This piece presents a strong basis for cheering DSA here, on results alone, and I'll sit with that. But I think the more important observation is that the WFP and DSA -- at least as proxies for broader divergences in the NYC left -- are most successful when they are working together. The reasons why are obvious, and that's part of why picking this fight has felt, to me, unstrategic on DSA's part. And a little bit disrespectful: Reynoso as an individual is not the institution of the WFP; his contributions to the left and to laying the ground work for DSA have a constituency that goes beyond factionalism. Should dues paid not be honored? Should Reynoso's supporters' new neighbors not feel compelled to honor the fight that was ongoing before they walked in the room? If not those who've been fighting it?
All of that is trivial, though, compared to the risks presented by this cleavage, which feels almost entirely factional; on the issues the two cohorts are nigh indistinguishable and share pretty much the same constituency. And we should note the example of Council Member Sandy Nurse, who took office in 2022 with the support of both cadres, representing more the lineage of Occupy Wall Street and its inheritor institutions which she helped create in "the Commie Corridor" long before DSA became relevant. There is no reason we cannot work together, and we are better off on the same team. We *are* the same team. It would be tragic to let acronyms get in the way of our seeing that.
So I still have hope for DSA as a connecting nexus between the various ideologically friendly cohorts in the city. But for that to happen, DSA has to act like team play is a thing it cares about. While sectarian feelings are probably very tempting to DSA right now, especially after defeating the unworthy centrist and right-wing billionaire factions, I urge DSA leaders and members to resist it when it comes to the organization's relationship to the rest of the NYC left. Folks like Reynoso are just one example of a broad set of relationships, organizations, and experiences of struggle that people carried on in much more lonesome fashion for a very long time. And as this piece correctly identifies (and in many more ways; for instance, People for Bernie is a direct OWS descendant personnel-wise), we wouldn't have this beautiful moment of hope and opportunity without them. So please, do what you can to stand on our shoulders, not our necks. And whatever happens next here, I hope we all learn lessons from it and try to avoid acquiring any scars or bitternesses. In this moment, we simply have to all keep trying to get it right.
I think you offer some useful insight into the overall landscape in this comment with the value of DSA/WFP partnership, but the reality of how the endorsement process went about really weakens your assertion that DSA wasn’t a team player. Both Reynoso and Valdez sought DSA’s endorsement in the exact same forum, as in they spoke one after another. Reynoso said some lines about wanting to work with landlords and not antagonizing them as well as being relatively optimistic about the advancement in AI technology (it has been almost a half year since that forum so I can’t recall exactly how he worded his statements), and both of those points were received quite poorly by the audience. Ultimately, the DSA endorsement went to the candidate who won more votes in its member-driven democratic process, one in which leadership does not have the same ability to circumvent members input to the extent that the RAC of WFP can. I think credit is necessarily due to DSA for hearing both NY-7 candidates out, and you can’t fault members themselves in a democratic process for simply participating as informed voters for someone more aligned with their principles and theory of change.
I appreciate your reply a lot, thank you for sharing your knowledge of all of that. I have no issue with the process you've described -- in fact, if that really is all that transpired, then I have a high degree of admiration for it. But as an outsider with a perhaps somewhat representative amount of ignorance of such, it's hard to accept that somebody already prominent within NYC-DSA wound up being "put up" for this seat -- held for a long time by another left organizational network -- and nobody at some point made a conscious choice to *not* be deferential to allies. Do you understand what I mean? If what you're saying really is all that led to this happening, and there were no backroom deliberations, it would seem that there is at the very least a lack of an active "is this team play?" check on the organization's effective footprint.
Because there's benefits to *not* signaling that you're unconcerned with the things other folks have built in the city over the years. There's a lot of bad vibes that could go avoided. There's a lot of effort that might be unneeded to gain the same effective benefits. There's a lot of communities that might be entirely out of reach for NYC-DSA as it's currently embodied but might one day find real foothold if they aren't made to feel actively walled off. You don't get a ton of opportunities to actually send clear signals to this effect before people draw conclusions. So I'm not really accusing DSA of actively being anti-team, but I am saying I've been surprised by some of the opportunities to be pro-team that I have seen being missed, and this has certainly felt like one of them. Though perhaps there are many other positive cases that I am oblivious to, and the scenario with this district this year is just a particularly disharmonious one.
ETA: Now I'm thinking about it like, are the tabloids in my head? Is it really as simple as Valdez decided to run, they had an endorsement process, she was more aligned and won, and the Mayor is just like yeah whatever that process says, I'm for? If that's really true then I guess I'm not going to tell somebody they shouldn't run, and the rest is just democracy, and I should pipe down. But I've been around the block a few times and it's hard to imagine there's not any larger steering, even if unintentional, with all that's at stake in these decisions.
This question of who could be more of a team player in this process is a tricky matter to sort out, especially if we take very precise stock of the exact timeline of this endorsement process amongst the various organizations and power players.
As a brief prelude though, I do want to acknowledge it's not your fault you weren't privy to more of the NYC-DSA endorsement details; it's an infamously opaque and rigorous multi-stage process (a whole conversation in its own right), and we were sworn to absolute confidentiality in not divulging details of the conversation to nonmembers (although details certainly did leak). I *think* now I might be in the clear to share some broad strokes of how things played out 5 months later, especially where temporal precision is particularly illuminating.
Here is the timeline of key dates:
- Jan 9, 2026: Mayor-Elect Mamdani (as well as UAW) endorse Claire Valdez
- Jan 14: NYC-DSA Electoral Working Group hosts its NY-7 endorsement forum, inviting Reynoso and Valdez to speak back to back in pursuit of the chapter’s endorsement. Round 1 of 3 for voting regarding 1) whether DSA should endorse in NY-7 and 2) who should be recommended for endorsement begins.
- Jan 16: Round 1 EWG vote concludes. Valdez wins this vote and is recommended for the chapterwide all member endorsement vote. On the same day of this announcement, Nydia Velasquez announces her endorsement of Reynoso, as well as suggesting the severance of her prior alliance with Mamdani (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/nyregion/nydia-velazquez-antonio-reynoso-mamdani.html)
- Jan 20-22: Round 2 chapterwide all-member vote is conducted. Claire Valdez receives 97% of member support on whether to endorse her or not. Citywide Leadership Committee holds a meeting the same night voting in concert (Round 3) with the membership’s decision on endorsement.
- Jan 23: NYC-DSA publicly announces its endorsement of Valdez.
- Feb 23: Peter Sterne reports on NYWFP vote (https://x.com/petersterne/status/2026110576787616256). Queens & Brooklyn chapter members vote to endorse Valdez but are overruled by nonprofit affiliate leadership from WFP RAC.
- Feb 24: WFP publicly announces its endorsement of Reynoso.
Given the above, I think it’s worth reiterating that 1) NYC-DSA upheld its key principle of member democracy throughout this whole process, and 2) WFP had knowledge of the DSA endorsement for a whole month before its leadership decided to overrule its membership in endorsing Reynoso. I think it’s thus reasonable to conclude that the onus of deference and collaboration should have been with WFP given the amount of time in between their respective endorsement efforts? From my circles that overlap with both organizations, I’ve heard that at least some WFP RAC leaders were bruising for a fight with DSA, whereas many DSA members who were also concurrent WFP members were operating through the established grassroots channels to successfully sway the chapter level votes in pursuit of alignment (trust me, countless numbers of DSA members talk extensively about their frustrating of left splintering).
Given these timings I've described, what would you say would have been the right time for teamsmanship, and from whom?
- Mamdani (now a separate but influential entity from DSA) on 1/9 not endorsing Valdez, his own assembly colleague, at a time he thought Velazquez was still his ally?
- DSA membership on the backs of the 1/16 announcement of an incumbent representative who isn’t a member of their organization (nor a direct spokesperson for WFP)?
- WFP RAC 1 month after knowing they would be shaping up for a fight with DSA?
I’ll admit to contextualizing the above while being much more ingratiated into the DSA sphere at this point in time, but also take this from someone who purposefully stayed clear of DSA for nearly the past decade due to significant disagreement with many of their priorities and strategies. It’s only with the recent showing of both organizational discipline and actually a whole lot of respect for how they conduct their modern endorsement process (even though I still maintain many respectful disagreements with other members) that I’ve aligned myself with the organization as a formidable power base.
I really appreciate your perspective, and the time it took for you to lay this all out. It's not going to waste. You're filling in important gaps for me.
Because, yeah, yikes. I certainly don't align with the WFP's approach here; if your rank and file aren't on board with their pipeline, aren't proud to advance the longstanding succession ladder, something's gone wrong. On the surface it seemed comparable to Valdez being endorsed by DSA and the Mayor, in terms of the apparent inside track -- but DSA's process vs WFP abandoning its rank and file obviously invalidates that.
I have felt similarly about DSA. I've done a little canvassing this cycle and want to do more. The discipline is inspiring, and their being so good at organizing whoever wants to help has allowed me to help without needing to join any clubs that would have me, which rocks. But I've been close to other sausage-making machines, and these days they make me anxious. I want the NYC left to remain a little bit messy, I want there to be room for fellow travelers. We'll all be better off that way, and anyway it's hard for me to imagine any other shape working out long-term in a city as heterogeneous as NYC. I think the best way to prevent splintering is to allow for differences in form and identity, to make an effort to be mindful of each other's generative efforts, and to be quick to recognize and build up allies, even brand new ones. Basically it's the Wu Tang model. :)
So yeah, I have much appreciation for DSA as a provider of opportunities to all of us to be helpful, and I hope it grows further in that direction.
Oh, I think maybe you added this:
`
- Mamdani (now a separate but influential entity from DSA) on 1/9 not endorsing Valdez, his own assembly colleague, at a time he thought Velazquez was still his ally?
- DSA membership on the backs of the 1/16 announcement of an incumbent representative who isn’t a member of their organization (nor a direct spokesperson for WFP)?
- WFP RAC 1 month after knowing they would be shaping up for a fight with DSA?
`
I think I'm past the bad part of Dunning Kruger, because I no longer feel qualified to hazard a guess. Look, if the district picks Valdez, that's democracy. And like, that's good? Better she run and be preferred than not run and Reynoso win by default, is where I actually land. But, I think you could make an argument that somewhere between Valdez deciding to run and Mamdani jumping in real early, somebody could have weighed the potential to integrate a Rep. Reynoso more closely into the warm embrace of the DSA and thereby build a bridge to constituencies that, while maybe no longer a majority in the neighborhood, still matter, and still have a lot of political infrastructure that is deeply rooted, beyond what one might describe as the WFP proper. That, I think, would have been the wiser course politically -- a little deference for a meaningfully stronger coalition. But that's not the only angle that matters, and that's a little more clear to me now.
All meaningful offerings, both. The one thing I’ll add here is that Reynoso does not fundamentally believe in a socialist movement or in the true transformative power of a resurgent labor movement in a way that he would put those issues front and center. He neither calls himself a socialist nor is a labor organizer himself. Claire, as what we call in DSA a “cadre candidate” (someone from within our movement), does and is.
There’s no way to turn Reynoso, a politician already deeply embedded in independent progressive systems with competing priorities, into someone deeply ideologically committed to achieving socialism in our lifetime. As such, it is not about civility or about being a team player. It is about what is strategically and tactically useful for building a socialist bloc in congress to get closer to achieving the goals of the left in the long term.
For those in NYCDSA who are serious about building power, true lasting power that transforms the material lives of the working class into something livable and dignified, these are the hardheaded practical decisions we must make. There are times to build coalitions and times to tactically press forward. It’s a case by case basis and not everyone will agree on the calculus. But trust that the org is thinking very seriously and practically about it. It’s not a matter of reactive catharsis. We are extremely well organized and dead serious about winning in the long term.
It's interesting to me that yours is the most persuasive description of their differences, and yet doesn't appear in any of the campaign material I have seen. But there does seem to be some bad faith misrepresentations (super pac? come on) and a lot of attention paid to Israel. It shows that DSA doesn't think it can rely on socialism messaging alone. I'm not sure I buy that this is all about improving the material lives of the working class. Tactics matter too. I'm not sure this race is helping anyone but DSA as an organization.
It seems like Velazquez vastly misunderstood the DSA process if she thought the mayor personally "picked" Valdez rather than Caban. Maybe that's how the WFP does things. But I don't think you can take Reynoso's comment at face value. His electoral strategy seemed to boil down to throwing subs at transplants, aka doing identity politics, and saying "well I wouldn't have even ran if it was Salazar or Caban" can be easily read as disingenuous.
The extent to which DSA basically embarrassed the WFP by showing what discipline looks like on an electoral level despite being basically dead up until a decade ago is incredible.
"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."
I'm glad you mentioned this. When I have observed left spaces, this is often cited as the cardinal sin that proved that the WFP was fundamentally not a democratic organization, as it chose to split the left-wing vote despite a majority of their members preferring to back the more popular and more consistent candidate.
As Matt Bruenig put it back in 2019: "Warren got anywhere from 22 to 40 percent of the member vote. This further means that 82 to 100 percent of the WFP leadership voted for Warren. This is the stark split they don’t want to reveal but are nevertheless very incompetent at hiding." https://jacobin.com/2019/09/working-families-party-elizabeth-warren-endorsement
I still think people are waiting for contrition about this incident before any sort of reproachment, at least here on the West Coast.
It is common to, as this piece does, attribute the growth of NYC-DSA to Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign. Certainly that campaign played a big role, but the real swelling of DSA's membership came after Trump won the first time. And after Trump won the second time, NYC-DSA went from what the author calls its "lowest point" in 2024 to its biggest success yet, winning the 2025 mayoral election. In other words, for all of NYC-DSA's success, it's pretty clear that its biggest electoral weapon is backlash to the Trump Administration.
I don't think "backlash to the Trump Administration" quite fits; why wouldn't Andrew Cuomo have benefitted from the same energy? Or Kamala Harris the year before?
Consider the disparity between party approval ratings and Democrats' electoral outcomes since November 2024. People are very upset not just with the Trump Administration, but with the liberal establishment's failure to stop the loss of a generation's worth of progress de jure. Truly, it's been a spectacular loss; sometimes I am boggled just by the temerity of those who have held roles of power to not have shown themselves the door already. So there's no real untying of these two causes; the rise of Trump is what has injected such urgency in the need to create a viable alternative. And our political system basically just doesn't provide any other way to change leaders without changing parties besides a DSA-style inside-outside form of organizing.
I think there's basically two things going on: 1) Backlash to the Trump Administration energizes people who often don't care enough about politics to vote. Compare turnout in the 2021 mayoral race to the 2025 mayoral race. Or the 2018 gubernatorial race to the 2022 gubernatorial race. Turnout is consistently higher under Trump than Biden or Obama. This isn't only true NY, but it seems especially true here, and these additional voters are less loyal to the Democratic establishment.
2) Related to what you were saying, backlash to the Trump Administration also creates anger at DEMOCRATS for losing/creating the conditions for Trump's victory. That makes Democrats eager for change, and more open to leftwing alternatives like Zohran or other DSA candidates.
And it's not just elections. I believe if you look at DSA membership numbers, the real swell happened post November 2016 (after Trump won), and not in the spring of 2016 (at the height of Bernie's campaign). Membership also sagged again post-2020, despite Bernie's second campaign, only to rebound after Trump won again in 2024.
I don't disagree with you on 1 or 2 at all, but I do think you're slightly off-base with the latter observation. The Sanders Campaign itself was a gigantic spinning-up of organization, both formal and informal, of a whole cultural and political cohort that saturated the left with new energy (and chaos; we couldn't digest all the new heads, and you could argue that they've instead digested us, which I don't love). The growth of DSA after Sanders lost was simply the transition of its energy into a new form (which was, by my understanding, a bit of an empty shell awaiting a resident). The swells of interest in DSA just track with how much people felt there was a more appropriate place to put their energy (which the Biden admin / Democratic Party proper fulfilled briefly until the organizing for Palestine, and then the Harris effort, took focus). So imo it's not about Trump being in power as much as it's about whether (and where) folks feel the good fight is being fought, and fought well.
Yeah, I don't want to be too stubborn about one or the other cause for the growth of DSA. Obviously it was a combination of factors, but I think it's a mistake to overlook the Trump effect.
There's an alternative framing of the Reynoso race—it's not WFP vs. DSA, it's native-born (working-class) New Yorkers vs. gentrifiers (and what used to be called yuppies).
That said, with Cuomo effectively destroyed I wonder if there's an opportunity for WFP to rebuild its relationship with the local NYC unions none of whom are crazy about Mamdani. They're not hostile either, but seemed wary or not terribly enthusiastic about helping elect him after he won the primary. My understanding is that the unions aren't happy with or endorsing Mamdani messing with the pension plans to balance his first budget, so that may be WFP's opportunity to solidify a relationship and counterbalance the DSA crowd.
FWIW, the WFP's ideological staff model long predates the forced pivot away from organized labor, and IMO is orthogonal to that shift. They came up with the year round staff model in the early 2000s, basically running electoral campaigns in the fall, getting paid to run lobbying campaigns in the winter / spring for 1199 and others, and knocking doors for cash in the summer. One could argue that this model is a big part of what made them powerful, and/or one could argue that it disincentivized building a DSA-like membership model comprised of the many union members to which the party had access. In any case, it happened wayyy before Cuomo went nuts and started ripping unions out of the party..... anyway, great piece, just had to put my 0.02 in on that detail :)
The Working Families Party had the move and missed it. In 2022, WFP could have gone nuclear. Run Jumaane Williams as the real left-wing alternative. Split the Democratic coalition. Let Lee Zeldin walk through the wreckage. Push Hochul into political oblivion. Blow up the Albany patronage pipeline at the Board of Elections. Take the No. 2 ballot line. Force every progressive, every union operator, every nonprofit climber, every ambitious leftist, and every Democratic insurgent to come crawling to WFP as the new center of gravity.
That was the trade: four years of Republican rule in exchange for destroying Hochul, wrecking the Democrat machine, and becoming the indispensable progressive ballot line heading into 2026. Mamdani and AOC would have needed WFP. The institutional left would have needed WFP. Albany would have feared WFP.
(And as a bonus, Jerry Kassar would have watched the Conservative Party get shoved down to the D line, turning his ballot-line empire into a basement apartment and sending him softly into the political night.)
Instead, WFP chose caution. And if ifs were a fifth, we would all be drunk.
Now the future belongs to DSA. Lange’s piece makes that brutally clear. Antonio Reynoso has labor, local roots, boroughwide experience, Nydia Velázquez, and the old progressive establishment. In another era, he walks into NY-7. But this is not that era. Claire Valdez has Zohran Mamdani and NYC-DSA. That is now enough to make Reynoso the underdog in his own political backyard.
That is the whole story of succession. WFP tilled the soil. DSA is harvesting the crop. WFP built the anti-establishment lane, but DSA learned how to drive faster, louder, younger, and meaner. The WFP model became nonprofit staff, weighted endorsement councils, foundation money, opaque process, paper endorsements, and aging progressive brands. DSA became members, doors, discipline, memes, field operations, candidate charisma, and a mayor who now functions as the left’s biggest political weapon.
WFP is still useful. It has a ballot line. It can spend money. It can coordinate. It can help campaigns. But it is no longer the feared left-wing kingmaker in New York. It is a second fiddle, third-party line status. DSA is the movement. Mamdani is the avatar. AOC is the national signal. The institutionalist enclaves are crumbling one by one.
The WFP had a chance to trade short-term pain for long-term dominance. It blinked. Now it gets to watch the socialists inherit the machine it once hoped to command.
How is this an "if"? We don't have to imagine this because the Working Families Party DID run Jumaane as a "real left-wing alternative" to Kathy Hochul in 2022... and he got crushed!
If you know anything about campaigns, you’ll know the difference between running and what Jumaane did - particularly after the political quid pro quo. Either you know nothing about campaigns, or you’re a Hochul HACK.
2022 was an incredibly hostile year for leftist primary campaigns. NYC-DSA ran 7 insurgent candidates that cycle and 5 of them lost. Do you have any actual reason to believe Jumaane could have outperformed all of them and run a credible third-party campaign against Kathy Hochul, besides this fantasy you've concocted in your head?
Point one you just made. Hostile primaries translate into entire party wings staying home or getting behind the insurgency.
Point two is Kooky Kathy and her old white ass. Jumaane would have been targeting the Black vote and the progressives, forming a coalition. Kathy can't hold that, even now.
The campaign would have been more than credible. Republicans would have won the A line. Dems might have kept B, but might not have. Conservatives would definitely be on the D line. It would have been good political math. I'm sorry you can't count.
You must really love Kathy. Let me ask, is your last name Crangle?
Yes, but my point is that we have pretty clear evidence for how Jumaane would have done as a left wing challenger to Kathy Hochul in 2022: Not well! If he got less than 20% of the Democratic primary vote, then it's hard to imagine him making enough of a dent in a general election to even successfully be a spoiler.
Great article! I do also think it's really interesting that the biggest supporters of Claire Valdez/DSA are young NYC transplants, college-educated, and generally in quite well-paid professions even though socialist policies would presumably benefit the older native New York working class more.
wow, this article was super insightful and confirmed a lot of what I’ve experienced in this district. WFP and other orgs set the foundation for DSA to grow, and it’s sad WFP moved further away from its labor roots
have a hard time caring what Nydia Velázquez, a member of the Congress that sat idly by while while the middle class and working class have been decimated by asskissers, conmen, and thieves (new country song single coming soon!) thinks.
She's spent the past 25 failing us over and over again. Out with the old and useless, and let's try something else.
If you haven't been causing trouble for rich people, I don't care what you say.
She was the first Congressperson to show up at JFK during the Muslim Ban protests, and has not been sitting idly by anything, no matter what DSA bros say.
Are you mad at Nydia Velazquez, or at Congress and the Democratic Party on the whole? Not everyone who's been a sitting member of Congress has been doing the same things. You should acquaint yourself with her record, and with all the work she did helping to align things in the city so that the power DSA is now wielding could be built. It doesn't help us to throw non-bums out (and yes, she is retiring, but that doesn't mean we need to give her the gong).
“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." *facepalm*
This is the same Antonio Reynoso whose campaign last year accepted “thousands of dollars” from real estate-linked contributors after he had promised NOT to take money from that sector?
This piece presents a strong basis for cheering DSA here, on results alone, and I'll sit with that. But I think the more important observation is that the WFP and DSA -- at least as proxies for broader divergences in the NYC left -- are most successful when they are working together. The reasons why are obvious, and that's part of why picking this fight has felt, to me, unstrategic on DSA's part. And a little bit disrespectful: Reynoso as an individual is not the institution of the WFP; his contributions to the left and to laying the ground work for DSA have a constituency that goes beyond factionalism. Should dues paid not be honored? Should Reynoso's supporters' new neighbors not feel compelled to honor the fight that was ongoing before they walked in the room? If not those who've been fighting it?
All of that is trivial, though, compared to the risks presented by this cleavage, which feels almost entirely factional; on the issues the two cohorts are nigh indistinguishable and share pretty much the same constituency. And we should note the example of Council Member Sandy Nurse, who took office in 2022 with the support of both cadres, representing more the lineage of Occupy Wall Street and its inheritor institutions which she helped create in "the Commie Corridor" long before DSA became relevant. There is no reason we cannot work together, and we are better off on the same team. We *are* the same team. It would be tragic to let acronyms get in the way of our seeing that.
So I still have hope for DSA as a connecting nexus between the various ideologically friendly cohorts in the city. But for that to happen, DSA has to act like team play is a thing it cares about. While sectarian feelings are probably very tempting to DSA right now, especially after defeating the unworthy centrist and right-wing billionaire factions, I urge DSA leaders and members to resist it when it comes to the organization's relationship to the rest of the NYC left. Folks like Reynoso are just one example of a broad set of relationships, organizations, and experiences of struggle that people carried on in much more lonesome fashion for a very long time. And as this piece correctly identifies (and in many more ways; for instance, People for Bernie is a direct OWS descendant personnel-wise), we wouldn't have this beautiful moment of hope and opportunity without them. So please, do what you can to stand on our shoulders, not our necks. And whatever happens next here, I hope we all learn lessons from it and try to avoid acquiring any scars or bitternesses. In this moment, we simply have to all keep trying to get it right.
I think you offer some useful insight into the overall landscape in this comment with the value of DSA/WFP partnership, but the reality of how the endorsement process went about really weakens your assertion that DSA wasn’t a team player. Both Reynoso and Valdez sought DSA’s endorsement in the exact same forum, as in they spoke one after another. Reynoso said some lines about wanting to work with landlords and not antagonizing them as well as being relatively optimistic about the advancement in AI technology (it has been almost a half year since that forum so I can’t recall exactly how he worded his statements), and both of those points were received quite poorly by the audience. Ultimately, the DSA endorsement went to the candidate who won more votes in its member-driven democratic process, one in which leadership does not have the same ability to circumvent members input to the extent that the RAC of WFP can. I think credit is necessarily due to DSA for hearing both NY-7 candidates out, and you can’t fault members themselves in a democratic process for simply participating as informed voters for someone more aligned with their principles and theory of change.
I appreciate your reply a lot, thank you for sharing your knowledge of all of that. I have no issue with the process you've described -- in fact, if that really is all that transpired, then I have a high degree of admiration for it. But as an outsider with a perhaps somewhat representative amount of ignorance of such, it's hard to accept that somebody already prominent within NYC-DSA wound up being "put up" for this seat -- held for a long time by another left organizational network -- and nobody at some point made a conscious choice to *not* be deferential to allies. Do you understand what I mean? If what you're saying really is all that led to this happening, and there were no backroom deliberations, it would seem that there is at the very least a lack of an active "is this team play?" check on the organization's effective footprint.
Because there's benefits to *not* signaling that you're unconcerned with the things other folks have built in the city over the years. There's a lot of bad vibes that could go avoided. There's a lot of effort that might be unneeded to gain the same effective benefits. There's a lot of communities that might be entirely out of reach for NYC-DSA as it's currently embodied but might one day find real foothold if they aren't made to feel actively walled off. You don't get a ton of opportunities to actually send clear signals to this effect before people draw conclusions. So I'm not really accusing DSA of actively being anti-team, but I am saying I've been surprised by some of the opportunities to be pro-team that I have seen being missed, and this has certainly felt like one of them. Though perhaps there are many other positive cases that I am oblivious to, and the scenario with this district this year is just a particularly disharmonious one.
ETA: Now I'm thinking about it like, are the tabloids in my head? Is it really as simple as Valdez decided to run, they had an endorsement process, she was more aligned and won, and the Mayor is just like yeah whatever that process says, I'm for? If that's really true then I guess I'm not going to tell somebody they shouldn't run, and the rest is just democracy, and I should pipe down. But I've been around the block a few times and it's hard to imagine there's not any larger steering, even if unintentional, with all that's at stake in these decisions.
This question of who could be more of a team player in this process is a tricky matter to sort out, especially if we take very precise stock of the exact timeline of this endorsement process amongst the various organizations and power players.
As a brief prelude though, I do want to acknowledge it's not your fault you weren't privy to more of the NYC-DSA endorsement details; it's an infamously opaque and rigorous multi-stage process (a whole conversation in its own right), and we were sworn to absolute confidentiality in not divulging details of the conversation to nonmembers (although details certainly did leak). I *think* now I might be in the clear to share some broad strokes of how things played out 5 months later, especially where temporal precision is particularly illuminating.
Here is the timeline of key dates:
- Jan 9, 2026: Mayor-Elect Mamdani (as well as UAW) endorse Claire Valdez
- Jan 14: NYC-DSA Electoral Working Group hosts its NY-7 endorsement forum, inviting Reynoso and Valdez to speak back to back in pursuit of the chapter’s endorsement. Round 1 of 3 for voting regarding 1) whether DSA should endorse in NY-7 and 2) who should be recommended for endorsement begins.
- Jan 16: Round 1 EWG vote concludes. Valdez wins this vote and is recommended for the chapterwide all member endorsement vote. On the same day of this announcement, Nydia Velasquez announces her endorsement of Reynoso, as well as suggesting the severance of her prior alliance with Mamdani (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/nyregion/nydia-velazquez-antonio-reynoso-mamdani.html)
- Jan 20-22: Round 2 chapterwide all-member vote is conducted. Claire Valdez receives 97% of member support on whether to endorse her or not. Citywide Leadership Committee holds a meeting the same night voting in concert (Round 3) with the membership’s decision on endorsement.
- Jan 23: NYC-DSA publicly announces its endorsement of Valdez.
- Feb 23: Peter Sterne reports on NYWFP vote (https://x.com/petersterne/status/2026110576787616256). Queens & Brooklyn chapter members vote to endorse Valdez but are overruled by nonprofit affiliate leadership from WFP RAC.
- Feb 24: WFP publicly announces its endorsement of Reynoso.
Given the above, I think it’s worth reiterating that 1) NYC-DSA upheld its key principle of member democracy throughout this whole process, and 2) WFP had knowledge of the DSA endorsement for a whole month before its leadership decided to overrule its membership in endorsing Reynoso. I think it’s thus reasonable to conclude that the onus of deference and collaboration should have been with WFP given the amount of time in between their respective endorsement efforts? From my circles that overlap with both organizations, I’ve heard that at least some WFP RAC leaders were bruising for a fight with DSA, whereas many DSA members who were also concurrent WFP members were operating through the established grassroots channels to successfully sway the chapter level votes in pursuit of alignment (trust me, countless numbers of DSA members talk extensively about their frustrating of left splintering).
Given these timings I've described, what would you say would have been the right time for teamsmanship, and from whom?
- Mamdani (now a separate but influential entity from DSA) on 1/9 not endorsing Valdez, his own assembly colleague, at a time he thought Velazquez was still his ally?
- DSA membership on the backs of the 1/16 announcement of an incumbent representative who isn’t a member of their organization (nor a direct spokesperson for WFP)?
- WFP RAC 1 month after knowing they would be shaping up for a fight with DSA?
I’ll admit to contextualizing the above while being much more ingratiated into the DSA sphere at this point in time, but also take this from someone who purposefully stayed clear of DSA for nearly the past decade due to significant disagreement with many of their priorities and strategies. It’s only with the recent showing of both organizational discipline and actually a whole lot of respect for how they conduct their modern endorsement process (even though I still maintain many respectful disagreements with other members) that I’ve aligned myself with the organization as a formidable power base.
I really appreciate your perspective, and the time it took for you to lay this all out. It's not going to waste. You're filling in important gaps for me.
Because, yeah, yikes. I certainly don't align with the WFP's approach here; if your rank and file aren't on board with their pipeline, aren't proud to advance the longstanding succession ladder, something's gone wrong. On the surface it seemed comparable to Valdez being endorsed by DSA and the Mayor, in terms of the apparent inside track -- but DSA's process vs WFP abandoning its rank and file obviously invalidates that.
I have felt similarly about DSA. I've done a little canvassing this cycle and want to do more. The discipline is inspiring, and their being so good at organizing whoever wants to help has allowed me to help without needing to join any clubs that would have me, which rocks. But I've been close to other sausage-making machines, and these days they make me anxious. I want the NYC left to remain a little bit messy, I want there to be room for fellow travelers. We'll all be better off that way, and anyway it's hard for me to imagine any other shape working out long-term in a city as heterogeneous as NYC. I think the best way to prevent splintering is to allow for differences in form and identity, to make an effort to be mindful of each other's generative efforts, and to be quick to recognize and build up allies, even brand new ones. Basically it's the Wu Tang model. :)
So yeah, I have much appreciation for DSA as a provider of opportunities to all of us to be helpful, and I hope it grows further in that direction.
Oh, I think maybe you added this:
`
- Mamdani (now a separate but influential entity from DSA) on 1/9 not endorsing Valdez, his own assembly colleague, at a time he thought Velazquez was still his ally?
- DSA membership on the backs of the 1/16 announcement of an incumbent representative who isn’t a member of their organization (nor a direct spokesperson for WFP)?
- WFP RAC 1 month after knowing they would be shaping up for a fight with DSA?
`
I think I'm past the bad part of Dunning Kruger, because I no longer feel qualified to hazard a guess. Look, if the district picks Valdez, that's democracy. And like, that's good? Better she run and be preferred than not run and Reynoso win by default, is where I actually land. But, I think you could make an argument that somewhere between Valdez deciding to run and Mamdani jumping in real early, somebody could have weighed the potential to integrate a Rep. Reynoso more closely into the warm embrace of the DSA and thereby build a bridge to constituencies that, while maybe no longer a majority in the neighborhood, still matter, and still have a lot of political infrastructure that is deeply rooted, beyond what one might describe as the WFP proper. That, I think, would have been the wiser course politically -- a little deference for a meaningfully stronger coalition. But that's not the only angle that matters, and that's a little more clear to me now.
All meaningful offerings, both. The one thing I’ll add here is that Reynoso does not fundamentally believe in a socialist movement or in the true transformative power of a resurgent labor movement in a way that he would put those issues front and center. He neither calls himself a socialist nor is a labor organizer himself. Claire, as what we call in DSA a “cadre candidate” (someone from within our movement), does and is.
There’s no way to turn Reynoso, a politician already deeply embedded in independent progressive systems with competing priorities, into someone deeply ideologically committed to achieving socialism in our lifetime. As such, it is not about civility or about being a team player. It is about what is strategically and tactically useful for building a socialist bloc in congress to get closer to achieving the goals of the left in the long term.
For those in NYCDSA who are serious about building power, true lasting power that transforms the material lives of the working class into something livable and dignified, these are the hardheaded practical decisions we must make. There are times to build coalitions and times to tactically press forward. It’s a case by case basis and not everyone will agree on the calculus. But trust that the org is thinking very seriously and practically about it. It’s not a matter of reactive catharsis. We are extremely well organized and dead serious about winning in the long term.
It's interesting to me that yours is the most persuasive description of their differences, and yet doesn't appear in any of the campaign material I have seen. But there does seem to be some bad faith misrepresentations (super pac? come on) and a lot of attention paid to Israel. It shows that DSA doesn't think it can rely on socialism messaging alone. I'm not sure I buy that this is all about improving the material lives of the working class. Tactics matter too. I'm not sure this race is helping anyone but DSA as an organization.
What I really found fascinating was the mention in his interview that this all could have been avoided had Julia chosen to run
It seems like Velazquez vastly misunderstood the DSA process if she thought the mayor personally "picked" Valdez rather than Caban. Maybe that's how the WFP does things. But I don't think you can take Reynoso's comment at face value. His electoral strategy seemed to boil down to throwing subs at transplants, aka doing identity politics, and saying "well I wouldn't have even ran if it was Salazar or Caban" can be easily read as disingenuous.
This was chock full of insight as usual. Excited to see how the race plays out!
The extent to which DSA basically embarrassed the WFP by showing what discipline looks like on an electoral level despite being basically dead up until a decade ago is incredible.
"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."
I'm glad you mentioned this. When I have observed left spaces, this is often cited as the cardinal sin that proved that the WFP was fundamentally not a democratic organization, as it chose to split the left-wing vote despite a majority of their members preferring to back the more popular and more consistent candidate.
As Matt Bruenig put it back in 2019: "Warren got anywhere from 22 to 40 percent of the member vote. This further means that 82 to 100 percent of the WFP leadership voted for Warren. This is the stark split they don’t want to reveal but are nevertheless very incompetent at hiding." https://jacobin.com/2019/09/working-families-party-elizabeth-warren-endorsement
I still think people are waiting for contrition about this incident before any sort of reproachment, at least here on the West Coast.
It is common to, as this piece does, attribute the growth of NYC-DSA to Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign. Certainly that campaign played a big role, but the real swelling of DSA's membership came after Trump won the first time. And after Trump won the second time, NYC-DSA went from what the author calls its "lowest point" in 2024 to its biggest success yet, winning the 2025 mayoral election. In other words, for all of NYC-DSA's success, it's pretty clear that its biggest electoral weapon is backlash to the Trump Administration.
I don't think "backlash to the Trump Administration" quite fits; why wouldn't Andrew Cuomo have benefitted from the same energy? Or Kamala Harris the year before?
Consider the disparity between party approval ratings and Democrats' electoral outcomes since November 2024. People are very upset not just with the Trump Administration, but with the liberal establishment's failure to stop the loss of a generation's worth of progress de jure. Truly, it's been a spectacular loss; sometimes I am boggled just by the temerity of those who have held roles of power to not have shown themselves the door already. So there's no real untying of these two causes; the rise of Trump is what has injected such urgency in the need to create a viable alternative. And our political system basically just doesn't provide any other way to change leaders without changing parties besides a DSA-style inside-outside form of organizing.
I think there's basically two things going on: 1) Backlash to the Trump Administration energizes people who often don't care enough about politics to vote. Compare turnout in the 2021 mayoral race to the 2025 mayoral race. Or the 2018 gubernatorial race to the 2022 gubernatorial race. Turnout is consistently higher under Trump than Biden or Obama. This isn't only true NY, but it seems especially true here, and these additional voters are less loyal to the Democratic establishment.
2) Related to what you were saying, backlash to the Trump Administration also creates anger at DEMOCRATS for losing/creating the conditions for Trump's victory. That makes Democrats eager for change, and more open to leftwing alternatives like Zohran or other DSA candidates.
And it's not just elections. I believe if you look at DSA membership numbers, the real swell happened post November 2016 (after Trump won), and not in the spring of 2016 (at the height of Bernie's campaign). Membership also sagged again post-2020, despite Bernie's second campaign, only to rebound after Trump won again in 2024.
I don't disagree with you on 1 or 2 at all, but I do think you're slightly off-base with the latter observation. The Sanders Campaign itself was a gigantic spinning-up of organization, both formal and informal, of a whole cultural and political cohort that saturated the left with new energy (and chaos; we couldn't digest all the new heads, and you could argue that they've instead digested us, which I don't love). The growth of DSA after Sanders lost was simply the transition of its energy into a new form (which was, by my understanding, a bit of an empty shell awaiting a resident). The swells of interest in DSA just track with how much people felt there was a more appropriate place to put their energy (which the Biden admin / Democratic Party proper fulfilled briefly until the organizing for Palestine, and then the Harris effort, took focus). So imo it's not about Trump being in power as much as it's about whether (and where) folks feel the good fight is being fought, and fought well.
Yeah, I don't want to be too stubborn about one or the other cause for the growth of DSA. Obviously it was a combination of factors, but I think it's a mistake to overlook the Trump effect.
There's an alternative framing of the Reynoso race—it's not WFP vs. DSA, it's native-born (working-class) New Yorkers vs. gentrifiers (and what used to be called yuppies).
That said, with Cuomo effectively destroyed I wonder if there's an opportunity for WFP to rebuild its relationship with the local NYC unions none of whom are crazy about Mamdani. They're not hostile either, but seemed wary or not terribly enthusiastic about helping elect him after he won the primary. My understanding is that the unions aren't happy with or endorsing Mamdani messing with the pension plans to balance his first budget, so that may be WFP's opportunity to solidify a relationship and counterbalance the DSA crowd.
FWIW, the WFP's ideological staff model long predates the forced pivot away from organized labor, and IMO is orthogonal to that shift. They came up with the year round staff model in the early 2000s, basically running electoral campaigns in the fall, getting paid to run lobbying campaigns in the winter / spring for 1199 and others, and knocking doors for cash in the summer. One could argue that this model is a big part of what made them powerful, and/or one could argue that it disincentivized building a DSA-like membership model comprised of the many union members to which the party had access. In any case, it happened wayyy before Cuomo went nuts and started ripping unions out of the party..... anyway, great piece, just had to put my 0.02 in on that detail :)
The Working Families Party had the move and missed it. In 2022, WFP could have gone nuclear. Run Jumaane Williams as the real left-wing alternative. Split the Democratic coalition. Let Lee Zeldin walk through the wreckage. Push Hochul into political oblivion. Blow up the Albany patronage pipeline at the Board of Elections. Take the No. 2 ballot line. Force every progressive, every union operator, every nonprofit climber, every ambitious leftist, and every Democratic insurgent to come crawling to WFP as the new center of gravity.
That was the trade: four years of Republican rule in exchange for destroying Hochul, wrecking the Democrat machine, and becoming the indispensable progressive ballot line heading into 2026. Mamdani and AOC would have needed WFP. The institutional left would have needed WFP. Albany would have feared WFP.
(And as a bonus, Jerry Kassar would have watched the Conservative Party get shoved down to the D line, turning his ballot-line empire into a basement apartment and sending him softly into the political night.)
Instead, WFP chose caution. And if ifs were a fifth, we would all be drunk.
Now the future belongs to DSA. Lange’s piece makes that brutally clear. Antonio Reynoso has labor, local roots, boroughwide experience, Nydia Velázquez, and the old progressive establishment. In another era, he walks into NY-7. But this is not that era. Claire Valdez has Zohran Mamdani and NYC-DSA. That is now enough to make Reynoso the underdog in his own political backyard.
That is the whole story of succession. WFP tilled the soil. DSA is harvesting the crop. WFP built the anti-establishment lane, but DSA learned how to drive faster, louder, younger, and meaner. The WFP model became nonprofit staff, weighted endorsement councils, foundation money, opaque process, paper endorsements, and aging progressive brands. DSA became members, doors, discipline, memes, field operations, candidate charisma, and a mayor who now functions as the left’s biggest political weapon.
WFP is still useful. It has a ballot line. It can spend money. It can coordinate. It can help campaigns. But it is no longer the feared left-wing kingmaker in New York. It is a second fiddle, third-party line status. DSA is the movement. Mamdani is the avatar. AOC is the national signal. The institutionalist enclaves are crumbling one by one.
The WFP had a chance to trade short-term pain for long-term dominance. It blinked. Now it gets to watch the socialists inherit the machine it once hoped to command.
How is this an "if"? We don't have to imagine this because the Working Families Party DID run Jumaane as a "real left-wing alternative" to Kathy Hochul in 2022... and he got crushed!
If you know anything about campaigns, you’ll know the difference between running and what Jumaane did - particularly after the political quid pro quo. Either you know nothing about campaigns, or you’re a Hochul HACK.
2022 was an incredibly hostile year for leftist primary campaigns. NYC-DSA ran 7 insurgent candidates that cycle and 5 of them lost. Do you have any actual reason to believe Jumaane could have outperformed all of them and run a credible third-party campaign against Kathy Hochul, besides this fantasy you've concocted in your head?
No primary. We're talking a general.
Point one you just made. Hostile primaries translate into entire party wings staying home or getting behind the insurgency.
Point two is Kooky Kathy and her old white ass. Jumaane would have been targeting the Black vote and the progressives, forming a coalition. Kathy can't hold that, even now.
The campaign would have been more than credible. Republicans would have won the A line. Dems might have kept B, but might not have. Conservatives would definitely be on the D line. It would have been good political math. I'm sorry you can't count.
You must really love Kathy. Let me ask, is your last name Crangle?
https://youtu.be/5BD4TNLf9Z8?si=hz21ZdsjTyn5bGs9
Kathy Hochul appeared on the November ballot under the WFP line.
Yes, but my point is that we have pretty clear evidence for how Jumaane would have done as a left wing challenger to Kathy Hochul in 2022: Not well! If he got less than 20% of the Democratic primary vote, then it's hard to imagine him making enough of a dent in a general election to even successfully be a spoiler.
Good article but I want to offer a correction, Lander was a member of DSA until 2023
Great article! I do also think it's really interesting that the biggest supporters of Claire Valdez/DSA are young NYC transplants, college-educated, and generally in quite well-paid professions even though socialist policies would presumably benefit the older native New York working class more.
Is that it? I have also been to many protests that didn't do very much, starting in 2001.
They are both awful so hopefully they kill each other off.
wow, this article was super insightful and confirmed a lot of what I’ve experienced in this district. WFP and other orgs set the foundation for DSA to grow, and it’s sad WFP moved further away from its labor roots
Labor rejected WFP - that's what I read above.
have a hard time caring what Nydia Velázquez, a member of the Congress that sat idly by while while the middle class and working class have been decimated by asskissers, conmen, and thieves (new country song single coming soon!) thinks.
She's spent the past 25 failing us over and over again. Out with the old and useless, and let's try something else.
If you haven't been causing trouble for rich people, I don't care what you say.
She was the first Congressperson to show up at JFK during the Muslim Ban protests, and has not been sitting idly by anything, no matter what DSA bros say.
Are you mad at Nydia Velazquez, or at Congress and the Democratic Party on the whole? Not everyone who's been a sitting member of Congress has been doing the same things. You should acquaint yourself with her record, and with all the work she did helping to align things in the city so that the power DSA is now wielding could be built. It doesn't help us to throw non-bums out (and yes, she is retiring, but that doesn't mean we need to give her the gong).
Yes. Yes. And yes.
Pretty much everyone who is a sitting Congress member has done one of two things: sell me out, or sit around and do nothing meaningful about it.
DSA is a failure - do you know how you can tell?
Take a look outside.
“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." *facepalm*
This is the same Antonio Reynoso whose campaign last year accepted “thousands of dollars” from real estate-linked contributors after he had promised NOT to take money from that sector?
Couldn't be.