history and the struggle and who was there fighting corrupt government. Now, all of the sudden, people want to come in and decide who is the best candidate with total disregard to the history, the background.”

The Socialists vs. The Progressives? More like The Townies vs. The Transplants.

This is, personally, somewhat of a strange column for me to write. I’m not sure anyone in New York City has closer combined ties to Velázquez (my former boss), Mamdani (the subject of my forthcoming book), and Valdez (my fellow DSA member, I’m not the type to say “comrade,” sorry). But this feels like an inflection point: for the political left, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, and, perhaps, the Democratic Party.

Velázquez’s comments were personal, belying deep-seated resentment that is relational, ideological, and political. If this was the beginning of a Civil War in the Commie Corridor, the well-respected Congresswoman had fired the first shot.

In referencing “history” and “background,” Velázquez bemoaned the demographic and cultural changes that have transformed North Brooklyn and Western Queens over the past three decades. The 7th District (formerly the 12th), was created in 1992 to empower Hispanic voters, most notably Puerto Ricans, who chose one of their own, Nydia Velázquez, to represent them in Congress. Since then, “La Luchadora” (the fighter) has cultivated a bench of local progressive allies, including Reynoso, who collectively wrested power from the machines that once dominated North Brooklyn politics. It seemed inevitable that Velázquez would choose her successor.

However, the past decade has seen pronounced changes to the 7th District’s character. Once plagued by crack vials and crime, NY-7 is now home to more artists than any Congressional District in America. Today, there are more Dominicans in the 7th District than Puerto Ricans, and more white residents than Latinos. Now, political media refers to the 7th District as the heart of the “Commie Corridor,” a phrase first coined on this Substack, the consequence of a 99th percentile concentration of Millennials and renters. And, from Greenpoint, a gentrified neighborhood of young professionals and creatives, to City Line, an enclave of Bangladeshi Muslims, perhaps no district better embodies the breadth of the Mamdani Coalition.

“We don’t need to look outside for leaders. We grow our own right here in Brooklyn,” Velázquez told attendees at a rally over the weekend. But the 7th is a district of “outsiders,” as more than half of residents were born outside of New York state, a figure that ranks in the 78th percentile nationwide. The entire history of New York City politics is one of ethnic and ideological successions — from Greenwich Village bohemians dethroning the Italian and Irish-led Tammany Hall to Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans wrestling for power in Central Brooklyn. These fights, endemic to the five boroughs, are nonetheless painful and fraught. And the race for New York’s 7th Congressional District is shaping up to be the latest chapter in this cycle.

Antonio Reynoso is the homegrown candidate. Reynoso is best described as a progressive reformer, proudly battling political bosses, passing legislation to curtail the NYPD, and voting against the city budget before it was a common protest tactic. A former City Council Member and the current Brooklyn Borough President, his personal and professional network is decades deep, spanning every non-profit and community organization. In politics, relationships are a currency, and Reynoso has relationships. The most important of which is Nydia Velázquez, who blessed the son of the Southside as the candidate best equipped to continue her legacy. Ten years ago, Reynoso would have been a shoe-in to win. Now, he is the underdog.

That’s because of Claire Valdez. A Mexican-American native of Lubbock, Texas (a city of a quarter-million in the Great Plains region), Valdez moved to New York City in 2015. An organizer with both NYC-DSA and the United Auto Workers who was only elected to the State Assembly in 2024, she has become a key figure in the Mamdani era. Her goodwill amongst the democratic socialist rank-and-file, the earnest and dedicated volunteers who knock on thousands of doors apiece, is unrivaled; Valdez won 94% of the internal vote to secure NYC-DSA’s endorsement. Nonetheless, the first-term legislator born outside the five boroughs is already facing headwinds as the candidate not from the community. When asked about Valdez, Velázquez was curt: “she’s been in office for 11 months now. I really don’t know her,” before suggesting the millennial might not know her way around the district. All politics is local, indeed. Nonetheless, Valdez has a powerful relationship of her own: Zohran Mamdani.

On the surface, there are few explicit ideological differences between Antonio Reynoso and Claire Valdez. Both have deemed the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.” Both have called for the abolition of ICE. Both support raising taxes on the wealthy to further fund an expansive social safety net. But there is always room for nuance. At the NYC-DSA endorsement forum, Reynoso “declined to rule out” taking contributions from real estate developers and was “questioned” on his previous reluctance to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide,” according to City & State. These are serious enough liabilities, in the nation’s most left-leaning district, that even Velázquez reportedly told Mamdani she was “worried Reynoso wasn’t vocal enough about Gaza and about his ties to real estate developers.” Such underscores the broader dynamic that Reynoso stands to benefit from any widespread perception of ideological symmetry (that the two candidates are the same on every issue), whereas Valdez is relying on soft contrast and savvy communications. This extends to how the candidates talk about their ideology, too: Valdez is a proud democratic socialist, whereas Reynoso agrees with many democratic socialist principles.

Nonetheless, beneath the veneer of relationships and ideology lies a classic (and familiar) struggle for political power between the Socialist and Progressive Left. Allies when the opponent was Andrew Cuomo (or Martin Dilan), these dueling tenants of left-leaning politics in the five boroughs are now on opposite sides. While this battle is confined to a sole Congressional District, the repercussions will stretch far beyond, with potential to dictate who leads the left in New York City for years to come.

The Progressive Left possesses a deeper bench of legislators, with more allies in the media and government class, particularly from the Bill de Blasio era. And before 2018, the Progressive Left was the only game in town — until the nascent Socialist Left, resurrected in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ first Presidential campaign, began exponentially amassing power following Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s upset victory.

Case in point: in 2021, the Socialist Left was little more than a footnote in the mayoral race, sitting out the contest to focus instead on building a bench down the ballot; whereas in 2025, one of their own stunned the political establishment and seized the most powerful bully pulpit in the five boroughs. Are the Socialists and Progressives on a collision course to decide the future of urban political power? Or will this be a respectful political joust that otherwise lacks broader implications?

Nydia Velázquez’s warning that Zohran Mamdani should “pay attention to the work at hand” is a subtle nod to the mayor’s vast influence with the electorate. Indeed, Mamdani annihilated Cuomo in the 7th District, 76% to 24%, amidst the highest voter turnout the district has ever seen (in a Democratic primary). NY-7 was not only Mamdani’s best district in the five boroughs, but is also home to the largest concentration of DSA members in the city. Naturally, Mamdani and NYC-DSA leapt at the chance to field a “cadre” candidate upon Velázquez’s retirement. Of course, the 17-term incumbent was also keen on influencing who would be her successor. However, the two trailblazing allies did not see eye-to-eye. Mamdani, from the onset, expressed enthusiasm about the prospect of Valdez running, to the chagrin of Velázquez, who settled on Reynoso, a longstanding ally. With each power broker committed to a candidate, the race materialized and the rift deepened, before spilling into the public eye last week. Now, the stakes have been raised for all parties.

For Mamdani, the race is an early test of whether his political prowess can translate to other, aligned candidates. Does his movement have coattails, or is it overly reliant on one man’s talent (and the presence of a scandal-scarred and flawed opponent)?

Over the next five months, you will hear me reference “1992” quite a bit. That was the year the modern iteration of (what would eventually become) New York’s 7th Congressional District was created, the result of repeated lawsuits from Puerto Rican communities under the Voting Rights Act. When Velázquez reflects that “we went to court for this district,” she is invoking this history, one held dear to her. In 1992, Velázquez emerged from a crowded field of Hispanic candidates to defeat incumbent Stephen Solarz, a high-ranking member of the Democratic establishment who championed interventionist foreign policy. Solarz, who watched his previous district be torn apart during redistricting, ran in the newly-created “Hispanic opportunity” district against Velázquez, in the hope of keeping his political career alive. Facing a well-funded and opportunistic carpetbagger naive to the lived experiences of low-income Latinos, Velázquez rallied her community. US versus THEM. More than 30 years later, political conditions may have changed, but the mentality has not.

One cannot parse Velázquez’s recent comments without understanding that history. It is possible, even likely, that she views the contest to choose her successor under similar terms. The memory of 1992 looms large over 2026.

Stephen Solarz, who absconded to a “sprawling” estate in suburban Virginia (only keeping a paper address in Brooklyn, his mother-in-law’s condo in Manhattan Beach) really was an outsider, with zero discernible ties to the neighborhoods of North Brooklyn. But Claire Valdez, a sitting elected official thirty-four years later, is not.

By June 2026, upwards of 40% of the Democratic electorate will have been born after Velázquez was first elected in 1992. Nostalgia is not a strategy.

In some ways, Claire Valdez is in a similar position to Nydia Velázquez back in 1992.

Valdez moved to New York City in 2015, and ran for Congress 11 years later; Velázquez settled in New York City in 1981, and ran for Congress 11 years later1.

But the parallels do not end there.

In 1992, Velázquez enjoyed support during her Congressional campaign from Mayor David Dinkins. Both were part of the ascendant “Rainbow Coalition,” a political marriage of the city’s growing Black and Hispanic communities, labor unions and liberals (Velázquez, through Atrévete Con Tu Voto, helped register hundreds of thousands of Latino voters). Velázquez was also supported by Denis Rivera of the influential healthcare workers union, 1199 SEIU, who counted many members amongst the working-class of Brooklyn and Queens. In 2026, Valdez is the one with the backing of recently elected Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, with the two symbolically at the vanguard of Socialist Left, having steadily built power over the past decade. (Dinkins was a paper member of DSA, but the organization was a fraction of its modern self). Alongside Mamdani, Valdez was also endorsed by Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers. (While Fain’s orientation is more national than Denis Rivera’s was, UAW’s political influence in 2026 is comparable to 1199 SEIU’s influence in 1992.) How the candidates were received, too, was eerily similar. Both were derided for a lack of legislative experience: Velázquez only served two years in the City Council, before losing a bitter primary to a challenger supported by the local Democratic machine; Valdez, elected in 2024, only recently completed her first year in the State Assembly. Both were also accused by critics of being insufficiently loyal to the district’s residents: Velázquez was seen as too close to the Puerto Rican government, and preoccupied with the island; Valdez has been mocked as too loyal to NYC-DSA, little more than a pawn in the mayor’s chess game. Now, the arguments once used to discredit Nydia Velázquez are being recycled against Claire Valdez.

Honoring the past, and those that came before us, is fundamental to the ethos of New York City. In this ever-changing municipality, if we were to lose sight of history, the good and the bad, we would be doomed to repeat it. Perhaps we already are.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

It was called “a cartographer’s worst nightmare.”

Rep. Stephen Solarz, one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives, watched as his district was (metaphorically) blasted apart, the consequence of a bloody redistricting knife fight.

It was 1992, and Solarz, who had painstakingly climbed the ladder of Brooklyn politics, was one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives, even on the shortlist to be the next Secretary of State. Once a leading critic of the Vietnam War, the highest-ranking Jewish member of the Foreign Affairs Committee had become a leading proponent of the Gulf War. In service of his national ambition, he had traded his modest residence in Kings County for a “sprawling” estate in suburban Virginia, only keeping a paper address in Brooklyn (his mother-in-law’s condo in Manhattan Beach). For years, he had thoroughly overshadowed another colleague from Brooklyn, Chuck Schumer, such that the latter contemplated departing federal politics altogether. But now, with his illustrious career in jeopardy, Stephen Solarz was left with three options: (A) challenge his colleague Ted Weiss, a well-respected liberal from Manhattan’s West Side whose district now snaked into Brooklyn, absorbing old pieces of Jewish neighborhoods once represented by Solarz; (B) run against Bill Green, the liberal Republican congressman from Manhattan’s East Side (the “Silk Stocking” district that had once been represented by John Lindsay and Ed Koch), which also included the Poles of Greenpoint and Greeks of Astoria; or (C) run in the newly-created 12th Congressional District, drawn by mapmakers to maximize the influence of Hispanic voters: from Puerto Ricans in Sunset Park, Bushwick, and “Losaida” to Latin Americans in Jackson Heights and Corona.

The besieged incumbent settled on the final choice: a heavily-gerrymandered, tri-borough district created to empower New York City’s growing Latino population. Flush with more than two million dollars (an incredible sum for the time), Solarz would attempt to steamroll his way to a slim plurality by any means necessary, while his (less funded) half-dozen Latino opponents split the remainder of the vote. Assailed for attempting to salvage his career at the expense of increased Latino political power and representation, Solarz was undeterred.

And if not for Nydia Velázquez, Stephen Solarz may have succeeded.

Velázquez, the daughter of a sugarcane worker from Yabucoa, a rural town on the outskirts of Puerto Rico, was always destined for greatness. As one of eight siblings, she more than held her own in dinnertime conversations, which were inevitably rooted in political organizing (farm workers, labor unions, Puerto Rican self-determination). She skipped three grades, becoming the first person in her family to receive a high school diploma, before arriving in New York City for college. In no time, she was teaching the classes herself, while simultaneously becoming enmeshed in local politics. In 1984, she was selected to fill a vacancy on the City Council, becoming the first Hispanic woman to serve on the body. However, the Brooklyn Democratic machine had other ideas, and ousted Velázquez in the next election. Undeterred, she pioneered Atrévete Con Tu Voto, a program that aimed to empower Latinos across the United States through voter registration. In New York City alone, Atrévete registered more than 200,000 new Latino voters, most of whom were Puerto Rican. Here, Velázquez “solidified her reputation as a street-smart and politically savvy woman who understood the value of solidarity and loyalty to other politicians, community leaders and unions.” Alongside Mayor David Dinkins, labor leader Dennis Rivera of 1199 SEIU, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and others, Velázquez was integral in building New York City’s Rainbow Coalition, a political movement rooted in organized labor, progressive politics, and the multi-racial working class.

The Rainbow Coalition swept the first Black man into City Hall, but could it send the first Puerto Rican woman to Congress?

Stephen Solarz and Velázquez’s other opponents did not roll out the red carpet for her. A rival Hispanic candidate, Elizabeth Colon, mocked Velázquez’s accented pronunciations in English. Several prominent Puerto Rican politicians backed other candidates, and there was certainly no consolidation to stop the well-funded Solarz, who inundated local radio with Spanish language advertisements. (After the primary, Velázquez’s medical records were leaked, which revealed a prior suicide attempt). Her critics wondered aloud whether her ties to Puerto Rico made her too parochial to serve the Hispanic community in New York and if her alliance with Mayor Dinkins compromised her independence. Nonetheless, Velázquez was revered by supporters as a relentless fighter for “a progressive agenda.” She was beloved in the Puerto Rican communities of Williamsburg and Bushwick, then low-income neighborhoods riddled with crime and drugs, whose residents were desperate to see one of their own conquer the political establishment. Solarz would send “eight mailings and they were all on Israel, [but] never anything about Flatbush or Ocean Parkway,” whereas Velázquez was relentlessly focused on the needs of the district’s working class, Spanish speaking residents. After Solarz stumbled through a Spanish introduction at a forum, the slim Velázquez arose from her chair and delivered a fiery rapid-fire rebuke, “he doesn’t speak our language, the language of the poor.” When a wall separated Puerto Rican and Hasidic children at a school in Williamsburg, Velázquez protested vociferously. Soon, the wall came down.

When the votes were counted, Velázquez prevailed in the seven candidate field — 34% to Solarz’s 28%. Solarz’s choice was ultimately the wrong one: Weiss passed away the day before the election (he won anyway), and his seat was eventually filled by then-Assemblymember Jerry Nadler; whereas Bill Green was defeated in November by a young mother on the City Council named Carolyn Maloney. Stephen Solarz would never hold elected office again.

Nydia Velázquez would go on to serve 34 years in Congress.

Subscribe now

Since 1992, New York’s 7th Congressional District has changed remarkably.

Once gerrymandered block-by-block without shame, the contours of district are more compact than ever, excesses reigned in by a special master in 2022. Once a “Hispanic-opportunity” seat protected by the Voting Rights Amendment, NY-7 is now plurality white. The epicenter of Puerto Rican political power, the 7th District is now the heart and soul of the Commie Corridor, reshaped by Millennial and Gen Z renters, creating the most left-leaning electorate of any Congressional seat in the nation.

On the neighborhood level, the changes are even more pronounced. Long Island City is no longer a forgotten outpost for industry, but a haven of tech workers and recently erected luxury buildings. The Poles have left Greenpoint, and the Italians have deserted Woodhaven; both have been replaced by white college graduates from out of state and multi-racial immigrants, dueling middle-class tenants of the nuanced and diverse Mamdani Coalition. No more is Sunnyside an exclusively Irish enclave, lined with pubs and watering holes bearing shamrocks, but a Queens County melting pot of professionals, young families, and recent immigrants, bearing food from Paraguay and Thailand. The hip frontier of the L train has shifted one stop east every couple of years, from Williamsburg to Los Sures to Bushwick — an insignificant and forgotten voting bloc prior to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump; this loose collection of young renters now comprises a majority of the 7th Congressional District. They are joined, politically, by their more well-heeled neighbors in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, once the stomping ground of Spike Lee and Christopher Wallace and now the home of Brownstone Brooklyn’s professional class.

However, even amidst the breakneck pace of the five boroughs, not all has been lost in North Brooklyn and Western Queens. The Satmar Hasidim of South Williamsburg, the descendents of Holocaust refugees whose anti-Zionist politics do not neatly conform to stereotypes, have remained a supermajority in their triangled enclave since the second World War. Glendale, sequestered from subway lines, has been a refuge for the city’s dwindling population of middle-class, white ethnic homeowners — Archie Bunker’s descendents — who anchored the electorate in the World’s Borough in the days of Tom Manton and Joe Crowley. And, despite the violence, alcoholism, and drug use that once condemned quality of life across both Bushwick and the Southside of Williamsburg, many Puerto Rican and Latino families persevered and achieved the dream of stability, now often manifested in the ownership of a modest single or two-family home east of Myrtle Avenue, or on the other side of Highland Park, in working-class Cypress Hills.

New York’s 7th Congressional District is in the 99th percentile nationwide with respect to its share of both Millennials (31%) and renters (78%) — the two most consequential ingredients for leftist politics. Only NY-10 (Brownstone Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan), NY-12 (Midtown Manhattan, Upper West/East Sides), and CA-30 (Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Pasadena) have a higher percentage of residents in media and arts. In the Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York City, the past and present of the 7th District faced off head-to-head; with the new, embodied by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, trouncing the old, symbolized by former Governor Andrew Cuomo — 76% to 24%. In fact, no Congressional District was more friendly to Mamdani than NY-7, evidence of the community’s increasingly ideological bent.

These changes, a snapshot of a thirty year migration of urban political power, are perhaps best embodied by the candidates — some declared, others rumored — who hope to succeed Nydia Velázquez.

Thus far, only one candidate has officially announced: Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. A son of the Southside and child of Dominican immigrants, Reynoso was always a political reformer. At 22, he co-founded New Kings Democrats, recruiting progressives challengers to contest the Democratic County Committee in Brooklyn, long consolidated by the party establishment. At 30, Reynoso went one step further, wresting power from the infamous Vito Lopez, a corrupt party boss who ran North Brooklyn’s majority-Hispanic neighborhoods as his own personal fiefdom (a man of Italian heritage, Lopez was aided by a Spanish sounding last name). Though Lopez was once unimpeachable, Reynoso delivered the fatal blow to his local machine, which had been a thorn in the side of Nydia Velázquez and other progressives for decades. To say Reynoso is close to Velázquez, the area’s Congresswoman for 32 years, would be a profound understatement. “La Luchadora” prides herself on mentorship (just ask her colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and a diverse cadre of North Brooklyn electeds hang on her every word — for good reason. Prior to the rise of NYC-DSA and the left resurgence of The Working Families Party, Velázquez was the only game in town when it came to building progressive political power and contesting the hegemony of the Lopez machine. In the City Council, Reynoso was one of the original members of the Progressive Caucus, frequently allying with Brad Lander and Jumaane Williams, and took noteworthy stances on criminal justice (closing Riker’s Island, supporting the “Right To Know” act) and transportation (Vision Zero). In 2021, when Borough President Eric Adams was term limited, Reynoso seized the opportunity, defeating a weak field of Jo Anne Simon and Robert Cornegy. Within the Brooklyn portion of the 7th Congressional District’s current boundaries, Reynoso won 66% of the three-way vote. As Borough President, a job largely bereft of real power mitigated by a large staff and endless opportunities for retail politicking, Reynoso has become a more vocal proponent of increased housing construction, while continuing to espouse the reform-progressivism that has distinguished his career thus far. As Eric Adams floundered in office, Reynoso was repeatedly courted by former aides to Bill de Blasio, and urged to run against the disgraced incumbent. Out of deference to Brad Lander and a reticence to abandon his position as Borough President (in an odd-year election), Reynoso ultimately eschewed a bid for higher office (a run for Comptroller was also floated). We all know what happened next.

Now, in the wake of Velázquez’s retirement, the path is cleared for Reynoso — or so it seems. It would be difficult for another candidate to rival the depth of Reynoso’s in-district relationships, burnished over a lifetime in Williamsburg, from non-profits to community leaders. He will, almost assuredly, win the endorsement of the Satmar Hasidim, another consequence of connection, instantly netting a five-figure vote advantage. He maintains robust relationships with the constellation of non-profits that make up the Working Families Party, from Make the Road to Churches United for Fair Housing. There will be no NYCHA tenant association president whose phone number Reynoso lacks. And, perhaps most importantly, the native Brooklynite has the inside track to a blessing from Velázquez, who remains a revered figure amongst generations of Puerto Ricans. Reynoso’s launch video, filmed at Lithuania Square on the Southside of Williamsburg, was an homage to this history, and a subtle but clear signal that he is the candidate best equipped to continue the district’s storied history. Save for five words, the ad is exclusively in Spanish.

Nonetheless, Reynoso, for all his progressive bona fides, will not be the left-most candidate in the race. That mantle will belong to whomever the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America endorses, whose much-anticipated vote will be scheduled in the new year, giving Reynoso at least a month-long head start.

NYC-DSA counts half-a-dozen elected officials within (and adjacent to) the 7th Congressional District: City Council Members Alexa Avilés and Tiffany Cabán, State Senators Julia Salazar and Kristen Gonzalez, and State Assembly Members Claire Valdez and Emily Gallagher.

Julia Salazar, elected in 2018, could have potentially cleared the (intra-socialist) field had she declared an intention to seek DSA’s endorsement. The longest tenured SiO (socialist in office), Salazar possesses a unique breadth of relationships in Albany and across the political class, frequently earning plaudits from ideologically unaligned (or even previously hostile) colleagues. Nonetheless, Salazar, whose first run for office was rather tumultuous, ultimately eschewed a bid for Congress, opening the door for her comrades. Alexa Avilés, squeezed from the neighboring Congressional race (NY-10) following a messy endorsement timeline (involving mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani supporting Brad Lander instead), could have been a compromise candidate for NY-7. However, the current borders of the 7th District are far from Avilés’ base in Sunset Park (though the neighborhood was part of NY-7 for 30 years), rendering an Avilés bid unrealistic. Emily Gallagher, the sole White elected in a district that is one-third Hispanic, would have been particularly disadvantaged versus Reynoso, and has decided against running (she also would have faced questions from her base concerning her well-documented reticence to support Mamdani).

As of today, Gonzalez, Cabán, and Valdez have all publicly expressed interest in a bid (or not ruled it out).

Kristen Gonzalez, the second socialist Latina to defeat one of the Crowley dynasty in Queens, theoretically has the broadest geographic base across NY-7, which overlaps significantly with her State Senate District. Tiffany Cabán, who lives a few blocks outside the district, has previously run for boroughwide office in Queens. Both have Puerto Rican heritage, important for a seat that has long been a symbol of the Island’s political power — from New York City to the mainland. However, the proverbial wind, with a gentle assist from a powerful third party, is behind Claire Valdez.

Valdez, a former organizer with the United Auto Workers (UAW), was only elected to a state legislature seat — encompassing Ridgewood, Sunnyside and Long Island City — last June. Segments of the political class, many of whom underestimated Mamdani’s potential, are quick to cast similar doubt on Valdez. Compared to the ease with which Mamdani charms his friends and foes alike, Valdez’s appeal is more understated, and thus far confined to a smaller circle of activists. In many respects, she represents the much sought after reluctant candidate. At Mamdani’s launch party last October, an intimate and hopeful gathering, there were no sitting elected officials present (or at least photographed), let alone a television camera. Yet, Valdez was there, one of the crowd, six weeks away from being sworn into the Assembly. Now, as the “invisible primary” for the 7th Congressional District takes shape, the powerful mayor-elect has signaled his support, “privately indicating to allies that he believes Ms. Valdez would be the best candidate,” according to The New York Times. When asked about the race to succeed Velázquez, Mamdani called Valdez “an incredible public servant.” One of his top advisors, Morris Katz, was more effusive, telling The Times, “Claire would be an incredibly strong candidate, and someone who understands deeply that the path to a dignified life for every New Yorker is to empower workers and unite with organized labor to deliver an affordability agenda for our city.” None of these quotes appear in print by accident, but the last line is particularly instructive, given Valdez’s ties to UAW (President Shawn Fain endorsed her campaign for Assembly) and the widespread desire on the left to run more labor-aligned candidates. Mamdani, not even in office, has already butted heads with NYC-DSA, his self-proclaimed “political home.” He backed Brad Lander over fellow socialist Alexa Avilés in the 10th Congressional District and campaigned publicly against a potential DSA endorsement of Chi Ossé versus Hakeem Jeffries (Ossé ultimately fell short, losing the internal vote 46% to 52%). But on the question of Valdez, the mayor-elect’s whims match that of the chapter rank-and-file, where Valdez is a consistent presence. Such goodwill will prove invaluable, given NYC-DSA will ultimately be tasked with greenlighting and staffing her candidacy. Thus, if the next month plays out as anticipated, Antonio Reynoso versus Claire Valdez will be an instructive and riveting lens into the future of urban, Democratic Party politics.

For a brief period during the first Trump era, Progressives vs. Socialists appeared to be the next frontier of New York City politics, as the two groups clashed in a handful of lowkey, down-ballot races. This fissure, lingering beneath the surface in Brooklyn and Queens, was momentarily on hold as the left attempted to coalesce against Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, the gatekeepers of the political establishment. Indeed, such a fault line could have easily kneecapped the progressive-socialist alliance in the Mayoral Primary, but Zohran Mamdani’s triumphant breakout, Brad Lander’s struggling campaign, and the presence of ranked-choice voting in municipal elections (allowing Lander and Mamdani to cross-endorse one another ahead of the election), deferred such a clash. However, in the race for New York’s 7th Congressional District, fought at the height of the Trump midterm, there will be no such shortcuts.

Not too long ago, the left in New York City appeared resolutely ascendant, as national political conditions aligned with a burgeoning local movement. NYC-DSA pushed in their chips, spreading themselves thin across the outer boroughs. The results were uninspiring and cautionary. Democratic socialist candidates, struggling to draw consequential distinctions, were routinely felled by progressive opponents, whose greater in-district networks won the day. Reynoso, a genuine ally of the left, fits the mold of a candidate that could upset NYC-DSA’s federal ambitions if taken lightly. “I want to be a voice to push the party to the left,” Reynoso told The New York Times. But will the voters of the 7th District be inspired by a candidate who merely pushes? Or are they seeking someone who pulls? The fewer ideological distinctions drawn between Reynoso and Valdez, the more Brooklyn’s Borough President (armed with more relationships, legislative accomplishments, and name recognition) stands to benefit. Reynoso, a son of the Southside, will counter with distinctions of his own, rooted in place (Valdez, a native of Lubbock, Texas, moved to Queens in 2015), telling The New York Times, “I have been doing this work as a reformer, as a progressive, for a long time before the D.S.A. had a single candidate they were supporting.” Reynoso’s play is one of relationships, personal and local. NYC-DSA’s advantage is one of door knocking and mass mobilization, anchored by stellar communications and universal policies. Amidst this unprecedented and existential political moment, what will the majority of voters be motivated by?

Ironically, a similar dynamic defined Zohran Mamdani’s first campaign for State Assembly.

Mamdani was derided as an interloper challenging a lifelong resident of the neighborhood. NYC-DSA, untethered to longstanding local institutions, were seen as the new kids on the block. Nor was the organized left (AOC, WFP) united behind him, while drawing meaningful distinctions was a consistent challenge. Many questioned why Mamdani was challenging Aravella Simotas, the respectable left-liberal incumbent, at all. “A young man in a hurry” they mused. But Mamdani’s answer, simple as it was, echoes many years later. His opponent, liberal as she was, no longer represented the zeitgeist of the district’s increasingly left-leaning residents — a thesis validated by Mamdani’s (narrow) victory, which came at the height of COVID-19 pandemic. Mamdani prevailed against a relatively well-liked and well-known opponent, in part, because voters looked ahead. A deep-blue Assembly seat, similar to a deep-blue Congressional seat, is tantamount to a lifetime appointment. When asked who would best represent them, in a moment of crisis (and the many crises that would come thereafter), voters chose Zohran Mamdani; for what he lacked in longstanding connections, he made up for in movement politics. Mamdani will be the Mayor of New York City in two weeks, the most powerful figure in the five boroughs. At the apex of his political capital, he does not appear content to stand idly by.

While thanking commuters, the new Congresswoman for Brooklyn and Queens credited the democratic socialist mayor for his early and consistent support, in addition to a handful of influential labor unions (and their respective leaders) who backed her candidacy. She had weathered concerns about where her loyalties lied, and triumphed amidst a divided field, building a broad and winning coalition. Having arrived in New York City during her twenties, she was headed to Washington by her late thirties. The year was 1992.

History does not often repeat. But come 2026, perhaps it will rhyme.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

The hour was late.

Thanksgiving was fast approaching.

And with each day that she failed to secure the required 26 votes to become Speaker of the New York City Council, doubts about the fitness of her candidacy would grow.

Julie Menin, who had diligently campaigned for the second most powerful position in the five boroughs — hosting fundraisers, courting unions, charming colleagues — for the past three years, was only a couple votes away from realizing her ambition.

But those votes, from a handful of persuadable holdouts, would not come easily.

Pressure would have to be applied.

Thus, on the eve of the holiday, Menin and her allies pushed in their chips. They would shake the proverbial tree, and hope a few more “yes” votes would fall into their lap. Technically, they only needed four to lock in a majority; but in reality, given the official vote would not take place for almost two months, they needed close to a dozen: a statement of supermajority support.

As Council Members were contacted, the message was simple but effective. Menin already had more than twenty of their colleagues pledged to her. She had many of the largest unions behind her, such as 32BJ and the Hotel Trades Council, in addition to the publicly atrophying (but privately effective) Democratic machines in the Bronx and Queens. The following day, in advance of Thanksgiving, the frontrunner would release a letter to the press, detailing the breadth of her support. Did these members, many of whom were newcomers to the Council, want their names on the letter, so they could be part of the winning team (to the victor goes the spoils)? Or would they prefer, in the spirit of the season, to be left out in the cold instead, and risk power for principle? Speaker Julie Menin was inevitable — so her emissaries implied.

“The train is leaving the station. Get on board while you still can.”

This audacious plan, a concoction of gall and aggression, was typical of the behind-the-scenes “Speaker’s Race,” the pinnacle of insider baseball in New York City politics.

Would Menin’s bluff be called? Or had she played her hand perfectly?

What is the Speaker’s Race?

Certainly, that has been the question everyone was asking over the holiday weekend.

There are only 51 votes, one per City Council Member. There are caucuses (“Common Sense”, “Progressive”), county machines (the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn), and labor unions (Hotel Trades, 32BJ, 1199 SEIU, DC37) weighing in behind-the-scenes. Most of the consequential campaigning, absent a handful of public forums, is done outside the public eye. The mayor (or in this instance, mayor-elect) has considerable influence, but often eschews a back room knife fight to avoid the appearance of “defeat.” Relationships, more so than ideology, shape the whims of coalitions in the Speaker’s Race, which historically blends progressive, liberal, and moderate Democrats with Republicans. Almost always, there are twists and turns, last-minute defections and eleventh hour betrayals. Most importantly, one’s prowess navigating institutions and charming the insular “political class” does not neatly translate to appeal amongst the voters themselves — and vice versa.

Such were the terms of engagement pitting Julie Menin, a well-connected liberal moderate from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, versus Crystal Hudson, one of the leaders in the Progressive Caucus from Central Brooklyn. (Amanda Farias, Selvena Brooks-Powers, and Christopher Marte were also running, but failed to gain comparable traction).

Precedent, for better or worse, looms large in a contest of this nature — which only occurs once every four years. Given 35 of the Council’s 51 members were first elected in 2021, the previous Speaker’s Race, one of the more unique episodes in the Council’s history, weighed heavily on the minds of members this time around. Four years ago, the early favorites were Carlina Rivera and Justin Brannan, progressive-aligned members who had campaigned rigorously for the position across multiple years. However, newly-elected mayor Eric Adams made clear his opposition to both, strong-arming unions and persuadable members to deny them a majority. However, Adams foolishly propped up Francisco Moya, a close ally of his consultants, who was neither known nor liked by many of his colleagues. Had the mayor-elect, at the zenith of his political capital, rallied behind another candidate, the Speakership would have been theirs. Yet, this folly opened the door for Adrienne Adams — a lowkey, labor-aligned moderate from Southeast Queens — to emerge as a compromise candidate. In victory, the well-respected Adams threaded a coalition of the atrophying Queens Machine and the ascendant Progressive Caucus. The Mayor’s whims were defeated, and the labor unions had flexed their muscle.

The lessons (or false assumptions) were plentiful:

1. The Speaker’s Race was dynamic and fluid, with conditions ripe for sleeper and dark horse candidates to emerge in the latter stages.

2. Intervention from the Mayor was risky, and could lead to an early political “defeat” if executed poorly.

3. The slow paced race would inevitably drag into December, as it always had.

Four years later, ALL of those presumptions proved incorrect.

In 2021, there was a flurry of late movement as top contenders fell by the wayside, leading to a climactic battle between Adrienne Adams and Francisco Moya that produced an ideologically varied (majority) coalition for the former. In 2025, Julie Menin slowly and steadily amassed a considerable “lead,” leaving Crystal Hudson (and other non-Menin candidates) to increasingly rely on the Progressive Caucus. However, the votes of those twenty members, even if delivered uniformly, fell below the requisite majority, and could never seriously threaten Menin’s advantage alone.

For months, Menin, the sole contender not from the Progressive Caucus1, had the inside track with the nine members of the “Common Sense” Caucus, a collection of moderate Democrats (Darlene Mealy of Brownsville) to MAGA-aligned Republicans (Vickie Palladino of Whitestone, Inna Vernikov of Sheepshead Bay). The Bronx and Queens Democratic “machines” have historically moved as a united bloc, so as to maximize their influence. This race proved no different, as Menin was strongly supported by Bronx members Kevin Riley of Black-majority Wakefield and Co-op City, Eric Dinowitz of leafy and historically-Jewish Riverdale, and Oswald Feliz of lower-income Bedford Park. Menin was particularly strong in Eastern Queens, where members are far more ideologically moderate and the county organization retains considerable influence, banking the votes of Sandra Ung of Flushing, Linda Lee of Bayside, and James Gennaro of Fresh Meadows with ease (plus Lynn Shulman of Forest Hills and Kew Gardens). Their Queens colleagues, Nantasha Williams and Shekar Krishnan, core members of the Progressive Caucus, were also early and non-persuadable Menin supporters, evidence of the frontrunner’s ideological reach. Menin married this base with support from her Manhattan colleagues: Chelsea’s Erik Bottcher, fellow Upper East Sider Virginia Maloney, East Harlem’s Elsie Encarnacion, and Washington Heights’s Shaun Abreu. Here, Menin brokered an alliance with Upper Manhattan Congressman Adriano Espaillat, a local power broker of sorts, which proved integral in delivering the votes of both Abreu (a top Menin surrogate) and Encarnacion, a freshman. Of this cohort, Abreu, Dinowitz, Riley, and Lee are all expected to assume top leadership and committee positions.

As of last Tuesday, Julie Menin’s whip sheet added up to 22 members — 4 shy of the majority needed to clinch the vote.

The emergence of Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic Primary in stunning fashion this June, could have destabilized the Speaker’s Race, given the immense bargaining power that the incoming Mayor has at his disposal. However, despite greater ideological closeness to Crystal Hudson, Mamdani (juggling a transition to City Hall and several other behind-the-scenes machinations), kept his hands clean of the Speaker’s Race — publicly — in an effort to preserve his political capital. Following Mamdani’s ascendance, a handful of moderate members of the Council, previously pledged to Hudson, shifted their support to Menin, under the auspices that their Upper East Side colleague would be a more appropriate counterweight to the fresh-faced Mayor; repeating the “adult in the room” pitch used by Menin and her allies. Furthermore, absent midterm elections for Council members in 2027, and with two-thirds of the body term-limited in 2029, the progressive movement — whose political power is far greater at the ballot box — lacked the necessary electoral leverage to pressure legislators who eschewed their preferred candidate.

That left Julie Menin — who had tactfully passed key legislation favored by important labor unions, donated handsomely to the campaigns of her colleagues, and relentlessly worked the New York City political class for decades — with a significant head start against a field of progressives that failed to consolidate, whose most valuable chess piece remained on the sidelines. Peeling back Menin’s support, estimated as over twenty Council Members, would be challenging, but depriving her of a majority remained a possibility. For Crystal Hudson, this path ran through the Brooklyn delegation, home to the largest concentration of Progressive Caucus members, but historically less cohesive than their Bronx and Queens counterparts. In addition to her fellow progressives (Lincoln Restler, Shahana Hanif, Alexa Aviles, Jennifer Gutierrez, Sandy Nurse, Chi Ossé, Rita Joseph), Hudson needed to penetrate the borough’s more moderate enclaves. Specifically, she needed the votes of Chris Banks of East New York and Susan Zhuang of Bensonhurst — considered local allies of House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. However, this arrangement was complicated by Chi Ossé, widely seen as a top ally of Hudson (the two serve together on several committees), threatening a primary challenge to Jeffries, who has represented New York’s 8th Congressional District for over a decade. Hudson herself, elected with Jeffries’ support in 2021 (against a candidate endorsed by NYC-DSA) and viewed as an ally of the House Democratic Leader, was caught in the middle. While efforts to thwart Osse’s primary of Jeffries were ultimately successful (the mayor-elect even appeared at Ossé’s NYC-DSA endorsement forum), the episode was nonetheless an ill-timed distraction for Hudson. Further muddying Hudson’s path in Kings County was County Leader Rodneyse Bichotte, who endorsed Cuomo, but quickly shifted her allegiance to Mamdani following the former’s defeat in the Democratic Primary. Bichotte, unkeen on Hudson’s bid, even attempted to persuade longtime ally Farah Louis of East Flatbush into the race during the annual SOMOS retreat in Puerto Rico. Hudson’s play for the Speakership lived and died with a unified Brooklyn delegation, a hopeful marriage of ideologically varied members lacking an agent of consolidation, a slim path strained beyond repair under the weight of Ossé–Jeffries and the County Leader’s objections. Whereas in contrast, The Bronx, led by State Senator Jamaal Bailey, and Queens, helmed by Congressman Greg Meeks, remained in lockstep behind Menin. All the while, the anti-Menin coalition lacked consolidation: as Amanda Farias, Selvena Brooks Powers, and Christopher Marte remained in the race, convinced they could be a dark horse candidate. Thus, as her path to victory narrowed, Crystal Hudson was increasingly reliant on the Progressive Caucus — incoming members, longtime colleagues, and fellow candidates for Speaker — remaining united. Such was the backdrop for Tuesday, November 25th.

While Julie Menin needed only a handful of votes from her colleagues to reach 26 members, a majority of the Council, she needed a significant cushion to declare “victory,” a number so impressive as to discourage her opponents from any further attempts to peel off her supporters. Her opponents, too reliant on precedent, presumed that time was on their side, for the earliest a candidate for Speaker had ever clinched the votes was December 17th — several weeks away.

As Menin and her allies, specifically emissaries from influential labor unions, called around to persuadable Council Members, many of whom were green to the Speaker’s race, the urgency of the message, and the fear of emerging empty-handed (without a chairmanship, a position on the powerful budget and taxation committee, or even discretionary funding) proved devastatingly effective. This dynamic was especially pronounced with newer(ish) members: Yusef Salaam of Central Harlem, Shanel Thomas-Henry of East Elmhurst, and Ty Hankerson of Southeast Queens. Perhaps most devastatingly, Lower Manhattan’s Christopher Marte and Harvey Epstein, both members of the Progressive Caucus, had given their left-leaning colleagues an impression of openness to Hudson. Marte, as reported by City and State, even joined a conference call arranged by The Working Families Party “to discuss strategy and urge consolidation” among the non-Menin candidates, only to abandon the coalition in the days thereafter. The defection of Epstein, widely supported in a competitive primary by the city’s progressive institutions, was seen as particularly suspect. Hour by hour, as Menin solidified more and more commitments from her colleagues, Hudson’s already slim path evaporated entirely. Before the knowledge of her defeat became widespread, a handful of progressive, Hudson-friendly holdouts — Pierina Sanchez and Althea Stevens of the Bronx, and Kayla Santosuosso of Southern Brooklyn — received permission from Hudson and other stakeholders to place their names on Menin’s list, so as to extract whatever concessions remained.

All told, Julie Menin earned the support of 36 of the Council’s 51 members.

Subscribe now

In many respects, the core of Julie Menin’s institutional coalition in the Speaker’s Race mirrored that of Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic Primary: labor unions, county machines, and (relatively) moderate members. That coalition, whose atrophication was exposed in the voting booth, still held considerable sway behind-closed-doors. Zohran Mamdani’s movement represents the inverse: movement politics practiced in public, outsmarting the traditional power brokers, and one million votes (not thirty-six).

As such, the tensions (or lack thereof) between Mayor Mamdani and Speaker Menin will shape the contours of New York City politics over the next four years. Since clinching victory, Menin has struck a conciliatory tone, praising Mamdani’s affordability agenda, while citing childcare as a natural point of collaboration, in an effort to temper down talk of ideological asymmetry. Asked whether she would primary challenge Mamdani in 2029, Menin unequivocally ruled it out. However, this episode belies the fact that Menin, prior to having clinched the Speakership, seldom mentioned the mayor-elect, much less in a positive light. In advance of the General Election, Menin declined to endorse Mamdani, the Democratic nominee. The party boss instrumental in Menin’s speakership bid, Rep. Gregory Meeks, a longstanding ally of the pro-Israel lobby, also eschewed endorsing Mamdani. On the eve of her victory, The New York Daily News reported that Menin, in private conversations, had “floated bringing back use of the chamber’s subpoena power, a tool that could be a check on incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration.” The sources also reported that “Menin has privately affirmed she would not as speaker simply be a rubber-stamp on the Department of Community Safety, a $1 billion agency Mamdani proposes to launch to take over certain responsibilities from the NYPD,” indicating she would not green-light the agency’s launch without “serious deliberation.” Simply, Menin and Mamdani are not aligned on several political matters, and will likely encounter points of tension with respect to Israel–Palestine (Menin reportedly “urged City Hall to intervene” and cancel the SummerStage concert featuring pro-Palestine R&B singer Kehlani) and the NYPD (see: Menin’s hesitation with respect to the Department of Community Safety). Menin is one of the wealthiest member of the City Council, the wife of a prominent Real Estate developer, and represents much of old-moneyed Upper East Side; whereas Mamdani disavows donations from corporations and developers, remains a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and has cut-his-teeth in outer borough politics. To paraphrase a quote from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (describing her orientation towards Joe Biden), in any other country, Menin and Mamdani would be in separate political parties. Menin’s allies, well-represented throughout the political class, exhibit angst when these well-known facts are recited, and are quick to deride any criticism as borne solely of ignorance.

I expect Mamdani to approach the next Speaker’s Race, timed for his re-election in 2029, much differently. The mayor-elect has shown no qualms with getting involved in internal elections, evidenced by his maneuvering to kill NYC-DSA’s endorsement of Chi Ossé, particularly when the outcome, in Mamdani’s estimation, poses a threat to his affordability agenda. For decades, the political left in New York City has sorely lacked an organizer-in-chief, a concentrated center of power capable of aligning (or strong-arming) legislators, marshaling public support, brokering agreements between interests groups, and executing a coherent medium-term political vision. Mamdani has both the orientation and instinct to be just that leader. Given the plethora of stakeholders across the progressive left, broad coalitional buy-in will be necessary on many occasions, but much decision-making and maneuvering will be left to Mamdani, the most powerful figure in New York City. How Zohran Mamdani balances the movement and the machine will be one of the most telling storylines of his first term.

Nonetheless, despite their ideological distance, the Mamdani–Menin partnership will not inevitably be doomed to infighting. Menin, a shrewd operator in her own right (one does not lock up two-thirds of their colleagues, in record time, if not), knows that any opposition to Mamdani, real or perceived, will invite a torrent of outrage. Multiple Council staffers told me that their offices, upon the news breaking that Menin had clinched the Speakership, received a flurry of phone calls from constituents asking “what could be done to change the outcome?” — the day before Thanksgiving no less. Indeed, the days of the general public being agnostic to the affairs of the New York City Council died alongside Andrew Cuomo’s political career. Mamdani, the incoming Mayor who humiliated and charmed the city’s political class on his way to a historic victory, is at the zenith of his political power. To challenge or undermine him now would be short-sighted and foolhardy, a dynamic well-understood by Julie Menin. Mamdani, robustly popular with his hyper-engaged and loyal base, may have the natural talent and political savvy to sustain his larger-than-life standing in the modern Democratic Party throughout his first term; and as such, de-fang the most fervent opposition. However, were the inertia of governing to weaken Mayor Mamdani over the course of months and years — particularly on all the thorny issues where his political capital is less pronounced — how would Speaker Menin, amidst a fever pitch of whispers from the (momentarily silent) Mamdani skeptics, respond?

Perhaps now, she will think twice.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

Yesterday, Brooklyn City Council Member Chi Ossé filed to run against House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who represents New York’s 8th Congressional District. Immediately, the contest would become one of the highest profile races in the nation: pitting an ascendant and insurgent democratic socialist movement against the Democratic Party’s moderate establishment at the heart of Black Brooklyn.

Ossé, the youngest person ever to be elected to the New York City Council, has earned plaudits for an impressive understanding of new media. Beating back Central Brooklyn’s atrophying Democratic machine, Ossé won his Council seat four years ago with little institutional support, a guerrilla effort of door knocking, creative mailers, and millennial-focused social media. His chief legislative accomplishment, the FARE Act, which prohibits the act of charging tenants for the fees of a broker retained by the landlord, was one of the most renter-friendly (and impressive) legislative accomplishments over the past few years. Armed with robust communicative instincts, Ossé’s future is undeniably bright; a twenty-seven year old talent that could easily raise millions of dollars and galvanize scores of volunteers.

Nonetheless, Ossé is choosing one of the steepest hills to climb, given Hakeem Jeffries has remained a powerful fixture of Brooklyn politics for two decades. Jeffries ran for State Assembly twice versus incumbent Roger Green (ironically, the young corporate lawyer campaigning on “change” and “reform” was the top choice of the urban professional class he now openly derides) but lost both times, only to luck into a vacancy when Green (foolheartedly) ran for Congress. As a legislator, Jeffries played a key role in the passage of several criminal justice reform bills, while his campaign coffers remained flush with funds from Wall Street and corporate law networks. Rep. Ed Towns, who once succeeded the “unbought and unbossed” Shirley Chisholm, looked increasingly vulnerable; barely winning re-election and struggling to raise money. While one to discourage such efforts today, Jeffries launched a “soft” primary challenge to the declining Towns, stockpiling funds and stoking speculation. The gambit worked, and pushed the seventy-eight year old incumbent to retire rather than stare down certain defeat, leaving Jeffries to crush City Council Member (and former Black Panther) Charles Barron, whom the future Democratic leader derided as needlessly divisive and antisemitic. Since then, Jeffries has never faced a competitive election; both a sign of genuine strength in this era of primary challenges and a potential liability. Were Democrats to retake the lower chamber next year, Jeffries would be in line to be the next Speaker of the House.

In local politics, Jeffries maintains a lower-profile. He has repeatedly sparred with NYC-DSA, whom his spokesperson (a transplant himself) has referred to as “Team Gentrification.” Jeffries also counts relatively few tried-and-true allies (Stefani Zinerman, Chris Banks, Nikki Lucas), compared to his Congressional contemporaries, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez. He eschewed allying himself with Eric Adams, who concurrently rose through Black Brooklyn politics, but took a hands off approach with respect to the Mayor’s myriad of scandals. This year, the House Democratic Leader sat out the Democratic Primary for Mayor; only issuing a tepid endorsement of Zohran Mamdani once the result was beyond doubt. Nonetheless, while Jeffries is not the local political player that some of his predecessors were, the Brooklyn representative remains closely allied with organized labor, the Governor, and the state’s Congressional delegation. Most importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, Jeffries remains well-liked throughout his majority-Black, working and middle-class district.

New York’s 8th Congressional District spans more than a dozen neighborhoods in Brooklyn, stretching from gentrifying Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant through many of the city’s pre-eminent Black communities: low-income Brownsville and East New York, middle-class Canarsie and Flatlands. The Southern Brooklyn portion — which includes Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, Brighton Beach and Coney Island — remains a sizable geographic portion, home to many (more politically conservative) immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who scarcely contribute in Democratic Primaries. Hence, the vast majority of the Democratic Primary electorate in NY-8 comes from either the district’s left-leaning gentrifying pockets (college-educated, renter-majority, younger) or its predominantly Black neighborhoods (diverse class character, older, less college-educated), where politics is less ideological, but more centered on institutions and relationships. In the Democratic Primary for Mayor, Zohran Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo 55.8% to 44.2% across the 8th Congressional District. Mamdani won by thrashing Cuomo in both Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant (76% to 24%), blanketing the tree-lined, brownstone blocks of Central Brooklyn with enthusiastic canvassers, while maximizing young voter turnout with sharp messaging and attentional hegemony (to voters under the age of 45, Mamdani was ubiquitous). In neighboring Canarsie and East New York, Cuomo outpaced Mamdani by more than thirty percent, but voter turnout noticeably lagged behind the district’s (increasingly) white-collar precincts. And, among middle-aged Black voters, particularly in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Mamdani made traceable inroads, which reduced Cuomo to relying solely on older voters, whom he struggled to motivate to the polls en masse. While the Russian Jews of Trump Village, Manhattan Beach, and Sea Gate broke for the avowedly pro-Israel Cuomo, as did the moderate Italians and Irish of Marine Park and Mill Basin, preferring centrism over socialism, their relatively few votes could not save the former Governor.

Theoretically, couldn’t Chi Ossé simply replicate a version of the Mamdani Coalition?

Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. Comparing Mamdani–Cuomo to Ossé–Jeffries is a natural impulse, but one that should be exercised with nuance. Jeffries, for all of the concern over his lackluster response to President Trump’s authoritarian administration (narratives that are, in my estimation, largely confined to white-collar media), remains scandal-free (unlike Cuomo) and broadly popular with his working-class Black constituents. While not a wartime consigliere, Jeffries remains difficult to negatively define (as opposed to the perpetually stumbling Chuck Schumer), even for Republicans. As the House Democratic Leader, Jeffries will have unlimited money at his disposal, through both his campaign and aligned Independent Expenditures.

To many on the left, Hakeem Jeffries is a clear villain, the symbol of Democratic establishment unable to meet the political moment: feckless when standing up to Donald Trump, complicit as Gaza is reduced to rubble. The question is whether Black voters in Brooklyn, the heart and soul of the 8th District, view Hakeem — the man who comes to their churches on Sunday, who has represented them for over a decade, and is now the most visible Black political leader in America — feel the same way?

In defeating Cuomo, the Mamdani Coalition spanned a remarkably big tent: NYC-DSA, The Working Families Party, DC37, Letitia James, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders. Pending a forum vote tomorrow evening, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America may decide to back Ossé. But who else, among those aforementioned institutions, would line up behind Ossé’s challenge to the Democratic leader? The Working Families Party, who eschewed supporting a viable DSA challenger to Jeffries-ally Stefani Zinerman last year, and will assuredly work alongside Jeffries to flip House districts across New York, has little incentive to wage war with the Minority Leader. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Axios yesterday, “I certainly don’t think a primary challenge to the leader is a good idea right now.” Attorney General Letitia James would endorse Jeffries upon request, as would the state’s largest labor unions, who count thousands of members in Black Brooklyn.

And, of course, the man who cohered said Rainbow coalition, mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, has repeatedly stressed his opposition.

For a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Defeating Jeffries, even with a left-progressive coalition similar to Mamdani’s, would be a herculean task. Without it, the endeavor is lonely and fraught. Most importantly, candidates and coalitions shape (and change) the electorate. Mamdani did this tremendously well, leveraging the political moment into a movement campaign, while maximizing his base on all fronts. However, in a citywide campaign, Mamdani could pull votes from every neighborhood, and maintained many paths to the nomination. Cuomo, need it be repeated, ran a listless and uninspiring effort, overly reliant on money, while failing to motivate his base of older Black and Hispanic Democrats. Jeffries, while marooned in Washington for days and weeks at a time (perhaps his greatest vulnerability), will have the time and money to tend to his working and middle-class base, and enough surrogates to fill in the gaps. While Zohran Mamdani received more votes (39K) than Andrew Cuomo (32K) in NY-8; Eric Adams , the son of Black Brooklyn whose electoral profile is more comparable to Jeffries, won more raw votes than either in 2021 (41K).

The electorate that comes to the polls in 2026 will not so neatly mirror that of 2025.

Undeniably, the stakes are high, even existential. An Ossé victory over Jeffries, comparable to Eric Cantor’s defeat at the hands of the Tea Party in 2014, would have the potential to realign the Democratic Party, and provide another devastating blow to the AIPAC. With another round of redistricting looming in 2028, and the Democratic base seething with anger towards the Party’s leadership, it’s now or never.

A generational opportunity to strike while the iron is hot? Or a mirage that threatens to bitterly divide an otherwise ascendant left coalition?

Zohran Mamdani, mere weeks removed from a General Election mandate, is at the center of this dispute. Already, Mamdani and Ossé, erstwhile allies, have reportedly fallen out. Mamdani, days away from entering City Hall, is unsettled by the prospect of being tangled up in an ugly, high-profile brawl that lacks upside for his state-sponsored agenda. The stakes would be raised further were NYC-DSA, Mamdani’s self-proclaimed “political home,” to lead the effort behind Ossé to unseat the face of Black political power in America. As Jeffries was asked ad nauseam over the summer whether he would endorse Mamdani, the reverse would be true for Mamdani’s first six months in office, oxygen deprived from his affordability agenda. After more than a year of carefully constructing a coalition, which finally came to include a majority of Black New Yorkers, the mayor-elect is reluctant to pick intra-Party fights.

This time last year, the left had nothing to lose by wholeheartedly supporting Zohran Mamdani. Now, Mamdani is one of the three most celebrated politicians in the United States, with an unrivaled megaphone to communicate his vision and beliefs. His success or failure, over the next four years, will have repercussions far beyond himself or New York City. Suddenly, there is everything to lose.

But does Mamdani’s base, who helped him get there, feel the same way?

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

The cadence of Election Day in New York City is strange and suspenseful.

Before the polls even open, close to one-third of all ballots, steadily acquired during the ten day early voting period, are already in the bank. The data from the “early vote,” released every evening by the Board of Elections, leaves ample time for discernment and dissection. However, when election day voting commences at dawn, there is nothing more than anecdotes, and token borough-by-borough data, for the next sixteen hours. Other states, such as New Jersey and Virginia, periodically provide updates of incoming ballots, based on age, geographic, and party distribution.

New York City does none of that. For election day is shaped entirely in the dark.

I spent last Tuesday following Zohran Mamdani around; mixing in a series of interviews, phone calls, and borough-wide vote total analyses along the way. There was, regrettably, little time to sojourn deep into the outer boroughs. Mamdani opened the day with a playground press conference in Astoria, after voting alongside his wife (and learning, in real time, of Dick Cheney’s passing) at Frank Sinatra High School. The eager crowd of reporters and cameramen, who closed ranks around the Democratic nominee, was comparable to that of a Presidential frontrunner on Super Tuesday. Afterwards, I stopped in a local coffee shop, Sweet Scene, several blocks away and off the beaten path, for a meal and some uninterrupted laptop time. A reporter–photographer duo from The New York Times coincidentally stopped by; laying out their next moves (they planned to visit Ozone Park and speak to South Asian voters). For fun, I scanned The Times archives for references to Ozone Park, a middle-class neighborhood in South Queens, during the previous mayoral race. I only found one, a fleeting reference in the description of a voter interviewed on the street. Now, immigrant enclaves like Ozone Park (and Brighton Beach, Westchester Square, Jamaica Hills) are spotlighted regularly by elite media: The Mamdani Effect in real time. A young woman sat down at my table, opened up her laptop, and dialed into a voter contact software using her cell phone, and was soon calling prospective voters, inquiring as to whether they had already cast their ballots. She was, of course, doing this volunteer work for Zohran Mamdani. Around noon, I set off for Brooklyn, taking the G train (better known as the Commie Corridor express), arriving in Clinton Hill, a brownstone neighborhood with several murals of the Notorious BIG (a native of St. James Place), for Mamdani’s event with State Attorney General Letitia James (that block: Mamdani 84%, Cuomo 14%). At his next stop, on the Lower East Side, voters could barely even reach the Democratic nominee, surrounded by an entourage of allies and media (that block: Mamdani 79%, Cuomo 17%). Pulling away in his SUV security detail, Mamdani rolled down the tinted window and stuck his head out, shouting “BLOCK BY BLOCK baby” at me, a reference to my predictions piece from the day prior. Yelling back, I told Mamdani that I may have undercounted his support once again (“I think you can hit 55%”); in the primary, while I predicted Mamdani would win, one of only a handful to make such a claim, he still outperformed my bullish expectations by twelve points. Mamdani, who has not lost his sense of humor with fame, laughed back, “Don’t be a coward, stick to your prediction!” He was right.

My comment belied a sense of optimism. Mamdani’s best boroughs in the primary, Manhattan and Brooklyn, were once again leading the way in the general. Voter turnout was on pace to easily surpass two million, a figure not reached since the halcyon days of civic engagement during the 1960s. Sure, some of that surge would come from an anti-Mamdani groundswell, most notably a handful of staunchly pro-Israel Jewish neighborhoods, but a higher turnout environment, overall, assuredly benefited the Democratic nominee in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1. Mamdani still led almost every public poll by double digits, with a coalition — indexed to lower-propensity younger voters and oft-overlooked immigrant groups — that is notoriously difficult to poll. Was another BIG polling miss on the horizon?

As the witching hour arrived, both campaigns hunkered down, playing host to both supporters and the media: Mamdani at Brooklyn Paramount, a theater in Fort Greene; Cuomo at the Ziegfeld ballroom in Midtown Manhattan. In the twentieth century, it would take several hours for the entirety of the citywide vote to be reported, forcing campaign strategists to scrutinize a handful of block-level precincts, bellwethers of sorts, for trends and clues. In 2025, the shape of the results would be known within an hour of the polls closing, as batches of ballots (“drops”) were processed by the Board of Elections; six figure vote totals revealed with the refresh of a webpage every ten minutes. The first “drop” came shortly after 9PM, four minutes after the polls closed, with all 819,165 early votes (in addition to the processed mail-in ballots). As expected, Zohran Mamdani was ahead of Andrew Cuomo: 51.5% to 39.7%. A healthy, but not an “I’ve seen enough,” lead. The pace and distribution of the early vote favors the city’s white collar precincts. Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn, walkable and in close proximity to polling sites, are well represented in the early vote tally (advantage Mamdani); in addition to car-dominated, pseudo suburban swaths of Staten Island and Northeast Queens (advantage Cuomo). The precinct results were instantly fed into live maps, painting a political picture of the five boroughs.

The Commie Corridor could be seen from space, while Upper Manhattan and Central Brooklyn were a sea of Mamdani blue. The working-poor South Bronx and middle-class Southeast Queens — Cuomo Country in the Primary — had swung dramatically to the Democratic nominee. Mamdani’s support neatly traced the city’s subway lines: from the end of the R train in Bay Ridge, to the N/W in Astoria, and the A in Inwood; among the most racially integrated and renter-majority in the five boroughs. Along Hillside Avenue in Queens, the five-mile Bangladeshi, Sikh, and Indo-Carribean thoroughfare where Mamdani began his campaign by speaking to newly-minted Trump voters, the democratic socialist did not lose a single block. Nonetheless, Cuomo held onto a noticeable chunk of the Manhattan vote, anchored by the Upper East Side’s Capitalist Corridor, and the island’s many old moneyed precincts. South of the Staten Island expressway, the most Italian census tracts in the nation, the son of Mario Cuomo was winning every block. The Anti Commie Corridor, pockets of Orthodox and Hasidic enclaves (most notably in Southern Brooklyn) could also be seen from space, supporting the avowedly pro-Israel (and rabidly Islamophobic) Cuomo. There was not a single Republican red precinct on the entire map, for Curtis Sliwa’s support had completely collapsed, the consequence of tactical voting and a late, quasi-endorsement of the former Governor from President Donald Trump.

In mere minutes, as preceding ballot drops were processed by the Board of Elections, Mamdani’s twelve point lead was cut to eight, with more than one million votes still outstanding. Was Zohran Mamdani, who had entered the evening preparing for a coronation, on the precipice of a historic nightmare?

The forthcoming “drops” would be skewed towards the outer boroughs, from the blue collar voters who cast their ballots after work. The small business men and women, the single family homeowner, the union workers, the public school parents: the people the left always claimed to speak for — but could never win. These were the people Cuomo needed to reclaim power, but whose votes he had often taken for granted.

Hours earlier, along Broadway in Upper Manhattan, the Spanish speaking blocks of Washington Heights and West Harlem delivered their votes to the fresh-faced candidate who so eagerly walked their streets greeting passersby months earlier, as Mamdani seldom lost a single block. Inside schools and libraries across Bedford-Stuyvesant, the evening crowd was White and Black, young and old, but united behind the Democratic nominee. Outside IS-145, named after Joseph Pulitzer, in the ethnic polyglot of Jackson Heights, ballots were printed in more than two dozen languages; three-quarters of which were delivered to the candidate who best embodied immigrant New York. Inside the Seth Low Senior Center in Brownsville, at the heart of the city’s lowest income neighborhood, Black seniors bubbled in the oval next to “M-A-M-D-A-N-I,” rather than the name they had known for decades. At Christ Church of Bay Ridge, the local Irish and Italian Catholics that once revered the Cuomo name were few and far between; outnumbered by their Arab Christian neighbors, eager to cast their votes for the inspiring young man who had become a fixture at their houses of worship years earlier. In working-class Westchester Square, where almost forty-percent of voters cast ballots for both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump the previous November, the sounds of Bangla and Spanish could be heard in the gymnasium of Lewis and Clark middle school, a new frontier being unearthed in real time. Uncles and Aunties formed a line at Arthur Ashe School in South Ozone Park, on the precipice of another man of color making history in Queens.

They did so silently and in the dark; their ballots furiously adding up, creating a new political mosaic, piece by piece. And for those who arrived at their polling place still undecided, most were greeted by an enthusiastic Mamdani volunteer, who knew their candidate’s positions by heart, their eager eyes twinkling with the hopes and dreams of the next generation. In those canvassers, many voters saw their neighbors, friends, nieces and nephews, sons or daughters. Perhaps, some even saw a glimpse of earlier, less-disillusioned versions of themselves. Whatever it was, the doors that opened at midnight believed in Zohran Mamdani, and had shut the door on Andrew Cuomo once and for all. The mayor-elect had eclipsed one million votes and fifty-percent.

In short order, Tascha Van Auken, Mamdani’s Field Director and longtime DSA organizer — who strategized, administered, and executed the canvassing plan that made all of those open doors possible — introduced the Mayor-elect on stage.

“My friends,” Zohran Mamdani smiled, “we have toppled a political dynasty.”

Subscribe now

I began election day with four questions:

• Will Mamdani crack 50%? Yes, with over one million votes.

In total, Zohran Mamdani added over five hundred thousand votes compared to the Democratic Primary. He needed every last one, for Andrew Cuomo doubled his vote total from the Primary, too. But it was from whom Mamdani consolidated support that was remarkable. Amidst voter turnout not seen since the 1960s, Mamdani’s triumph was the result of a coalition rooted in the city’s multi-racial working and middle classes. From the Democratic Primary to the General Election, Mamdani made pronounced inroads with Black (+26) and Hispanic (+22) voters, while cementing his emergent coalition of renters (+25), public transit commuters (+29), younger leftists, older progressives and liberals, South Asians, rent-stabilized tenants, and Muslims (+30). The “Jewish Vote,” much discussed, was far closer than many realize; among Jewish Democrats (precincts where 10%+ of registered voters have Jewish surnames, and Kamala Harris won 60%+ of the vote), Mamdani ran less than two points behind Cuomo (47.8% to 49.2%). Among households earning $30K-$50K, Mamdani won by thirteen points; while households between $50K-$100K went for democratic socialist by twenty percent. Mamdani, of course, won the votes of those who valued a candidate that “would bring needed change” (+62) and “was honest and trustworthy,” (+49) too. Nonetheless, the most instructive Mamdani-Cuomo split was among those in search of a candidate “who will work for someone like me,” a cohort that made up one-fifth of the electorate, and broke decisively for Mamdani by more than fifty points. More than half of voters (55%) said the Cost of Living was the most important issue, dwarfing Crime (22%) and Immigration (9%), more proof Mamdani had actively molded the electorate, rather than merely reacted to it.

This was, unequivocally, the voter coalition the political left had always sought to build.

• Can the first major Muslim candidate for mayor win back the city’s working-class Hispanic and Asian communities that swung dramatically towards Donald Trump last November? For the most part, yes, sans struggles with East Asian voters.

The Trump-Mamdani voters are working-class Latinos, South Asians, & Muslims.

And they number in the tens of thousands.

Across neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Jamaica Hills, Westchester Square, and Glen Oaks — working-class, immigrant enclaves — Zohran Mamdani outperformed Kamala Harris in vote share (and, some cases, raw votes), despite facing another Democrat (running as an Independent) and a Republican. Here, the man who relentlessly focused on costs of living, listened to the plight of immigrant New York (hosting press conferences with night workers, speaking to former Trump voters), all while showing up – over and over again — delivered on his promise. The sole weak spot: East Asian voters (mostly Chinese). The caveat is class and age.

In working-class Elmhurst, one of two Chinatowns in Queens, Mamdani easily outpaced Cuomo by fifteen points (a comparable margin to the Democratic Primary). Throughout downtown Flushing, a lower-income Chinatown at the conclusion of the #7 train, Mamdani and Cuomo split a handful of precincts. But, in the adjacent and more middle-class Murray Hill (Queens), Cuomo outran Mamdani by double digits. In neighboring Bayside, home to the Korean middle-class, Cuomo won by twenty five percent. In Southern Brooklyn, the emerging Chinese communities of Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, and Gravesend contributed relatively few votes during the Democratic Primary (in June, Mamdani clobbered the listless Cuomo there, aided by younger, second generation immigrants). However, these middle-class neighborhoods have become the epicenter of rightward political realignment over the past five years. And last Tuesday, the behavior of these voters mirrored that of other Republicans: abandoning Curtis Sliwa en masse, and shifting dramatically towards Andrew Cuomo. Why? A series of damaging headlines (“Mamdani Says He Would Phase Out Gifted Program”) from both The New York Times and New York Post, articles which received tens of millions of impressions, surely did the Democratic nominee no favors. Nor did Cuomo’s repeated attempts to tie Mamdani to the legalizing (and proliferation) of prostitution, a damaging charge in middle-class immigrant enclaves. Nonetheless, the result goes well beyond just Mamdani, and should be contextualized in the multi-cycle realignment of Chinese voters away from the Democratic Party.

• How many Republican voters can Andrew Cuomo peel away from GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa? A hell of a lot, Sliwa didn’t win a single precinct.

Andrew Cuomo tried a reverse Dan Osborn — let me explain.

Osborn, an Independent candidate for Senate in blood red Nebraska, benefited from the Democratic Party eschewing the race entirely; allowing the mechanic to consolidate support from the state’s Democratic voters, while making an anti-oligarch play for Independent and Republican voters, leading to the greatest over-performance of any Senate candidate in the nation. In deep-blue New York City, particularly amidst Donald Trump’s second term, the Republican Party is equally toxic. While Cuomo, a lifelong Democrat running as an Independent, marginalized Curtis Sliwa to a remarkable extent, had the Republican nominee actually quit the race (or eschewed it entirely), the outcome may have been different.

Given the tactical voting exhibited by New York Republicans, could a similar (more coordinated) strategy work against progressive and socialist Democratic nominees at the city and state level? The Reverse Osborn: the GOP stands down and rallies behind a centrist “Democrat” embraced by the billionaire class, who runs-up-the-score among suburban moderates, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, and white ethnics, while retaining some appeal among non-white working-class voters. Yet, Andrew Cuomo, a scandal-scarred candidate who ran consecutive listless campaigns, still retained an ability to thread an (otherwise) unaligned coalition; his electoral appeal (Cuomo once routinely exceeded 80% of the vote in NYC), while diminished, is still unique.

Would the New York GOP be wise to re-create this strategy?

• Will the Black electorate, older and historically loyal to Cuomo, shift to Mamdani, the Democratic nominee? Yes, providing his margin of victory.

In my opinion, this is the story of the election.

Zohran Mamdani’s inroads with Black voters were not pre-ordained, nor the sole consequence of him being the Democratic nominee. For nine months, Mamdani has been double (and triple) booked with church services every Sunday, hustling between Harlem, Southeast Queens, and Brooklyn’s Black Belt. But since the primary, the African-born Mamdani gained relationships and institutional validators across the Black community by the day, allowing him unfettered access to larger congregations and wider audiences. During the Primary, Mamdani’s allies attempted to host a rally at the legendary Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, only for the well-connected Cuomo to call in a favor and nix the effort; but as the Democratic nominee for mayor, Mamdani was able to speak at Abyssinian on the eve of Election Day, seated alongside Harlem’s political class. From the pulpit, Mamdani would tell the story of his father’s Civil Rights era activism, a “which side are you on” moment for the young academic, while making light of the pronunciation of his name to lighten the mood, an old trick employed by early career Barack Obama. Over the course of weeks and months, these efforts made a difference, undoubtedly hastened by Cuomo entering a de-facto truce with Donald Trump in an effort to court Republican voters.

Zohran Mamdani built the next chapter of New York City’s Rainbow Coalition.

Coined by Jesse Jackson during his consecutive Presidential campaigns, the Rainbow Coalition (locally) is most commonly associated with the triumph of David Dinkins in 1989. At a tense, sliding doors moment in the city’s history (well-chronicled in Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York), the soft spoken Dinkins, one of Harlem’s legendary “Gang of Four,” brought together upper-middle class Jewish liberals, labor unions, and the city’s large (but oft-ignored) working-class Black and Puerto Rican communities. An enthusiastic majority of New Yorkers helped Dinkins defeat both three-term incumbent Ed Koch and the (white) backlash campaign of prosecutor Rudy Giuliani. The Rainbow Coalition was beautiful and robust, but amidst zealous and alert opposition, its margin for error was slim. Under the weight of record-breaking crime, complicated by the specter of race and class in a segregated and economically-divided municipality, the “Rainbow Coalition” buckled. When Dinkins and Giuliani rematched, New York City’s first Black mayor lost by less than 2%.

While New York City has changed remarkably over the following three decades, there are many parallels to the present moment. The opposition to Mamdani, while not a majority of the city, is fierce and well-represented throughout elite institutions. There will be no “benefit of the doubt” for the thirty-four year old mayor, nor a plethora of second or third chances. Mamdani will deal with a hostile federal government, as large swaths of his Party openly root for his failure. His ambitious agenda will be, to an extent, at the mercy of his (soon to be former) colleagues in Albany. In the words of NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, “the fate of the organized left and the Mamdani administration will be tied together.” In the story of David Dinkins and his failed re-election, Zohran Mamdani has a cautionary tale of backlash politics.

Nonetheless, the eleventh-hour rally to Andrew Cuomo felt like the last gasp of the Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg coalition, arrangements that once reigned municipal politics. The core tenants of Mamdani’s coalition are the city’s most ascendant demographics: young voters, the college-educated renter class, South Asians, and Muslims. While he made pronounced inroads among working-class Black and Hispanic voters the past four months, his ceiling for improvement is even greater. The intelligentsia of Manhattan may sour on him, or rally behind a white-collar adversary in four years, but Mamdani will almost assuredly deepen his reservoir of support across the blue-collar outer boroughs; net positive arithmetic in the equation of re-election. His ability to command attention and comprehensive understanding of new media gives him a unique, and unparalleled, ability to disseminate his message.

Most importantly, Mamdani has a political movement at his back. One could quantify that movement as more than one hundred thousand volunteers, more than one million votes, or more than three million doors knocked. But a movement should not be quantified, for the will to climb a sixth floor walkup in search of conversation cannot be reduced to numbers on a screen. A movement must be nurtured and protected, but also given space to grow organically. Movements need leaders, and Mamdani has become that, and so much more. Already, the mayor-elect appears poised to not re-create the failures of Obama’s own vanished volunteer army. Since Mamdani stepped off the R train in Bay Ridge, in search of Father Khader El-Yateem eight years ago, he has never stopped organizing. He will not only bring that ethos to City Hall, but foreground it in the next generation of New Yorkers who have been inspired by his rise.

To these folks, Zohran Mamdani represents hope. And you can’t put a price on that.

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

From start to finish, the campaign for New York City Mayor, pitting Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, has been scintillating and suspenseful. But tomorrow night, this bittersweet election, spanning more than twelve months, will come to an end. While not as climactic as the Democratic Primary, a come-from-behind upset of epic proportions, the General Election is nonetheless on course for historic voter turnout, the highest in fifty-six years.

With Zohran Mamdani’s victory all but assured, the real drama lies in the details.

Will Mamdani crack 50%? Can the first major Muslim candidate for mayor win back the city’s working-class Hispanic and Asian communities that swung dramatically towards Donald Trump last November? How many Republican voters can Andrew Cuomo peel away from GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa? And will the Black electorate, older and historically loyal to Cuomo, shift to Mamdani, the Democratic nominee?

Thus, in an ode to the infinite nuance of New York City’s mosaic, I have predicted the results, BLOCK by BLOCK.

2,000,000+ Votes

120,000+ City Blocks

4,000+ Election Districts

1,212 Polling Sites

350 Neighborhoods

51 City Council Seats

5 Boroughs

3 Candidates

1 Prediction

Without further ado, let’s begin!

TO VIEW AN INTERACTIVE MAP OF MY PREDICTION, CLICK HERE

THE BRONX

On the banks of the Hudson River rests the Riverdale section of the Northwest Bronx. Adjacent to the water, homes routinely cost millions, while the atmosphere bears a closer resemblance to Westchester County, than the rest of the borough. Here, Cuomo will do well, particularly among Orthodox Jews in the lush Fieldston enclave. Mamdani, in turn, will perform better inland, closer to Van Cortlandt Park; a mix of apartments and modest single family homes, more middle class and culturally diverse.

Woodlawn, a historically-Irish community (bordered by Westchester County, Van Cortlandt Park, Woodlawn Cemetery, and the Bronx River Parkway), should be close between Mamdani and Sliwa (although Cuomo, on account of the older white ethnic population, remains viable here, too). A bit south, on both sides of the Major Deegan Expressway, Mamdani is poised to perform well among the Hispanic working-class of Kingsbridge, and the middle-class of Van Cortlandt Village and Kingsbridge Heights, building upon his strong showing in the Democratic Primary. Across the Jerome Park Reservoir, the Bronx Science alum should continue to dominate in Norwood, a neighborhood of hospital workers and civil servants at the end of the #4 train, home to a growing South Asian and Muslim population. I also expect Mamdani to win Bedford Park comfortably, along with the blocks adjacent to Fordham University. College students, having missed the Democratic Primary on account of summer break, are back in school for the fall semester, and should give Mamdani a notable boost in Fordham and Morningside Heights.

South of the Cross Bronx Expressway, Mamdani and Cuomo trade precincts, while Sliwa remains a non-factor. In the bluffs of Highbridge, Cuomo holds onto support from older Black and Hispanic Democrats (many of whom live in public housing); whereas on the comparably low-income blocks of Morrisania and East Tremont, adjacent to Crotona Park, where the majority of the housing stock is either rent-stabilized or subsidized with vouchers, Mamdani fares better. In Mott Haven, the southernmost neighborhood of the South Bronx, amidst the early stages of gentrification, I expect Mamdani to do well, as is the case for the precincts adjacent to Saint Mary’s Park (where Bernie Sanders held a Presidential rally in 2016) and the Dawson Street historic district in Longwood. Across the Bruckner Expressway, in the industrial, working-class peninsula of Hunts Point, Mamdani and Cuomo should play to a draw. Across the South Bronx, I expect voter participation to continue to decline, a consistent trend since 2016. Were Mamdani to rout Cuomo here, amongst the lowest-income blocks in the United States, which dramatically shifted to the right over the past decade, countless narratives would be shattered in real time.

Across the Bronx River, in Soundview and Castle Hill, Cuomo holds onto a handful of HDFC co-ops and public housing developments, but Mamdani gains everywhere else. On the middle-class peninsula of Clason Point, colloquially referred to as “Little Puerto Rico,” complete with waterfront condominiums, townhouses, and two influential homeowner’s associations, I expect Mamdani to win a plurality. However, north of the Cross Bronx Expressway, those pluralities become majorities (and supermajorities) in Parkchester, a planned community of 171 apartment buildings (affixed with beautiful Terracotta statues on their exterior, between seven and thirteen stories tall), home to thousands of African, South American, Bangladeshi, and Puerto Rican immigrants. Once “Whites Only,” Parkchester has become a remarkable reflection of New York City’s mosaic, a place where working class people, whose doors open at midnight, can harbor middle-class dreams. Half a mile away in Westchester Square, home to an even larger Bangladeshi Muslim population, Mamdani will run-up-the-score, as he did in the Primary. On one block in particular, where almost 40% of voters cast their ballots for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump last November, Mamdani has a chance to eclipse 80% of the vote (Kamala Harris limped to 60%).

On the other side of the (freight) tracks, the heart of historically-Italian Morris Park promises to be a red reprieve in an otherwise blue borough, surrounded by Mamdani blue in working-class Van Nest (Yemeni immigrants) and Allerton (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans). Farther north, The Black Belt of the Northeast Bronx, once represented in Congress by Jamaal Bowman, begins. Majority African American and Afro Caribbean, the area straddles between working and middle class, with an almost identical number of renters and homeowners. The oldest precincts, such as the Edenwald houses, stick with Cuomo, albeit to a lesser extent; while the younger, bluer blocks of Wakefield and Williamsbridge shift to Mamdani. Across I-95 lies Co-op City, the world’s largest NORC (naturally occurring retirement community), whose electorate is two-thirds Black and one-third Hispanic. In the Democratic Primary, Cuomo dominated Mamdani here, winning by 50%. However, as Mamdani has steadily gained ground among older Black and Hispanic voters, I expect the margin will be much closer this time around, with Cuomo earning majorities from the development’s two senior centers (along with several pluralities elsewhere), while Mamdani performs better in the more Puerto Rican precincts.

I predict Pelham Bay, a vestige of the white working-class at the terminus of the #6 train, to break for Mamdani, albeit narrowly. East Tremont Avenue, which runs south from Pelham Bay through Throggs Neck, acts as the de-facto line of political demarcation: with middle-aged, working-class two family homeowners to the west supporting Mamdani; while their older, white ethnic counterparts to the east back Sliwa (and Cuomo). In both Country Club and Throggs Neck, I believe Cuomo will dent Sliwa’s margins among Italian American homeowners, limiting the Republican nominee to pluralities, not majorities. The two Sliwa majority precincts are both gated communities: Edgewater Park and Silver Beach, the most GOP-friendly blocks of the Bronx. I expect the Seaside Swing State of City Island, closely contested by all three candidates, to be a narrow Sliwa plurality, with Mamdani finishing a close second. Throughout the many white ethnic (and Republican-leaning) enclaves of the East Bronx, Sliwa should also receive a bump from the local City Council Member, Kristy Marmorato, who I expect to comfortably win re-election.

Bronx Prediction: Mamdani 50%, Cuomo 39%, Sliwa 10%

Subscribe now

MANHATTAN

Along the Upper East Side’s Capitalist Corridor, from Park to Fifth Avenue, the wealthiest and oldest precincts in the nation, resistance to the thirty-four year old democratic socialist will be pronounced. The same can be said for tony Sutton Place, Cuomo’s temporary home during the campaign, in addition to Battery Park City, East End Avenue, Lincoln Square, and pockets of Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. Here, where The Free Press outranks The New York Times, expect both the Democratic nominee, a pro-Palestinian socialist committed to raising taxes on the wealthy, and the Republican nominee, an outer borough populist who frequently rails against the billionaire class, to struggle for votes. Amongst these old, educated, and avowedly zionist billion-dollar blocks, Mamdani hysteria has reached a fever pitch.

Yet, I expect everywhere else to be a sea of blue, the only question is what shade?

Cuomo’s working-class support will keep him afloat in East Harlem and corners of Washington Heights, but only enough to “limit” Mamdani to pluralities and majorities. Across Harlem and Hamilton Heights — gentrifying, relatively young, staunchly Democratic — I expect Mamdani to run up the score, building on his twenty five point margin in the Primary. Throughout Hudson Heights and the Park Terrace historic district, Cuomo, the scandal-scarred former Governor running as an Independent, will be bludgeoned by progressive, upper-middle class cooperators. Mamdani will even hold his own in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side, the young (and increasingly hip), renter-majority counter to the neighborhood’s old-moneyed elite. In Hell’s Kitchen and the East Village, neighborhoods I have deemed part of The Commie Corridor Jr, Mamdani will assuredly run-up-the-score, as he did four months prior. While Cuomo can temper Mamdani’s margins in the West Village and TriBeca, the former Governor lacks avenues to build majorities of his own, absent the Upper East and Upper West Side.

One year after the election of Donald Trump, Manhattan’s predominantly white-collar electorate will be fired up and motivated to Vote Blue No Matter, inevitably aiding Mamdani, the Democratic nominee. In the Primary, Mamdani won Manhattan by 11%. Expect that number to grow, perhaps significantly.

Manhattan Prediction: Mamdani 56%, Cuomo 40%, Sliwa 4%

Share

STATEN ISLAND

Across the racially diverse and working-class North Shore of Staten Island, one would never know that The Forgotten Borough routinely delivers more than two-thirds of its votes to Republicans each November.

Here, expect Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani to win the majority of most precincts, from gentrifying Tompkinsville to immigrant-heavy Port Richmond, in addition to working-class Black enclaves such as Mariner’s Harbor and Clifton. Mamdani will also excel at bringing out the North Shore’s growing Muslim and Arab community, and will likely outperform Kamala Harris across a handful of precincts.

The Staten Island Expressway splits the borough politically, between the bluer North Shore, a diverse polyglot of renters; and the redder Southern and Eastern Shores: Italian, union-dense, and homeowner-heavy. Across mid-Island, I expect Sliwa to perform well in middle-class Castleton Corners and the wealthier Todt Hill enclave, while Cuomo wins the Orthodox of Willowbrook. Some neighborhoods along the Eastern Shore, such as Dongan Hills and Arrochar (whose electorates are two-thirds White, one-third Hispanic & Asian), have the chance to be competitive between all three candidates. Farther south, I was conservative with my prediction, limiting Sliwa to pluralities along most of the Eastern Shore, communities where other Republicans have coasted to majorities. Yet, I have also been generous to the GOP nominee, as Cuomo wins only a handful of precincts outright, with Sliwa even approaching supermajority territory in Tottenville and Prince’s Bay. However, my least confident prediction point rests with Sliwa’s performance among white ethnic Republicans and Independents, specifically Italian Americans. Were Sliwa, consistently painted as a spoiler, to see his support collapse, Cuomo would stand to benefit handsomely in places like Staten Island, the most Italian county in the United States.

Brigid Bergin from Gothamist published an excellent article exploring this question about Staten Island’s southern shore, the most Republican-leaning state house district in the entire northeast. Here, turnout is among the highest of anywhere in New York City, only eclipsed by Brownstone Brooklyn. How many — given the choice of a non-viable Republican gadfly, a disgraced former Governor embodying the Democratic establishment’s old guard, and an unabashed democratic socialist — will simply stay home?

Staten Island Prediction: Mamdani 25%, Cuomo 37%, Sliwa 38%

Subscribe now

BROOKLYN

As the results pour in, you will be able to see The Commie Corridor from space.

From Greenpoint, once the Polish capital of New York, to Sunset Park, a gentrifying Mexican and Puerto Rican community adjacent to Greenwood Cemetery, Mamdani will win a supermajority of the vote. For miles, the Democratic nominee will not lose a single precinct, save for the Satmar Hasidim of South Williamsburg (more on them later), netting several hundreds of votes per block. At the end of the R train, Bay Ridge — once the only neighborhood outside of Staten Island to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson — is expected to decisively support Mamdani. Across upper-class Brownstone Brooklyn (Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Prospect Heights) where the proverbial No Kings Marchers (90-10: Harris vs. Trump) reign, the fresh-faced and dynamic Mamdani will clobber the listless and scandal-scarred Cuomo, amidst a deluge of blue wave voter turnout. Farther into Central Brooklyn, Mamdani’s pronounced advantage among younger voters, combined with the loyalty of Black voters to the Democratic Party, will carry him to significant majorities in Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Bedford-Stuyvesant; the bluest neighborhoods in New York City. As was the case in the Bronx, I expect Brooklyn’s African American and Afro Caribbean neighborhoods to split their votes between Mamdani and Cuomo, along the lines of age, tilting slightly towards the Democratic nominee. Once more, were Mamdani to consolidate support across middle-class Canarsie, working-class East Flatbush, and low-income Brownsville, he would be on pace for 60%+ in Kings County, the most vote-rich of all five boroughs.

While some leadership of the powerful anti-zionist Satmar Hasidim in South Williamsburg have declined to make an endorsement, sending a letter to the community protesting the “smears against Mamdani,” (despite an eleventh hour plea from both Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams), I expect the rank-and-file to still support either Cuomo or Sliwa. Amongst other Orthodox and Hasidic sects, in Midwood and Borough Park (and Crown Heights), I anticipate Cuomo’s margins to be even more pronounced. Along Ocean Parkway, home to the thousands of Sephardic Jews, expect Cuomo to earn a supermajority of support.

Across Southern Brooklyn’s mosaic, each candidate will find pockets of support. For Curtis Sliwa, the blood red blocks (Trump 80%+) of Russian-heavy Manhattan Beach, as well as Luna Park Towers and Trump Village (built by the President’s father) in nearby Coney Island, should serve as a bulwark against some of Cuomo’s late gains. Sheepshead Bay, reliably Republican, predominantly Russian and Chinese, should also be friendly to the GOP nominee; ditto for Marine Park, Gerritsen Beach, and Mill Basin, white ethnic waterfront communities (mostly Italian) that serve as time capsules to an older era. Andrew Cuomo should be able to peel away some votes here, particularly from immigrants from the former Soviet Union, as evidenced by Republican Council Member Inna Vernikov’s endorsement of the former Governor over the weekend. Mamdani, in turn, should continue building support among Brighton Beach’s emerging Pakistani Muslim population, partially offsetting the neighborhood’s heavy Republican lean. In Coney Island, the Democratic nominee should find solace among the Mexican working-class and local public housing residents. Across Gravesend Bay, I am eagerly anticipating the results of Bath Beach and Bensonhurst, Italian and Asian neighborhoods which Donald Trump won with more than 60% of the vote. Four years ago, Curtis Sliwa shocked the Democratic establishment by crushing Eric Adams here, foreshadowing the rightward realignment of the Chinese working and middle class. I consider both genuine Swing States, where each candidate has a chance. As of now, I expect both neighborhoods to split, block by block, between Mamdani and Sliwa (in neighboring Sunset Park East, Mamdani should lead, with Sliwa ahead in Dyker Heights). For Zohran Mamdani, the overlooked whims of the Chinese working-class will be one of many tests on Tuesday. Can he outrun Kamala Harris? I wouldn’t rule it out.

Brooklyn Prediction: Mamdani 59%, Cuomo 30%, Sliwa 10%

Subscribe now

QUEENS

We end where it all began: The World’s Borough.

“The People’s Republic of Astoria,” the heart and soul of The Commie Corridor, will inevitably turn out in large numbers to support their State Assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani. As will neighboring Long Island City and Sunnyside, a trinity of once white ethnic, now gentrifying neighborhoods that have helped remake New York City politics since 2018. Astoria Heights, the neighborhood’s last enclave of Greek homeowners, which seesaws between Democrats and Republicans in midterm and Presidential elections, should be an interesting battleground between the three leading candidates. The Commie Corridor, and Mamdani’s dominance, will extend farther east into Filipino and Bangladeshi Woodside and the multi-ethnic, immigrant polyglot of Jackson Heights (where 200+ languages are spoken), the site of Mamdani recent night workers press conference. In the civilly-engaged Historic District, Mamdani will crush Cuomo among older progressive white voters. Farther south, buried between cemeteries and expressways, I expect Sliwa to hold onto historically-Irish Maspeth and historically-Polish and German Middle Village, while Mamdani annihilates the competition in Ridgewood along the Brooklyn border.

Both Chinatowns in Queens, Elmhurst and Flushing, are enclaves where Mamdani will expand his head-to-head lead versus Cuomo. Flushing, in particular, should be a fascinating battleground between Mamdani and Sliwa, whereas Cuomo will almost assuredly finish a distant third. College Point, a nearby peninsula of working-and-middle-class Chinese and Hispanic immigrants, won decisively by Donald Trump last November, has a strong chance of being retaken by Mamdani. The incredible influence of South Asian voters, activated like never before through Mamdani’s campaign, can be seen along the dark blue of Hillside Avenue, which stretches from South Richmond Hill to Glen Oaks. One year ago, this corridor experienced one of the most pronounced rightward shifts in the nation. In the wake of Trump’s victory, Mamdani’s breakout moment as a little known candidate for mayor came from talking to voters here, listening to their concerns. Since then, the democratic socialist has worked tirelessly to bring those communities back into the Democratic Party tent with an affirmative, costs-of-living focused agenda. Tomorrow night, at the epicenter of the World’s Borough, Mamdani is poised to do just that.

In the older suburban neighborhoods across northeast Queens, Cuomo and Sliwa will battle for votes. Sliwa should hold MAGA-friendly Whitestone and build off his past Asian inroads across Linden Hill (home to conservative Chinese homeowners) and Bayside (the Korean middle-class); while the former Governor coalesces older, white Democrats in Bay Terrace, Douglaston, and Little Neck, in addition to running-up-the-score among Orthodox Jews in Fresh Meadows and Kew Gardens Hills.

Southeast Queens, the heart of the city’s Black middle-class, should be more amenable to Mamdani than in the Democratic Primary, where the well-known Cuomo easily outpaced his fresh-faced opponent. Here, I expect Mamdani to do best in-and-around Queens Village and Jamaica, which, in addition to their large Black populations, have growing South Asian communities; while struggling the most (a relative term) in places like Rochdale Village and Springfield Gardens, among the oldest developments in the city. If Mamdani, the Democratic nominee among the bluest neighborhoods in the United States, thrashes Cuomo among Black voters in Queens, a mandate will be inevitable.

Along the Rockaway Peninsula, from west to east, Sliwa should win the Republican stronghold of Breezy Point, a gated community of Irish civil servants and retirees, and neighboring Belle Harbor, both of whom delivered 70%+ of their votes to Donald Trump (expect Broad Channel and Howard Beach, fellow A train peninsulas, to follow suit). Rockaway Park, once known as the “Irish Riviera,” has the contours of a Swing State, split between Sliwa, Cuomo, and Mamdani. Farther east, in Arverne and Edgemere, the character of the peninsula changes, becoming more working-class and racially-diverse, to Mamdani’s benefit as the Democratic nominee. At the edge of the peninsula, bordering Nassau County, I anticipate the local Orthodox population of Bayswater and Far Rockaway will bloc vote for Cuomo.

Fittingly, I wanted to conclude with Corona, a working poor neighborhood of immigrants and non-English speakers, in the shadow of the #7 train. There is no place, over the last decade, where the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged more support, taken voters so consistently for granted, and failed so catastrophically. The people of Corona are The Forgotten People to many across the media class: ignored unless given a reason to care. Last November, Donald Trump won a majority of the vote in precincts that went for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton by more than 90%. The political establishment took notice, as did the national press, at least for a couple months. Now, especially around election season, we hear little about the plight of Corona; perhaps because this immigrant enclave, home to tens of thousands of non-citizens, has relatively few votes to contribute. Their fears of prostitution, ICE raids, and higher costs have not receded, but the attention has. Perhaps it is wishful thinking to say that Zohran Mamdani will do well here, that his economic message and I’m Fighting for You ethos speaks to the anxieties and fears pulsing through this oft-overlooked community. Everyone always wants the perfect ending. Maybe this is it.

Queens Prediction: Mamdani 49%, Cuomo 34%, Sliwa 16%

Subscribe now

FINAL PREDICTION

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani will win the General Election for New York City Mayor on Tuesday, November 4th — yet the question remains: by what margin?

Mamdani, amidst a bitter three-way campaign, faces both former Governor Andrew Cuomo, running on an Independent ballot line, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. While consistently leading by double digits, Mamdani’s support, gauged repeatedly by surveys, has remained stuck in the mid-40’s (not that the polls are accurate), allowing critics to charge that the democratic socialist has a hard ceiling. Thus, Mamdani not only needs to win, but cross the 50% threshold along the way, earning a symbolic majority of the vote, tantamount to a mandate for his ambitious agenda.

Hence, I have sorted all of New York City’s 365 neighborhoods into eleven categories:

• The Commie Corridor Sr: The young, leftist base that has reshaped New York City Politics over the past decade

• The Commie Corridor Jr: The next era of socialist electoral expansion

• Open Doors: Working-class South Asian and Muslim communities where Mamdani opened doors for The Left

• The Capitalist Corridor: The wealthiest blocks of Manhattan

• No Kings Marchers: Progressive middle-aged and older voters in Brownstone neighborhoods that broke overwhelmingly for Lander and Mamdani

• MSNBC Viewers: Liberals who split their votes between Mamdani, Cuomo, and Lander in the Primary

• The Black Belt: The most staunchly Democratic neighborhoods in America

• The Anti-Commie Corridor: Heavily Republican communities with large ancestral Eastern European populations

• The Forgotten People: Lower-income Black and Hispanic precincts where the Democratic Party is losing support

• Swing States: Neighborhoods where the margin was close between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Primary AND Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the Presidential Election

• Archie Bunker’s Descendants: The dwindling MAGA white ethnics that once anchored New York City’s electorate

Here is Mamdani’s path to a Mandate.

Subscribe now

THE COALITION OF THE IN-BETWEEN

The movement that carried Zohran Mamdani to victory in the Democratic Primary

The Commie Corridor Sr.

The young, leftist base that has reshaped New York City Politics over the past decade

Astoria, Long Island City, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy

2024 General: Harris 83%, Trump 17%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 66%, Cuomo 14%, Lander 12%

We’re back!

Since the Democratic Primary, The Commie Corridor, the phrase I coined to describe Mamdani’s left-leaning and youthful base, has taken on a life of its own: headlining a New York Times Op-Ed, featuring in a primetime CNN segment, receiving a citation in The New Yorker, and even a Wikipedia blurb.

On June 24th, this ideological cohort, stretching from Astoria to Sunset Park, powered the democratic socialist Mamdani to victory with record turnout and resounding margins. But can the new shorthand for the urban left keep up this raucous energy in November? After all, the youth are notoriously fickle, at least according to their Baby Boomer parents.

Young people, thus far, have made up a smaller percentage of the electorate than in the Democratic Primary, according to data released by the Board of Elections, leaving some to question whether the Mamdani-mania has worn off. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that Mamdani’s tent has only grown. In the past few months, Mamdani’s volunteer army, which numbered close to fifty-thousand in the Primary, has nearly doubled to ninety thousand plus. Along the G train line, there is no more popular politician in America than Zohran Mamdani.

In a bitterly contested and higher-turnout General Election, The Commie Corridor will have less influence than a closed Democratic Primary. Mamdani did an excellent job of maximizing his base, but how many more untapped votes are there left?

We’ll find out soon enough.

Electorate Estimation: 14-18%

Zohran needs to win almost 80% of the vote (75% is pretty good, too).

The Commie Corridor Jr.

The next era of progressive and socialist electoral expansion

Bay Ridge, East Village, Hamilton Heights, Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen, Kensington, LES

2024 General: Harris 79%, Trump 21%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 52%, Cuomo 28%, Lander 11%

Nonetheless, Mamdani’s dominance in June was not confined to the neighborhoods where the socialist left had already established an electoral foothold. In expanding the political map, Mamdani broadened the Left’s horizons: coalescing previously unrealized gains, creating a new electorate with a mass politics campaign, and providing a winning template for future candidates of his mold.

For youth and leftism is not confined to the shores of Long Island City and Greenpoint.

Throughout the hip and happening blocks of the East Village, Alphabet City and the Lower East Side, Mamdani routinely eclipsed 80% of the vote. Across bustling Hell’s Kitchen and gentrifying Hamilton Heights, the charismatic insurgent seldom lost a precinct. Ditto for Central Harlem, historically the Black political capital of the world, where Mamdani trounced Cuomo by more than twenty-percent. In Bay Ridge, a diversifying middle-class community at the end of the R train, Cuomo won five precincts — Mamdani won the other thirty five. None of these neighborhoods, where the democratic socialist won handily, have any DSA elected officials.

Perhaps that will soon change.

Electorate Estimation: 13-17%

Zohran needs to win approximately two-thirds of the vote.

Open Doors

South Asian & Muslim communities where Mamdani opened doors for The Left

City Line, Elmhurst, Jamaica Hills, South Richmond Hill, Westchester Square

2024 General: Harris 61%, Trump 39%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 55%, Cuomo 36%

Mamdani’s victory was not solely a triumph of The Commie Corridor, but under-represented and oft-overlooked New Yorkers: Muslims, South Asians, rent-stabilized tenants. Now, they are the fulcrum of the biggest political story in the country, with cable news pundits and national magazines have been forced to learn the plight of South Richmond Hill, Jamaica, and Westchester Square. A new story, bringing visibility to the lives of those too often ignored, written before our eyes.

One year ago, these working-class communities were the epicenter of the Democratic Party’s failure: lost to the couch, a write-in ballot, or Donald Trump himself.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, Mamdani’s breakout moment as a candidate for Mayor came from talking to voters on Hillside Avenue in Queens, a Bangladeshi corridor that saw one of the nation’s most pronounced shifts to the right. This was the start of an unprecedented level of outreach to South Asian and Muslim voters. Every Friday without fail, the first major Muslim candidate for Mayor would be at a different mosque for Jummah Prayers; on the night of Chaad Raat, the first South Asian man elected to the State Legislature crisscrossed Parkchester and Jamaica Hills. Four days before the Democratic Primary, Mamdani’s team canvassed a head-spinning 135 mosques after their weekly prayer session. On June 24th, as the results from the Board of Elections were broadcast onto a citywide precinct map, Hillside Avenue, emblazoned with Mamdani colors, was finally visible — in more ways than one.

In recent days, the Cuomo campaign and their surrogates have openly embraced Islamophobic rhetoric, intent to rile up their wealthy and zionist base with fear mongering. In doing so, they mirrored the tactics once used against Cuomo’s Italian and Catholic ancestors. Muslim and South Asian voters, ignored by the political class until this campaign, have been subjected to the anti-immigrant reaction that has, regrettably, been part of New York City’s storied history. Yet, every ethnic group has overcome the tide of inflammation on their path to political power. Now, on the precipice of history, these Open Doors can bring the race home for one of their own.

Electorate Estimation: 5-6%

Zohran needs to win greater than 60% (ideally two-thirds).

Subscribe now

VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO?

The modern Democratic Party: the donor elite, progressive activists, liberal media, and Black working-class. To what extent will they back their Party’s nominee?

The Capitalist Corridor

The wealthiest (and avowedly zionist) blocks of Manhattan

Upper East Side (Park, Madison, Fifth), Carnegie Hill, Sutton Place, Battery Park City

2024 General: Harris 78%, Trump 22%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 27%, Cuomo 45%, Lander 19%

Save for Orthodox and Hasidic enclaves, the staunchest resistance to Zohran Mamdani comes from the city’s well-heeled older residents. Between Park and Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side, stretching from Sutton Place to Carnegie Hill, age and affluence meet, culminating in a crescendo of support for Andrew Cuomo. Once the home of the Republican Party’s liberal wing, these billion dollar blocks have realigned towards the Democratic Party during the Trump era.

Here, where The Free Press and Wall Street Journal outrank The New York Times, expect both the Democratic nominee, a pro-Palestinian socialist committed to raising this taxes on the wealthy, and Republican nominee, an outer borough populist who frequently rails against the billionaire class, to struggle for votes. While never overwhelming in numbers at the ballot box, The Capitalist Corridor’s influence was felt elsewhere: in editorial boardrooms, multi-million dollar television advertisements, and Super PAC expenditures. For months, these precincts have been the heart of the anti-Mamdani resistance, which has fallen flat, despite its financial largesse.

Through the first few days of Early Voting, The Capitalist Corridor has led the way with respect to voter turnout: offering an early bright spot for Cuomo and mild warning sign for Mamdani. However, amongst the wealthiest, oldest, and most-educated blocks in the nation, where Mamdani hysteria has reached a fever pitch, the question remains: do working-class Black, Hispanic, and Asian New Yorkers feel the same?

Electorate Estimation: 6-7%

Zohran needs to win more than 25% of the vote.

No Kings Marchers

Progressive middle-aged and older voters in Brownstone neighborhoods that broke overwhelmingly for Mamdani and Lander

Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Carroll Gardens, Hudson Heights, Morningside Heights

2024 General: Harris 90%, Trump 10%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 47%, Cuomo 16%, Lander 30%

The Resistance 2.0

They are angry at the establishment and crave new leadership. They span all ages, embody the politics of New York Magazine and your local Indivisible chapter, and form the backbone of the small dollar donor class. And most importantly, for our purposes, they vote in large numbers. The No Kings Marchers may be wealthy, but affluence has not stymied their radicalization.

In 2016, most of these neighborhoods decisively backed Hillary Clinton, eschewing the democratic socialist rhetoric of Bernie Sanders; only to overwhelmingly reject Clinton acolyte (and former Governor) Andrew Cuomo in favor of Zohran Mamdani, a cadre member of NYC-DSA, less than a decade later. Not only had their ideology changed over time, the political environment had, too. A concurrence of crises, local and national — Trump, Gaza, Cuomo’s resignation, Adams’ corruption — pushed No Kings Marchers to their Party’s anti-establishment, left-leaning flank.

These civically-engaged communities, some of the only places where Kamala Harris did not bleed support last fall, came to the polls in droves this June, squashing Cuomo like a bug. On November 4th, I expect more of the same.

Electorate Estimation: 4-5%

Zohran needs to win more than 70% (honestly, he should aim for three-quarters)

MSNBC Viewers

Liberals who split their votes between Mamdani, Cuomo, and Lander in the Primary

Brooklyn Heights, Forest Hills, Spuyten Duyvil, Upper West Side, Yorkville

2024 General: Harris 81%, Trump 19%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 34%, Cuomo 34%, Lander 22%

The median New York Times reader and cable news watcher, MSNBC viewers are steadfastly liberal, but value technocracy in local government. Predominantly concentrated in Manhattan’s affluent enclaves, they seek candidates in the mold of Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Bloomberg. Instead, they were forced to choose between a democratic socialist, a scandal-scarred relic of the political establishment, and a well-meaning left-liberal with no chance of victory; the closest three-way margin between Mamdani, Lander, and Cuomo.

With the primary decided, many of these voters will fall in line behind the Democratic ticket. While raging debates over Israel may cost the nominee some support among Jewish Democrats, it should not be enough to temper Mamdani’s momentum.

Electorate Estimation: 11-13%

Zohran needs to win a decisive majority (60%+ ideally).

The Black Belt

The most staunchly Democratic neighborhoods in the United States

Brownsville, Canarsie, Co-op City, East Flatbush, Rochdale Village, Wakefield

2024 General: Harris 87%, Trump 13%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 26%, Cuomo 60%

In the Democratic Primary, Zohran Mamdani won White, Hispanic, and Asian voters; whereas the well-known Andrew Cuomo performed best among Black voters.

Across The Black Belt, spanning Canarsie in Brooklyn to Co-op City in the Bronx, Cuomo consistently outperformed Mamdani by double-digits. Nonetheless, the former Governor lacked comparable enthusiasm to that of Eric Adams four years prior, which manifested in lower voter turnout, which ultimately cost him dearly. Since then, Mamdani, armed with the Democratic nomination, has made steady and significant inroads with older Black voters. Now, according to some polls, the African-born Mamdani, who shares the story of his father’s Civil Rights era activism from the church pulpit every Sunday, is leading among African Americans.

No cohort could swing the election’s outcome more than The Black Belt. If Mamdani, the Democrat on the ballot among the nation’s bluest blocks, thrashes Cuomo among Black voters, a mandate will be inevitable. However, were Cuomo to keep the margin close, or even win the Black electorate for a second straight time (despite losing scores of institutional support), the race would narrow. At the very least, uncomfortable narratives about The Left’s struggles with the Black working-class would resurface.

Electorate Estimation: 11-13%

Zohran needs to win at least a plurality (48%+).

Share

OUTER BOROUGH NUANCE

A messy mosaic away from the neat narratives

The Anti-Commie Corridor

Heavily Republican communities with large ancestral Eastern European populations

Borough Park, Gravesend, Manhattan Beach, Midwood, Sheepshead Bay

2024 General: Harris 35%, Trump 65%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 23%, Cuomo 65%

It is not a question as to whether most of the various Hasidic, Sephardic, and Orthodox Jewish sects will vote for Andrew Cuomo, who has made “fighting antisemitism” (and Islamophobic fear mongering) a cornerstone of his campaign, but by what margin. However, while Cuomo has relentlessly courted influential rabbis, most Orthodox communities consistently vote for the Republican at the top of the ticket, a potentially boon to Curtis Sliwa. The Cuomo-Sliwa splits in Borough Park, Kew Gardens Hills, and Ocean Parkway — all of whom voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump — will make-or-break the former Governor’s third party bid.

Farther south, the Russians and Ukrainians of Southern Brooklyn — along the blood red blocks of Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach — are far more likely to remain with Sliwa, despite an eleventh hour push from Cuomo to earn their votes, who has cast the Republican nominee as a hopeless spoiler. Mamdani, on track to receive scant support, is hoping for a non-historic turnout against him.

Electorate Estimation: 6-8%

Zohran needs to win a non-negligible amount of the Satmar in South Williamsburg.

The Forgotten People

Lower-income Black & Hispanic voters where the Democratic Party is losing support

Bedford Park, Castle Hill, Highbridge, Hunts Point, Morrisania, Corona, Port Richmond

2024 General: Harris 72%, Trump 28%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 38%, Cuomo 50%

Last November, the Black and Brown working class dramatically shifted away from the Democratic Party. Only three counties in the country experienced a more pronounced swing to the right than The Bronx and Queens. Can Zohran Mamdani, who began his campaign talking to voters on Fordham Road, reverse these troubling trends?

In the Democratic Primary, Cuomo held most of these neighborhoods, albeit by a lesser margin than expected. Unsurprisingly, Cuomo did better in areas with higher Black populations, while Mamdani was stronger in more Hispanic precincts. The democratic socialist who ran on “freezing the rent” for two million rent stabilized tenants did best among the renter class more broadly; while the former Governor with universal name recognition swept every public and senior housing development.

Could Republican Curtis Sliwa, on the back of Trump’s gains last November, submit a surprisingly strong performance? In 2021, Sliwa performed quite well with Chinese immigrants in Southern Brooklyn and Eastern Queens, a precursor to the racial realignment that would come in the following years. However, the red beret Republican failed to make any discernible inroads with working-class Black and Hispanic voters, and, now hindered by a blue wave environment amidst the backlash to Trump 2.0, shows little signs of meaningful improvement four years later.

What percentage of these “lower propensity” voters will simply stay home?

Electorate Estimation: 8-10%

Zohran needs to win a plurality for victory, a majority for a mandate.

Archie Bunker’s Descendants

The dwindling MAGA white ethnics that once anchored New York City’s electorate

Breezy Point, Country Club, Howard Beach, Marine Park, New Dorp, Whitestone

2024 General: Harris 30%, Trump 70%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 35%, Cuomo 49%

In political commentary, the Archie Bunker vote, named after the fictional Queens homeowner from the 1970’s sitcom All in the Family, has become shorthand for the bloc of urban, white, working-class men. During the latter half of the 20th century, many neighborhoods across the outer boroughs (some of which, like Astoria and Throggs Neck, would be represented in Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decades later) were embodied by the blue-collar, Catholic, white ethnics (Italians, Irish, Greek, Polish, German); most of whom, despite identifying as Democrats, held relatively conservative views, particularly with respect to school busing and abortion.

For decades, the Archie Bunker bloc was the pre-eminent force shaping the contours of New York City politics. After uniting behind their fellow “stoop sitter,” Mario Procaccino, only to fall short to “limousine liberal” John Lindsay, the Archie Bunker vote became a key piece of Ed Koch’s three term coalition, a marriage of white conservatives and reactionary liberals, before migrating to Republican Rudy Giuliani, at the height of racial backlash, and later Michael Bloomberg, foreshadowing the Party realignment that would soon plague the national Democratic Party.

However, since the election of Bill de Blasio, Bunker’s Descendants, now a generation removed from their political heydey, have lacked the ability to influence municipal elections. De Blasio, a Park Slope liberal with a penchant for YMCA workouts and tardiness, routinely tarred and feathered by The New York Post, was particularly offensive to these voters. Yet every November, Bunker’s Descendants cried out in protest, only to be trounced at the ballot box, their votes never adding up to more than thirty percent; an island of red in a deep blue city. As the number of Bunker’s Descendants dwindled year-after-year, the consequence of age and atrophy, it appeared as though their days of influencing New York City elections were over.

Not yet. Amidst the most competitive Mayoral election in sixteen years, Bunker’s Descendants are poised to play a meaningful role in shaping the outcome. On these MAGA-friendly blocks, most will pull the lever for fellow Republican Curtis Sliwa, despite his impossibly long odds of victory. However, some (to what extent remains unknown), will be tempted to not “waste” their vote, and bet on Andrew Cuomo (once a darling of white ethnic New York), the Italian Catholic who can flawlessly pronounce “Kosciuzko.” Ultimately, for Cuomo to have a fighting chance, he will need to peel away a significant percentage of Bunker’s Descendants from Sliwa.

Electorate Estimation: 8-10%

Zohran needs to win a few precincts that voted for Trump (for the narrative war).

Swing States

Neighborhoods where the margin was close between Cuomo and Mamdani in the Democratic Primary AND Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the Presidential Election

Bath Beach, College Point, City Island, Coney Island, Morris Park, Glendale

2024 General: Harris 50%, Trump 50%

2025 Primary: Mamdani 42%, Cuomo 43%

An eclectic mix of Open Doors, Archie Bunker’s Descendants, and Forgotten People (with some Commie Corridor Jr. sprinkled in), the Swing States are New York City’s most interesting blocks, neatly split at both the national and local level.

Here, it will come down to turning out the base. Curtis Sliwa is counting on registered Republicans sticking with their nominee, and building on his inroads with East Asian voters from four years ago; Andrew Cuomo hopes to peel off Irish and Italian Republicans from Sliwa, activate moderate Democrats, and win a sizable chunk of Independents; Zohran Mamdani continues to rely on young voters, straight ticket Democrats (of all races), and his (difficult to poll) working-class coalition.

For Andrew Cuomo to close the gap versus the frontrunner, the former Governor will have to perform far better across these unique pockets than he did during the primary. Here, Cuomo has a greater chance of finishing third, behind Mamdani and Sliwa, than winning a plurality. On the contrary, a strong performance throughout the Swing States from Zohran Mamdani would go a long way in showcasing the appeal of economic populism with working-class voters in politically “purple” areas.

Can Mamdani, who has surpassed expectations at every turn, deliver one last time?

Electorate Estimation: 7-9%

Zohran needs to win around 40%.

Subscribe now

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

When Andrew Cuomo stepped onto the debate stage Wednesday night, he needed a strong performance to maintain any hope of an improbable upset on November 4th.

Cuomo, heavily favored in the Democratic Primary, had been felled in dramatic and humiliating fashion by a gifted upstart less than half his age. Yet, despite his thirteen point drubbing in June, the former Governor of New York soldiered onto the General Election, running as an Independent, determined to rewrite his political obituary.

Zohran Mamdani, his opponent, was the anti-Cuomo. Where the career politician avoided unscripted interactions and retail politics altogether, the democratic socialist insurgent, who had spent a small lifetime knocking doors, relished any chance to talk to voters. When the son of Albany stuck to the familiar playbook of the Democratic Party establishment and its attendant consultant class, the son of an acclaimed filmmaker leaned into creativity and belonging, reinventing the art of campaigning along the way. And, for what the thirty-three year old lacked in experience, he made up for with youthful energy and earnest charisma, compared to his scandal-scarred and overly-cautious opponent. If Mamdani was Michael Jordan, a supremely talented overachiever, then Cuomo was Karl Malone, always coming up short in the clutch.

With Election Day around the corner, polls showed Cuomo trailing Mamdani by double-digits.

The debate was his last chance.

Cuomo’s entrance was serenaded by bagpipes, played by volunteers wearing all Black. After falling flat in the previous debate, the evening had all the makings of a funeral for his storied career.

Nonetheless, Cuomo started out strong, routinely emphasizing Mamdani’s lack of experience. “You’ve never even introduced a bill on housing,” he asserted, to steady applause. Asked his position on the three ballot measures (Questions 2-4), Mamdani, unwilling to irk the Democratic City Council or anger the influential and well-funded pro-housing forces in the city, pointedly refused to answer the question. The anti-politician was caught being a politician. This was followed by another bruising exchange for the Democratic nominee, as Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa took turns pillorying Mamdani for refusing to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Through the first 40 minutes, the listless Cuomo was full of life, the dynamic Mamdani on the defensive.

However, Mamdani soon turned the tide. After Cuomo complained about a lack of state funding for housing, Mamdani effortlessly trapped his opponent: “We just had a former Governor say in his own words that ‘the city is getting screwed by the state.’ WHO was leading the state? It was YOU.”

Since the Democratic Primary, Cuomo, now a longshot third party candidate, has avoided the same degree of media scrutiny he experienced prior to the Primary, as Mamdani, the heavily-favored Democratic nominee, has become the main source of press attention and vetting. Thus, in the cross-examination portion of the debate, Mamdani shined the light back on Cuomo’s skeletons, none more damning than his alleged sexual harassment of female state employees.

“Mr. Cuomo, in 2021, thirteen different women who worked in your administration credibly accused you of sexual harassment. One of those women, Charlotte Bennett, is here in the audience this evening. You sought to access her private gynecological records. She cannot speak because you launched a defamation case against her. I, however, can speak. What do you say to the thirteen women that you sexually harassed?” — Zohran Mamdani

“If you want to be in government, then you have to be serious and mature…” his opponent stammered, before pivoting. The arrogant and heartless Cuomo was back.

Nonetheless, the evening was a rare bright spot in an otherwise forgettable campaign. The political class agreed, describing the former Governor’s showing as “much better than last time,” and even “pretty good.”

However, mere moments after the debate concluded, almost no one was talking about Andrew Cuomo’s performance, for their attention was focused elsewhere…

Subscribe now

It has been bewildering to watch Andrew Cuomo, the son of a beloved three-term Governor, the most powerful man in New York State for a decade, and the talk of the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic, reduced to such a diminished state.

It is not so much that the sixty-seven year old Cuomo is old, but more that his understanding of political power, media, the Democratic Party, and New York City are ancient — despite spending a lifetime in the arena.

After the primary debacle, Cuomo’s institutional support abandoned him in droves. Immediately, the city’s largest labor unions defected to the Democratic nominee who would soon negotiate their contracts. They were followed by many elected officials, particularly those who, fearing a primary challenge from the Democratic Socialists of America, watched Mamdani handily win their districts. His high dollar consultants, eager to preserve their other business before the city, left the campaign (some of whom leaked internal conversations to the press in the process). Even billionaire Bill Ackman, the perfect caricature of the feckless and entitled anti-Mamdani coalition, said that Cuomo was too “low energy” to continue. Only a handful of the former Governor’s most loyal and sycophantic aides stayed on for the General. Their autopsy was convenient and incomplete: Cuomo was too cautious, neglected retail politics, and remained anonymous on social media. After watching the Biden debacle last summer, Cuomo ran an equally moribund campaign — no questions, few public appearances, rooted in opposition rather than affirmation — save for the senility. There were little to no reflection on Cuomo’s losing and lacking message: that the city was a hellscape only he could save, despite half a lifetime spent in the suburbs and Manhattan’s toniest enclaves. No, with a few simple tweaks and increased media scrutiny of Mamdani, the listless Cuomo could be competitive in November. “He’s read the polling,” they insisted. But could an old dog learn new tricks?

The answer was resoundingly no. For a couple weeks, Cuomo made a series of direct-to-camera videos in Mamdani’s mold — visiting seniors in Co-op City, showcasing his love of muscle cars, choosing a campaign theme song with his daughter — in an attempt to humanize the man with terrible favorability ratings. However, these productions were abandoned quickly, replaced by AI slop: somehow even more hollow and cringe. Now, Cuomo outsources his social media to a handful of “meme lords” and “comedy influencers,” each more controversial than the last, in a futile and pathetic attempt to manufacture attention. Governor Cuomo, who once ruled New York State with an iron fist, would have never tolerated such nonsense.

Absent genuine enthusiasm, desperately needing to counter Mamdani’s “emotional momentum,” Cuomo’s only move was to try and consolidate the field and take his chances with the older, more politically moderate General Election. The problem was that neither Eric Adams nor Curtis Sliwa wanted to defer to the man who had been so handily defeated months earlier. For this was Andrew Cuomo’s modus operandi, pushing aside those who stood in the way of his ambition. Twenty years ago, on the brink of salvaging his career, Cuomo and his allies forced Charlie King out of the Democratic Primary for Attorney General, so as not to split the Black vote. As AG, Cuomo frequently marginalized New York’s first Black Governor, David Paterson; wounded by scandal, the incumbent eschewed re-election, clearing the deck for Cuomo to ascend to the state’s top post. No wonder his contemporaries believed he was arrogant and entitled. Two aligned operatives, pollster Mark Penn and former Council President Andrew Stein, personally briefed President Donald Trump on Cuomo’s chances versus Mamdani in a one-on-one race, a secret plot unearthed by The New York Times. The saga left Cuomo damaged by a pseudo-association with the unpopular GOP President in overwhelmingly liberal New York City, without a comparable boost among conservatives. And, while Adams eventually dropped out (but not before ripping Cuomo in a bitter, live televised rant outside of Gracie Mansion), Sliwa is adamant he would only leave the race in a body bag. When asked on WABC whether he would consider working for a Cuomo administration, Sliwa asserted he would “rather be tortured and murdered than work for Andrew Cuomo,” comparing the experience to the final scene of Braveheart. Instead of marginalizing Sliwa’s support, the GOP nominee experienced a boost in the polls, as the red beret wearing Republican gleefully cast Cuomo as an avatar of political insiders and the billionaire class. As Governor, Cuomo could ruthlessly bully others, for he had no true peers, only subordinates; but as a retread candidate with no power, he cannot.

With Early Voting beginning tomorrow, the math is not in the former Governor’s favor:

For every one vote Andrew Cuomo gains from the bungalows of Breezy Point, a gated community of conservative Irish civil servants, or the single family homes of Throggs Neck, home to the Puerto Rican and white ethnic homeowner class; he loses two votes to Zohran Mamdani on the Upper West Side, historically-Jewish and steadfastly liberal, or the working-class Caribbean neighborhoods of East Flatbush and Canarsie, among the bluest blocks in the United States. Mamdani is poised to crush Cuomo in white-collar Manhattan and Brooklyn, the most vote-rich and Democrat-leaning boroughs of New York City. A bloodbath, even more pronounced than the Primary, will commence throughout the Commie Corridor. The age splits between Mamdani, 34, and Cuomo, 67, will only widen; with the former annihilating the latter among voters under-45 (close to half of the electorate last November). The alienated and disillusioned working-class masses of the Bronx and Queens have little incentive to turn out for the former Governor, an avatar of the dysfunctional status quo and loathed political establishment. Were the city’s demographics fixed in 2001, Cuomo would be the heavy favorite; in 2025, he has a snowball’s chance in hell.

To pull off an improbable upset, Cuomo, not Mamdani, will need to expand the electorate. However, given Cuomo’s supporters have the lowest enthusiasm (by far) of any major candidate, that will prove extremely difficult.

His solution? Fear.

Share

Halfway through the debate, Cuomo’s campaign posted — and quickly deleted — an AI-generated ad depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani,” where a shoplifting Black man in a keffiyeh, a domestic abuser, a pimp, a drug dealer, and a drunk driver collectively declare their support for Mamdani. The video also portrayed Mamdani eating rice with his hands, a “common practice among South Asians that has been frequently invoked by the right to mock Mr. Mamdani,” according to The New York Times. The final shot was New York City in smoldering ruins, overlaid with an ominous “PAID FOR BY CUOMO NYC” tag. Hours later, another TV ad, from a pro-Cuomo, business-funded super PAC, placed “JIHAD ON NYC” over Mamdani’s face.

As the Internet reacted to the former Governor’s most recent blunder, he sped away to Madison Square Garden, sitting courtside next to incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who quit the race weeks earlier. After calling the former Governor “a snake and a liar,” Adams endorsed Cuomo the following day. If Cuomo fanned the flames of Islamophobia, his newest ally poured gasoline on the fire, telling reporters: “New York can’t be Europe, you see what is playing out in other countries because of Islamic extremism. Those Islamic extremisms that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying communities in Germany, that have taken over the logical thinking.”

Yesterday morning, Cuomo, talking to conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg, asked: “God forbid, another 9/11 — can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?”

“He’d be cheering,” Rosenberg responded. Cuomo, who never visited a mosque during his decade-long tenure as Governor, paused and chuckled before saying, “That’s another problem.”

The episode marked the natural conclusion of a monthslong escalation of Cuomo’s rhetoric with respect to Mamdani’s faith, talking points which have since been echoed by JD Vance, Elon Musk, and white nationalists across the country.

Subscribe now

Fifty years ago, New York City’s Italian population routinely faced discrimination. The patrician press, dominated by progressive WASPs, derided the more conservative Italians as uncouth and reactionary. They lacked a foothold in the labor movement: the Police Department and Transit Workers Union were tightly controlled by Irish bosses; while the United Federation of Teachers was overwhelmingly Jewish. The backbone of the lower and middle homeowner class, Italian Americans did not receive the government welfare of the Black and Puerto Rican underclass, nor the media clout of the upper-middle class intelligentsia. While Manhattan was filled with “the beautiful people,” the Outer Boroughs were home to the “stoop sitters.”

During the tumultuous period of the late 60’s and 70’s, two Italian Americans ran for Mayor of New York City: Mario Procaccino and Mario Cuomo.

They could not have been more different.

Procaccino, the son of a shoemaker who infamously coined the term “limousine liberal,” was far more than a candidate of cultural grievance. Stoking the flames of white working-class resentments, Procaccino trafficked in apocalyptic rhetoric with respect to the city’s poorest residents, overwhelmingly people of color, slowly moving beyond redlined ghettos into what were previously solely White neighborhoods. After Black and Puerto Rican students at City College went on a seventeen day strike, Procaccino ran commercials depicting the college in West Harlem burning down from a riot. New York’s elite liberal institutions, newspapers and celebrities, portrayed Procaccino as a caricature of himself for a series of embarrassing gaffes (tinged with anti-Italian prejudice). In defeat, Procaccino claimed the election was stolen.

Cuomo, running for Mayor in 1977, shattered many of these stereotypes, breaking barriers for Italian Americans in New York City. A well-respected lawyer, Cuomo was regarded as a bridge builder, tasked with managing tensions during polarizing housing fights in Forest Hills and Corona, both middle class white neighborhoods. As a Democrat, he won the votes of many who also cast ballots for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, without forsaking his liberal conscience. At great cost to his political ambitions, Cuomo eschewed reactionary rhetoric (his opponent regularly railed against “poverty pimps,” demeaning the welfare system), and famously declined to support the Death Penalty (a key factor cited in his defeat to Ed Koch, who did).

There are many parallels between the Italians of twentieth century New York and the city’s present-day Muslim community. Both established an economic foothold in the small merchant class, which the most fortunate parlayed into homeownership in the outer boroughs. Owing to the more traditional values espoused by their religion, Italians and Muslims, concerned with safety and crime, have been described as “moderate” and “conservative,” both culturally and politically, in a city where liberalism has always reigned. Italians and Muslims watched their festivals and gatherings broken up by the police, only to be told they were not intentionally targeted on the basis of their darker skin. Despite consistently growing, each remained an overlooked piece of the local political tapestry, until one of their own emerged to topple the pre-existing machine. And, when their leading politicians were maligned on account of their faith or cultural orientation, many throughout the Democratic Party establishment, past and present, remained silent. John Lindsay could not pronounce (or deliberately butchered) “PRO-CAC-CINO,” the same way Andrew Cuomo fails to pronounce “M-A-M-D-A-N-I”.

During his opening statement at the debate, Andrew Cuomo promised to “end the hate mongering and division that is tearing this city apart, because that is not who we are as New Yorkers.” Those words were tested yesterday, and Cuomo failed to channel the high-minded and inclusive prose of his father, instead opting for the bigoted and inflammatory rhetoric of Procaccino, lacking an affirmative message of his own. Similar behavior and tactics to those employed by Cuomo and his surrogates over the past 24 hours were once used to disparage and discredit his ancestors.

Our city has always been a home to new immigrants, who have come to the five boroughs in search of opportunity, hoping to be judged by the content of their character, rather than their skin color or religion. Let’s keep it that way.

For the New York City project will endure. Andrew Cuomo’s career will not.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

In 1895, the seafaring residents of City Island — a quiet, Bronx neighborhood adrift Eastchester Bay and the Long Island Sound — were presented with a choice: remain in Westchester County, or join New York City.

With 900 ballots cast, New York City defeated Westchester County by two votes. In exchange, City Island received a bridge to the mainland.

Even one-hundred and thirty years ago, City Island was a swing state.

Hailed as a “working man’s Nantucket” by The New York Times or the “Bronx Hamptons” in the eyes of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, City Island is one of the only neighborhoods in New York City where one can spot Black Lives Matter and Thin Blue Line flags on the same street. Last November, single family detached homes alternated lawn signs in support of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump; with the Democratic nominee ultimately prevailing: 1,138 votes to 990.

While trending left at the national level (Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, and Biden all won), the Island consistently leans right at the local level. In fact, no Democrat candidate for Mayor has won City Island in forty years. Inside an Irish watering hole at the heart of the Island’s “downtown,” two women, both registered Democrats, lament the “crapshoot” of choices on November’s ballot: Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

“I want Michael Bloomberg back,” says one. “I loved Rudy Giuliani, but now he’s a kook,” replies the other. Both loathe Donald Trump, plan to vote for Kristy Marmorato (the area’s Republican Council Member), but are undecided on the Mayoral race: “I’ll know when I walk into the booth,” a familiar sentiment heard across the Island.

And that is exactly why I ventured to this seaside village in the Bronx. In the majority of New York City’s 365 neighborhoods, one candidate (maybe two) will be competitive this November, owed to partisanship and demographics. City Island, with a unique and diverse political culture (home to civil servants, resistance liberals, Archie Bunker boomers, and everything in between), remains the exception: possessing discernible pockets of support for Mamdani, Cuomo, and Sliwa.

Despite this eclectic tapestry, there is little scholarship about City Island, much less its fascinating politics, reducing the Island’s footprint to a handful of articles (primarily real estate focused). Here, I hope to change that.

From an early age, civic engagement is fostered across City Island, bred by the burning desire to “protect” the Island’s fragile character — from crime, summer traffic, environmental catastrophe, or runaway development.

For generations of Islanders, guarding against the latter has been a time-tested tradition, the roots of which can be traced back centuries. Dating back to 1761, City Island has been targeted for development. August Belmont, a political insider who founded the Belmont Stakes, “quietly” tried to buy up the Island’s precious real estate, intrigued by the possibility of developing a horse racing center. When the Islanders became privy to Belmont’s intentions, they came together to keep prices out of the financier’s vast reach, ultimately thwarting his effort. Nor would it be the last time Islanders organized to preserve their nautical colony, as the preceding centuries saw “exclusive resorts, enclaves for wealthy yachtsmen, and an amusement park” attempt to establish a foothold on the Island, only to suffer similar fates. City Island’s first apartment complex, the rent-controlled Pickwick Terrace, was built in 1964, totalling all of seven stories. A decade later, height restrictions were imposed capping future development at three stories. Low density is prized, and rezonings are unwelcome.

A coastal community, to say the least, climate resilience and conservation are far from theoretical to Islanders. Runoff from the Hutchinson River has polluted the surrounding channels, threatening the long-term health of those who grew up swimming in said waterways. Memories of Hurricane Sandy endure, while an ominous billboard looms — depicting waves crashing onto City Island in the year 2050, foreshadowing the next generation of flooding — at the heart of the main thoroughfare. Several organizations, including City Island Rising and the Oyster Project, have spawned to protect this precarious ecosystem.

This creates an interesting bi-partisan dynamic, where the Island’s political left, right, and center are relatively united against development (historically conservative), but also care about climate resilience (traditionally liberal). John Doyle, an outspoken Democratic District Leader, attributed these non-partisan attitudes, in an era defined by polarization, to the Island’s community-oriented ethos: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a D or R, when the floods come we’re all F’d.” However, the past decade has surfaced underlying tensions among this close-knit neighborhood. At the Irish pub, the liberal Democrats (bespectacled women) gravitated to one side, while the MAGA-aligned Republicans (gruff older men) drifted to the other. When Republican politicians visit the Island, they often frequent City Island Diner; whereas Democratic candidates opt for Clipper Coffee. “When I was growing up,” a Catholic Democrat and thirty year resident told me, “no one would even ask you who you voted for, it just was not polite.”

Subscribe now

During the twentieth century, what was once a blue-collar fishing village, where residents lived and worked on the Island, gradually became a residential community with “far more people in professional and managerial jobs than in craft and repair operations.” City Islanders have always rejoiced in their relative anonymity, which had helped keep their precious sanctuary affordable. The slow erosion of the local maritime economy, coupled with the steady outmigration of Italians, Irish, and Germans from other Bronx neighborhoods (fueled by white flight in the 60s and the fiscal crisis in the 70s), lifted the veil of secrecy that once shielded City Island from the speculative outside world. Today, less than ten-percent of residents work on the Island, almost exclusively in the small businesses that line City Island Avenue.

This arc mirrors a political transition. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried for a fourth term versus New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the architect of the New Deal won 61% in New York City; but amongst the white working-class shipbuilders of City Island, his Republican opponent took more than two-thirds of the vote (some Italians resented FDR for going to war with fascist Italy). Patriotism and patriarchy are integral to the identity of the Island’s white ethnic families. The American flag is omnipresent on City Island: a staple of every front yard, an homage to achieving the middle-class dream of homeownership, and a reminder of the generations of Islanders who were raised in the shadow of the second World War.

After World War II, City Island remained a GOP stronghold for decades, delivering majorities to Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush. The wartime economy of ship building steadily declined; when the final boatyard closed in 1982, gated condominiums, fittingly named The Boatyard, were swiftly built atop the remnants, embodying the Island’s economic transition. On the municipal level, the Republican Party prevailed as well. Sixty years ago, liberal Republican John Lindsay narrowly won City Island, while William F. Buckley, the architect of modern conservatism, finished a close second. Four years later, after Lindsay’s liberalism was rejected by the GOP faithful, much of the blue collar Bronx, in closer proximity to racial encroachment, backed conservative Democrat Mario Procaccino, the candidate whose rhetoric, inflammatory and apocalyptic, matched their own emotion. City Islanders, sequestered from the anxiety of the mainland, delivered a plurality of their votes to the patrician John Marchi, the soft spoken Republican nominee from Staten Island. These party trend lines held through the late 80s, with notable and instructive exceptions for Italian-American Democrats, such as Mario Biaggi and Mario Cuomo. “I loved Mario Cuomo and wanted him on the Supreme Court,” said a late Gen-X Democrat and Muscle Sucker (the colloquial name given to those who move to City Island; Clam Diggers are born on the Island).

“I wish his son was more like him. Mario was a very compassionate human being.”

As City Island became more of a “bedroom community” and the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism, the national trends shifted. Since 1992, every Democratic candidate for President has won City Island, a remarkable reversal after generations of consistent Republican support dating back to the Great Depression. Over the last decade, as the Hispanic and Asian working-class of the five boroughs have shifted dramatically to the right, City Island remained one of a handful of neighborhoods to move to the left, mirroring upper middle-class and suburban shifts across the country.

Nonetheless, City Island maintained its red hue on the municipal level, delivering substantial mandates to Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in six consecutive elections. Even when Bill de Blasio consecutively won 73% and 66% of the citywide vote, the Park Slope Democrat failed to win a plurality on City Island. No Democratic candidate for Mayor has won City Island since Ed Koch in 1985. To this day, when politics is mentioned, many yearn for Giuliani and Bloomberg. Even as the national environment has become more polarized, City Islanders have continued to split their tickets in local, state, and federal elections; when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by fifteen percent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lost to Island-native John Cummings down the ballot. In this seaside village of no more than forty-five hundred residents, the quality and longevity of one’s relationships can transcend political ideology.

“City Island is the New Hampshire of the Bronx,” Doyle tells me, “people here like to get a feel for the candidates.” Four years ago, several mayoral candidates visited City Island, including second-place finisher Kathryn Garcia, who ultimately won seventy-five percent of the Island’s voters (the technocratic Garcia is closer to the Island’s ideological median than anyone in the current field). Those closely involved in City Island politics, both Democrat and Republican, cannot recall an instance when Andrew Cuomo has ever visited their nautical colony. In fact, the only major candidate for mayor to visit City Island this cycle has been Zohran Mamdani.

In March, Mamdani cut one of his signature videos, visiting a handful of small businesses: Clipper’s Coffee, Cinema on the Sound, and Dan’s Parents House (a phenomenal toy store). “That was the most views on social media we have ever received,” the owner of both the coffee shop and cinema where Mamdani appeared, told me. The cinema, in particular, (one of only three in the Bronx) received an uptick in business following Mamdani’s video, which received more than half-a-million views. Mamdani was unknown when he first made landfall on City Island, but his video quickly made the rounds to residents. In June’s Democratic Primary, the well-known Cuomo barely edged Mamdani — 52% to 48% — across the Island.

“I liked his answer in the debate, when they asked each candidate where they would visit as mayor,” a Millennial Democrat told me, “and he said ‘I’m going to stay in New York City.’” The man continued, “It was refreshing to hear that. Our City Council Member just came back from a trip to Israel. She represents Throggs Neck, Country Club and Pelham Bay — why is she visiting Israel?”

In many respects, Mamdani represents a new era of City Island politics, brewing since Donald Trump was first elected. Unlike other “swing state” neighborhoods in New York City, the Democratic electorate on City Island is relatively liberal, a consequence of generation. The inflection point came in 2018, when progressive Alessandra Biaggi challenged State Senate incumbent Jeff Klein, who brokered a controversial power sharing agreement with Republicans in the state legislature. Local Democrats, rallied by the neighborhood’s Indivisible chapter, put off by Klein’s ties to the GOP, and catalyzed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory months earlier, helped deliver City Island to the progressive insurgent by a two-to-one margin. Many of the older Italian voters, erstwhile loyal to Klein, their ethnic brethren, had left the Democratic Party.

Alessandra’s grandfather, Mario Biaggi, was beloved on City Island during his two decades in Congress. A decorated former police officer who was shot eleven times in the line of duty, the tough-talking Mario was a fixture of the East Bronx, running on the Democrat, Republican, and Conservative Party ballot lines. “A law-and-order conservative who supported labor, Israel and laws to crack down on drugs, lift local businesses, and help families and the elderly,” Biaggi embodied the spirit of his Italian and Irish working-class constituents. When forced to resign from the House of Representatives following multiple felony convictions for corruption, Biaggi remained on the ballot in both the Primary and General Election. Declining to campaign altogether, the disgraced Biaggi was handily defeated. However, the ex-cop still won City Island, in both the Primary and the General Election, whose loyal residents still held a four-hundred person rally for the scandal-scarred icon on the eve of the vote.

If Mario understood the zeitgeist of City Island’s old guard, law-and-order conservatives relentlessly focused on local concerns; Alessandra embodied the next generation, unabashedly liberal in an era shaped by national politics.

City Island remains rich in union density — nurses, carpenters, teachers — traditional hallmarks of the Democratic electorate, the vast majority of whose leadership has endorsed Mamdani. On the big development question of the day, whether or not to add a NYC Ferry stop to the Island, Mamdani is supportive, as is much of the local business community and the younger, white-collar professionals who work in Manhattan. Once greater than 95% white, the City Island of today is more racially diverse than ever. While Italian delicatessens and Irish pubs can still be found, one will not have to venture far to find a landmark of Bronx life, the Puerto Rican flag. Latinos — once relegated to visiting the Island during crowded weekends or working the handful of restaurant, landscaping, or boatyard jobs available year-round — now account for one-quarter of City Island’s population, whose votes Mamdani won by double-digits in the Primary. Pride flags are commonplace in small businesses and front yards. There is even a quasi-hipster coffee shop and a yoga studio. The shared values of Islanders — inherent skepticism of real estate development (and those who take their campaign contributions), firsthand concern with respect to climate change, and embrace of public education (PS 175 is one of the best rated K-8 schools in the Bronx) — align with key issues championed by progressives like Mamdani.

Nonetheless, the tide has not turned definitively in Mamdani’s favor. Familiar skepticism (“how will he pay for that?”) is common among older Democrats (“he’s making promises he can’t keep”), while Republicans shudder, afraid the property taxes on their semi-detached homes will be increased (“he wants to raise taxes only in white neighborhoods”). City Island is home to a small but engaged Jewish population, many of whom worship at Temple Beth El (one of the only Bronx synagogues outside of Riverdale). According to Ryan Grim’s reporting in The Squad, after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voted against funding the Iron Dome, “rabbis from City Island who were typically progressive and on her side were sending out mass emails warning that her vote would put people’s lives at risk. She had even been banned from attending High Holidays in her district.” Years later, as tensions with respect to Israel and Palestine have risen precipitously, one can assume the folks who organized against Ocasio-Cortez did not vote for the anti-zionist Mamdani in June. Nor have Mamdani’s past statements in favor of “defunding” the police helped in a community home to hundreds of retired police officers. As Mamdani-mania grips the nation, many City Islanders, highly informed and politically savvy, still don’t know what to make of the man who has captured America’s attention. “He seems sincere,” one woman, 64, tells me, gesturing towards a television broadcast of News 12 The Bronx, showing Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul speaking at a press conference. “You never know whether what they’re saying about him is just fear mongering,” she admits. But, in the quest to win the hearts and minds of City Islanders, Zohran Mamdani’s stiffest competition may not come from fellow Democrat (turned Independent) Andrew Cuomo, but Republican Curtis Sliwa.

In the eyes of the GOP faithful, Sliwa has been a staple of the East Bronx, the borough’s only Republican outpost, for years. Before the infamous “Hochulmander” map was overturned by the courts, he weighed a move to the Bronx to run for Congress. Four years ago, Sliwa won 50% of the City Island vote as the Republican nominee, finishing five points ahead of Eric Adams, albeit in a very low turnout General Election. And, despite Republicans only accounting for 24% of the Island’s registered voters, Donald Trump’s consistent 45%+ performance on City Island indicates that Curtis Sliwa has the highest floor of any candidate. Andrew Cuomo has attempted to court Republican voters, casting Sliwa as a hopeless spoiler, in the hope of coalescing the anti-Mamdani electorate; according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, Cuomo is winning 37% of Republicans, compared to Sliwa’s 54%. If City Island is any bellwether, that plan remains flawed, if not doomed entirely. For among City Island’s Republicans, appetite for Cuomo is scant. “He’s not a predator, but he’s a sleezeball” grumbled one Italian Boomer, a GOP loyalist. Another spent months in a nursing home during the pandemic, and swore off Cuomo then and there. Frank Ramftl, the Republican District Leader, told me he is sticking by Sliwa, and his Republican neighbors are doing the same: “Cuomo got us into this mess, he signed the bail reform laws.” His Democratic counterpart, Doyle told me, “40% of City Island is MAGA; unless there is a personal appeal from Trump on Cuomo’s behalf, those folks will vote for Sliwa.” Sliwa has raised more money, from more donors, on City Island than both Mamdani and Cuomo combined. Even among Trump-hating Democrats, opinions of Sliwa were mixed. “He cleaned up the subway,” one woman told me, referencing his founding of the Guardian Angels, while another dismissed the political gadfly and his signature red-beret: “Sliwa is not a governing person.”

Herein reveals Andrew Cuomo’s best chance. Many Democrats — liberals, moderates, conservatives — tell me they “liked Cuomo as Governor,” fondly remember his daily briefings during the pandemic, and voted for him in the Primary. Indeed, when voters are asked who has the “right kind of experience to be mayor,” Cuomo enjoys a wide lead over Mamdani: 72% to 39%. Homeowners, two-thirds of City Island’s electorate, are a constituency theoretically ripe for Mario’s son. Cuomo’s problem, as it has been the entire campaign, is generation. City Island is older than New York City as a whole (over 70% of the Democratic electorate is over-50), yet Cuomo barely beat Mamdani in the Primary; before a tidal wave of press coverage increased the Democratic nominee’s name recognition. If Andrew Cuomo falls short on November 4th, as polling suggests, it will be because the former Governor, running without a Party, found himself boxed out for votes — by the Democratic Mamdani and Republican Sliwa — in neighborhoods like City Island.

Share

For several decades, every warm weekend has been met with hundreds of Bronxites toiling across the borough to experience, albeit for a fleeting afternoon, the spoils of City Island: a taste of fried seafood at Sammy’s Fish Box, the summer breeze off the Long Island Sound, capped off by a breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline beyond the Throgs Neck Bridge. Making their pilgrimage from Morrisania, University Heights, Parkchester, or Soundview, these visitors – largely the borough’s Black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican urban dwellers — see the Island as a nautical reprieve of blue and green within reach of working-class families used to a life of asphalt and concrete. This “patchwork of race and class” is where City Island “begins to look more like New York than anything resembling Martha’s Vineyard.” While the weekend influx elicits predictable complaints from locals about traffic and noise – such grievances are limited to just that. Indeed, countless small businesses on City Island, the few remaining on a commercial strip still recovering from the economic crash of 2008, are sustained by Black and Hispanic patrons. Spending their teenage summers in restaurant work at Johnny’s Reef or Seafood City, generations of Islanders are acquainted with their fellow Bronxites on the warm Saturday afternoons of Spring and Summer. This acquaintance — between those intimately aware of the precarity pulsing through the concrete jungle, and those whose understanding is confined to the secondhand — however fleeting, nonetheless fosters a degree of respect and acceptance often denied in more segregated enclaves.

This ethos sets City Island apart from other neighborhoods in the East Bronx. Infamously, many of the communities across the bay — Country Club, Edgewater Park, and Silver Beach — which share a racial, class, and ethnic profile similar to City Island, have conspired to keep people of color from buying homes in their sequestered enclaves.

Whereas the key to City Island’s culture is rooted in proximity to people different from oneself. For when I strolled through the streets of this authentic coastal hamlet, there were fewer political lawn signs than I observed one year ago. What I did see was friends and family who knew one another on a first name basis, almost every house eagerly preparing for Halloween, and small acts of mutual respect between neighbors.

Because after November 4th, City Island, split between Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, and Curtis Sliwa, will continue to co-exist — as it always has.

Perhaps the rest of us could learn something.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com

New York City is headed in the wrong direction.

A reform candidate emerges, untethered to the city’s political machines, in the mold of Fiorello La Guardia. Handsome and dynamic, he excites tens of thousands of volunteers and is aided by a left-leaning third party. Raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, his ethnic background and upper class upbringing are considered liabilities by the political class. On the campaign trail, he is accused of sympathizing with “communists.” Young voters, disillusioned by war abroad, flock to the polls. Trailing until the final days, the candidate consistently walks the streets of working-class neighborhoods, shaking hands of passersby. In victory, the press credits a relentless work ethic and appetite for new blood: “He is fresh while everyone else is tired.”

At a moment of vacuum in his Party, the progressive Mayor-elect is hailed as a national model; an avatar for what is possible.

I’m not talking about Zohran Mamdani. I’m talking about John Lindsay.

Sixty years ago, the latter entered City Hall with momentum, but lacked a wide mandate for his agenda. Young, ambitious, college-educated bureaucrats — motivated by his message of reform — flocked to his administration, but struggled relating to union leaders and power brokers, still a staple of the city’s political tapestry. As middle-class families fled the outer boroughs in droves, New York City’s tax base thinned precipitously, forcing the mayor to borrow against the city’s assets, foreshadowing the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. In the pursuit of noble reforms, like adding civilian members to the city’s police reform board, increasing community control over public schools, or building scatter-site housing in middle-class neighborhoods, the progressive mayor faced intense backlash from the white working-class.

In 1965, the Lindsay coalition — the business elite, affluent Manhattan Republicans, lower-middle-class Catholic homeowners, liberal Manhattan reformers, middle-class Jews, and a small but significant number of Blacks and Puerto Ricans — resembled the northeastern liberal wing of the Republican Party. However, the late sixties, a period of unprecedented racial and cultural strife in American history, dramatically realigned the Democratic and Republican parties (to an extent still felt today), with John V. Lindsay and New York City at the epicenter.

Once hailed as a future Presidential candidate, in the mold of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Lindsay saw the Republican Party embrace the more conservative Richard Nixon, whose “Southern Strategy” proved as popular among the white-working class of the urban North as it did in suburban Dixie. Running for re-election in 1969, Lindsay lost the Republican nomination to John Marchi, an unknown and uninspiring state legislator from Staten Island; a triumph not rooted in oratory skill or campaign prowess, but solely because Marchi was the non-Lindsay candidate. A similar wave of backlash swept the Democratic Primary, as Comptroller Mario Procaccino, a conservative Italian from the East Bronx, felled both the Democratic establishment, lined up behind former three-term mayor Robert F. Wagner, and the Party’s liberal institutions, who supported Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo.

Indeed, liberalism was in retreat.

Rejected by the Republicans and divorced from the Democrats, Lindsay ran for re-election with the support of the Liberal Party; a symbolic last stand for progressivism in New York City.

“The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” detailed by Pete Hamill, embodied the campaign of Mario Procaccino, derided by the cosmopolitan class as the “frenetic voice of a reactionary Democratic bloc” (Hamill’s essay became a favorite of President Richard Nixon). Undoubtedly, the liberal mayor lacked an understanding of the outer borough worldview. Were crime to spike and quality of life to deteriorate, across neighborhoods on the precipice of the ever-expanding “ghetto,” the sequestered elite of Manhattan (Lindsay’s social circle) would remain insulated behind their doormen; whereas their white ethnic counterparts, the small homeowner class, would not. However, there was a darker side to Procaccino’s appeal, one rooted in racial backlash that went far beyond cultural grievance (Procaccino coining the term “Limousine Liberal”). Lindsay, whose record on Civil Rights was excellent, was sensitive to the plight of poor Black and Puerto Ricans, the city’s most marginalized residents, condemned to a life of poverty and welfare with little hope of escape.

To the “White Lower Middle Class” and the “Middle Americans” at the heart of Mario Procaccino’s coalition, John Lindsay only cared about them.

Procaccino, a proficient retail-campaigner who resonated with blue-collar whites, spoke the language of the alienated and powerless middle-class; Lindsay, tall and handsome, enjoyed almost uniform support from elite institutions: editorial boards, unions, celebrities. Those institutions, trusted and respected, portrayed Procaccino as a caricature of himself (tinged with anti-Italian prejudice) — not that he made it particularly difficult. The Bronx Democrat remarked that his running mate, Francis X. Smith, “grows on you like cancer.” Repeatedly embellishing his resume, Procaccino claimed he was the President of Verrazano College (it did not exist). Contrasted to Lindsay by the media at every turn, an insecurity swiftly consumed Procaccino, to the point where he carried around a copy of his law school transcript to show reporters. Addressing a Black audience, Procaccino’s plea – “my heart is as Black as yours‘’ — encapsulated his ignorance. Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, attended a twelve-hundred person event hosted by the mayor on the eve of the General Election, signaling to attuned Jewish voters that “the Israeli best interest was to keep Lindsay.” Procaccino did not receive a single newspaper endorsement (The New York Times not only endorsed Lindsay once, but twice), while the unions lined up behind the mayor who negotiated their contracts. All the “beautiful people” voted for John Lindsay; only the “stoop sitters” voted for Mario Procaccino.

In defeat, Procaccino claimed the election was stolen. Lindsay, who earned only a plurality of the vote, called his triumph, “a commitment by the City as a whole to progressive government.”

Subscribe now

If a picture is worth one-thousand words, then the map of New York City in 1969 tells a story of five boroughs amidst profound demographic and cultural upheaval. From a distance, one can glean the “beautiful people” of Manhattan, who bequeathed near unanimous support to one of their own, John Lindsay; the ancestral Republican outposts of Maspeth and Breezy Point, Bay Ridge and Staten Island, whose votes were delivered to John Marchi; and the sea of outer borough blue, a tide of white ethnic reaction and law-and-order rhetoric on behalf of Mario Procaccino. The migration of Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers can be seen, block-by-block, in the pro-Lindsay precincts of Central Brooklyn and the South Bronx. The handful of remaining Italians, many of whom supported socialists Vito Marcantonio (and Fiorello La Guardia) in their respective campaigns three decades prior, can be seen as lonely islands of Procaccino holdouts in an ocean of Lindsay support across Harlem.

In Manhattan, John Lindsay took over two-thirds of the vote, finishing with 85% of the Black vote, 65% of the Puerto Rican vote, and 45% of the Jewish vote. Young voters, from students to reform-minded professionals, increasingly left-leaning and catalyzed by the Vietnam War, spearheaded Lindsay’s volunteer operation — becoming a formidable voting bloc in their own right. The unsophisticated Procaccino campaign, little more than a “one note denunciation of crime,” ran-up-the-score with New York City’s “Middle Americans,” but was crushed by liberal institutions and the Black and Hispanic working-poor. Marchi, running a distant third, split the anti-Lindsay coalition, allowing the incumbent to win with only forty-one percent of the vote.

John Lindsay’s arc foreshadowed the Party realignment half-a-century later; with his 1969 coalition — Blacks, cosmopolitans, the college-educated, Hispanics, and ideologically motivated youths — serving as a precursor to the modern Democratic Party. In creating a new, multi-racial coalition of the top and the bottom, Lindsay had lost the middle-class. In the late sixties, as progressives were wiped out of elected office across the country, Lindsay’s survival was notable, but it also represented the high watermark of his second term. As Richard Nixon shifted the Republican Party to the right, the left-liberal mayor registered as a Democrat, his cultural and social liberalism reviled by the emerging Republican base.

The coalitional differences between Procaccino and Marchi, both Italian, are instructional as well. Marchi, the patrician northern Italian (the vast majority of New York’s Italians trace their roots to Southern Italy), drew on a more well-heeled, suburban base of sequestered conservatives. “Many Italians thought Marchi (pronounced: Markey) was Irish, not Italian… In some ways, Marchi was as foreign to most ethnic New Yorkers as Lindsay,“ wrote Vincent Cannato in The Ungovernable City. Whereas Procaccino’s voters, more blue-collar and in closer proximity to racial encroachment, backed the candidate whose rhetoric, inflammatory and apocalyptic, matched their own emotion. The precincts in the heavily Italian enclave of Belmont, well-depicted in A Bronx Tale, gave Procaccino almost 80% of the vote, their last line of defense as the blight of the South Bronx inched northward. In Canarsie, a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood surrounded by water on three sides, strong support for Procaccino (and lack thereof for Lindsay) informed the thesis of Jonathan Reider’s sociological book, The Italians and Jews Against Liberalism. For many of the white families who could not flee the city, a fortress mentality kicked in, their neighborhood under siege from “limousine liberalism,” forced busing, and cultural change.

From his office on Avenue Z in Southern Brooklyn, Fred Trump tapped into this zeitgeist. In 1969, Trump was in the process of handing off the family real estate business to his eldest son, Donald. Fred’s staunch backing of the outer borough Democratic machines (which all stuck by the party nominee), is small evidence of a Trump–Procaccino connection; but the symmetry is far more subtle. Not long after the election, the federal government charged the Trump Management Corporation with discriminating against African Americans seeking apartments in the thirty-nine buildings the firm operated. If the son craved the acceptance of the “beautiful people,” and wanted, desperately, to become one of them; the father, who lived in Jamaica Estates and worked in Sheepshead Bay, not only built housing for the “stoop sitting voters,” but shared their worldview. When the former ran for President in 2016, he faced silk-stocking opponents (John Kasich) reminiscent of Lindsay and those whose lack of charisma (Ted Cruz) was matched only by Marchi. Returning home to New York, Fred’s son swept the modern-day Procaccinos, blasting apart his Republican rivals in Broad Channel, Tottenville, and Brighton Beach. After watching New York City’s “Middle Americans” forsake liberalism decades ago, Trump nationalized Procaccino’s backlash campaign perfectly, shattering the so-called blue wall in the white-working class Upper Midwest on his way to the White House.

When Donald Trump told four non-white congresswomen (Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib) to “go back to where you come from,” many were aghast; but the President was channeling his outer borough upbringing.

You could hear the echoes of Mario Procaccino.

John Lindsay acts as both a cautionary and inspirational tale for Zohran Mamdani on the nuances and limitations of coalition building atop the nation’s largest city.

Sixty years later, we have a very different New York City. The white ethnic homeowner class, save for pockets of sequestered waterfront enclaves, have since absconded from the five boroughs. The richest and poorest Democrats voted for Andrew Cuomo, while the new working and middle-classes — renter-majority, youthful, college-educated, ethnically and racial diverse — formed the bedrock of Mamdani’s movement, the “Coalition of the In-Between.” New York’s civic and cultural institutions (newspapers, unions, machines) ensured John Lindsay won re-election; sixty years later, they lined up to stop Zohran Mamdani, and failed miserably.

For John Lindsay, supported by the wealthiest and lowest income New Yorkers, the working and middle-classes remained not only an Achilles Heel, but a foreign constituency. The journalist Jimmy Breslin, who frequently praised the progressive mayor, nonetheless questioned whether Lindsay was too tall to be Mayor: “Take Lindsay off the front pages and put him on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Put him there with the schools closed and the garbage not picked up and the robberies and assaults way up… Do this, and you do not have a towering figure anymore. You have a bony Protestant from Yale and Wall Street whose height makes him a conspicuous target for the stumpy little people who yell up at him.”

Despite sharing Lindsay’s upbringing on the West Side, Mamdani did not cut his teeth in the “Silk Stocking” neighborhoods of Manhattan, but across the outer boroughs: canvassing in Glen Oaks, managing campaigns in Bay Ridge, before being elected to the State Assembly in Astoria. After a flurry of suicides in the Sikh community, Mamdani went on a fifteen day hunger strike alongside Taxi drivers to win debt forgiveness for their medallions. His mayoral campaign, from inception, was focused on bringing new voters into the political process: rent stabilized tenants, Muslims, and South Asians. While Lindsay was comfortable walking the firebombed streets of the South Bronx or the slums of Brownsville, the liberal mayor struggled to grasp the outer borough mind, or relate to the worldview of Woodhaven Boulevard, New Utrecht Avenue, or Pelham Parkway. Mamdani, aided by the changing racial complexion of New York City, has built goodwill across these communities; whose class character (and underlying values) have nonetheless remained constant.

In recent days, Andrew Cuomo has resorted to calling the Democratic nominee “shorter Bill de Blasio,” a Trump-esque dig at the six foot Mamdani. However, what the marginally taller Cuomo (ironically) fails to comprehend, is that his own “height” remains the reason why the former Governor is hopelessly behind in the polls, one month away from the end of his career. After years of looking down on others, or not seeing them at all, Cuomo grew too old, too tired, and too out-of-touch.

Too tall to be mayor, indeed.

Lindsay never won a majority of the vote in either of his campaigns, underscoring the deep and bitter divides of the era. This November, Mamdani, versus two well-funded and well-known opponents, has the opportunity to do just that: a clear statement of the democratic socialist’s appeal that manifests in even greater political capital.

Once Lindsay was victorious, much of the neighborhood-level organizing, so tantamount to his campaign’s success, ceased — not to be resumed until his re-election several years later. Mamdani, who was endorsed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, is closely allied with a multiple mass-member organization — NYC-DSA, the Working Families Party, DRUM Beats — capable of leading an “outside” organizing arm throughout his term. Such a movement, rooted in electoral politics, gives Mamdani soft power that Lindsay sorely lacked, particularly in Albany; the liberal mayor was routinely steamrolled by Robert Moses (immortalized in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker) and infamously ceded city control of the Metropolitan Transit Authority to the Governor.

Nonetheless, during a period of fervent polarization, Lindsay held the social fabric of the city together. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Lindsay walked the streets of Harlem, and New York City avoided the rioting that befell Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark. On the defining issues of the time, Lindsay remained a staunch critic of the Vietnam War and made Civil Rights a cornerstone of his administration; Mamdani, who has vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has helped shift the Democratic Party zeitgeist with respect to the War in Gaza. Through these principled stances, Lindsay maintained his core coalition of younger voters and liberal Jews, similar to that of Mamdani. Most importantly, Lindsay methodically built up his support in the city’s Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, despite the Democratic machine’s institutional advantages. When Lindsay ran for re-election, he prevailed because of overwhelming support from African Americans and Puerto Ricans, the lowest-income New Yorkers. Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee, has the opportunity to do the same in the coming months and years, given people of color are most harmed by the cost-of-living crisis.

However, when his second term concluded, Lindsay was forced into political retirement. Abe Beame, the pride of the Democratic machine whom Lindsay defeated in 1965, succeeded him as New York City fell into fiscal catastrophe. One of Lindsay’s most vocal critics, Ed Koch, went on to serve three terms as Mayor, remaking the five boroughs in his image. Lindsay, who shepherded New York City through one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history, watched his political opponents diminish his legacy, reducing the former mayor to “an exile in his own city.” To his enduring credit, Lindsay gave visibility to the plight of the most marginalized New Yorkers at a time when they lacked political or institutional power. An enthusiastic forty-percent of New Yorkers had supported Lindsay twice, but under the stress of the era, the liberal mayor failed to win over those in the middle: the city’s working people.

The backlash to Zohran Mamdani, already bubbling, is far more astroturfed, concentrated in C-suites and editorial boardrooms; whereas John Lindsay enjoyed almost universal support from elites, he failed to win over a majority of the city to his vision of progressive governance. The Mamdani coalition, rooted in the middle-class, centered on affordability, represents a path forward for the Democratic Party, which has consistently hemorrhaged support from the modern-day “stoop sitters” in service of placating “the beautiful people.” For Mamdani to build on Lindsay’s legacy, he does not need comparable support from oligarchs, but the latter’s resonance and goodwill among the Black and Hispanic working class, on the front lines of our political realignment, and most importantly, the costs of living crisis in the five boroughs.

To transform New York City (and the American left), Zohran Mamdani will not only have to build this new majority, but work tirelessly to maintain it.

Connect With Me:

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelLangeNYC

Email me at Michael.James.Lange@gmail.com