Tuesday was primary day in New York, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had bet big, won big. Former Comptroller Brad Lander, Mamdani’s ally from the mayoral campaign, trounced incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. That was less surprising than Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, an underdog, defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the race to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez. And, in the most shocking result, pro-Palestine organizer Darializa Ávila Chevalier, an investigator in a public defender office, defeated the powerful Harlem Rep. Adriano Espaillat. All three winners had been endorsed by the mayor.
I’ll freely admit, as I wrote right here recently, that I thought the mayor was making a strategic mistake in endorsing Ávila, a relative unknown, over Espaillat, a longtime uptown political operator with a cadre of carefully cultivated allies. I did not think that it was impossible for her to win — certainly her victory was far less of a shock than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s triumph over Rep. Joe Crowley eight years ago. But I didn’t think it was likely, and it looked as if Mamdani was going to squander some political capital on the race.
Clearly, I was wrong about that, and without taking anything away from Ávila or her campaign, it’s clear that what pushed her over the top was Mamdani’s endorsement – and that Mamdani knows that. Pre-endorsement, I think most observers had written the race off, despite the gobs of cash that had been flowing to it. Does this mean that Ávila “owes” Mamdani her nomination? The mayor certainly wouldn’t characterize it that way, but I think that’s how pretty much everyone understands it. Mamdani was, however, not shy about characterizing the wins as evidence that his political movement was chugging along a year after his upset victory in last year’s Democratic primary, and more than one news outlet has already called him a kingmaker.
Even some of those unhappy with the results have laid the responsibility at Mamdani’s feet, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, who raised some eyebrows by fretting that the mayor was moving to “blow [the Democratic Party] up” and comparing that effort to MAGA’s demolition of the Republican establishment. It’s not a stretch to say that Mamdani does indeed see these primary victories not only as wins in their own right but as shots across the bow to more entrenched Democratic leadership in the city, including the two national Democratic legislative leaders, both of whom are New Yorkers. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has already begun downplaying any possible showdown with Mamdani. But Jeffries could face a primary in 2028 and, while that is an eternity in political terms, if Mamdani can take out Espaillat, why not Jeffries?
Now, there are two ways to look at this. One is, as James says, that Mamdani is dynamiting the party, picking off experienced members who can work within the system and with Republican counterparts to get things done. The other, which is closer to Mamdani’s vision, is that the institutional Dems have lost their way, paralyzed by an inability to grasp the magnitude of the Trump era. In this view, the old guard is overly wedded to a kind of cautious, corporate institutionalism even as their constituents clamor for them to rein in President Donald Trump’s corruption and the excesses of increasingly dominant conglomerates. In one vision, this agitation is a destruction of the party, and in the other, it is saving the party from itself.
I’m not going to pretend to settle this question here, but I will say that if Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, who as that chamber’s minority leader is the country’s highest-ranking Democrat, have a vision for stanching the destruction of our entire body politic by one sundowning narcissist and his gang of open fascists, I haven’t really seen it. Whether or not Mamdani and his Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) warriors are the answer is a question that probably doesn’t have an easy answer, but what I can say is it’s unsurprising to me that voters are looking for something, anything, new.
We’ve been hearing for months that the economy is teetering on the edge; the low-hire economy means a lot of younger people are having trouble finding jobs, not to mention that every other headline seems to be about the coming AI decimation of every industry. Trump has dragged out a war no one wanted while complaining bitterly about the algae in the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool, the product of his own corrupt mismanagement. The effects of Trump’s litany of bad decisions over the last year and a half have only come into starker focus as screwworms eat livestock in Texas and FEMA shrinks in the run-up to hurricane and wildfire season and gas prices are up from before the war and on and on. There have long been crises afflicting the voting public, but I do think it’s been a while since so many of them felt so self-inflicted, even to the people kind of tuned out.
There’s another element to this Mamdani sweep, which is that some of the incumbents and their challengers are both from traditionally politically disenfranchised identities; that was the case with Reynoso and Espaillat, a Dominican immigrant who is one of the first formerly undocumented people to serve in Congress. There’s been some concern over this being a sign of cratering solidarity among communities of color in the city, though I want to complicate that narrative a bit here. This fracturing looks like a sign of weakness, but I would go a bit against the grain and say that fissures of this sort are actually what it looks like when political communities mature. I’ve been covering Latino politics in New York City for years now, including right here at Epicenter, and one of the things I’ve often heard is that the perception of the community as a monolith of united political interests was the product of its own political weakness.
Put another way, the fact that the diverse Latino communities around the city had been putting up a united front politically was to some extent because they had to, as they did not yet have the clout and foothold necessary to be multifaceted without getting steamrolled. As that political influence builds up, the need to stick together wanes, as different factions realize they’ve built enough solidity to stand more comfortably on their own and represent their own more particularized interests.
Back when I first started reporting on these issues, some 10 years ago, what was mostly talked about were splits between national and ethnic identities, i.e., how New York’s Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Colombians and so on had mostly stuck together in a sort of pan-Latino front (yes, I know it was more complicated than this in the greater arc of Latino organizing in NYC, but this was where things had settled in the mid-2010s).
There’s still some of that, but I’d say the cracks have grown to be more generational and ideological than they are purely national or ethnic, which is really just a microcosm of liberal politics as a whole — the younger generations are drifting further from their parents in ways that seem more lasting than the longtime trend of the student-age population trending more centrist as they age. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is a reflection of a breaking apart of camaraderie among these populations so much as a sign that they have grown politically enough to reflect the broader trends in the party.
