In a sweeping victory on June 23, three candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani were preselected in the New York City primaries to stand as Democratic Party candidates to the United States Congress in November’s midterm elections.
Mamdani joined their campaigns, appearing with them in meetings and reaching out to ordinary voters for support.
Israeli genocide
A central issue in the primaries was what position to take towards Israel. The three candidates — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander — all oppose Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. They defeated opponents from the Democratic Party “establishment”, which supports Israel’s wars and genocide.
Given the dominance of the Democrats in NYC, the three are likely to be elected to Congress in November.
The NY Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mobilised for the primaries, and the Mamdani-DSA bloc emerged as a powerful political force.
Mamdani, who is Muslim, was elected Mayor last year, in a surprising victory after initially polling only 1%. A significant majority of NYC voters liked his democratic socialist views, as they became aware of them.
This pre-selection win shows his victory was not an anomaly, but reflects support for his progressive positions, especially easing the economic pressure on working-class people, caused by wages lagging behind inflation.
Chevalier and Valdez are members of the DSA. The pro-Israel American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) poured an estimated US$50 million (A$72.5 million) into their staunchly pro-Israel opponents’ campaigns.
Lander, who is not a DSA member, told Democracy Now! “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up loud for Palestinian human rights, freedom and equality. I will stand against bigotry aimed at Jews, as well. That’s not two different jobs. That’s the same job.”
The DSA ran a slate of candidates, most of whom Mandani supported. Three out of the four DSA-endorsed candidates for the NY State Assembly, who were not endorsed by Mamdani, won their races.
Racism
Chevalier, an Afro-Latinx of Dominican heritage, has long been active as a supporter of the Palestinians. She visited the West Bank in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a Columbia University student, while majoring in Middle Eastern studies, from 2014–18.
Chevalier told DN! that her experience in the West Bank formed a lot of her understanding of global and domestic politics. “I started to see and understand that the systems that were oppressing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — all of Palestine — were also informing our systems here [and] having such a deep, harmful impact on so many Black, Latino and communities of colour.
“As you grow as an organiser, as you become more educated on these systems, you start to notice they are the same systems that consistently put profit over people, that consistently deny people their human dignity for the sake of capital.”
Chevalier told DN! that every time she opened her social media accounts, during her campaign for the primary, she was inundated with racist attacks, including that she was Haitian [Black] “as though it was a slur”. Her social media account was also “inundated” with emojis of “monkeys”, “gorillas” and “rats”, and people demanding her birth certificate and proof of where she was born.
“It was the ugliest rhetoric I have seen in a really long time,” Chevalier said. This was “MAGA-style politics … in a heavily blue [Democrat] district where the sitting incumbent [she defeated] was a Democrat.”
Local government
In Los Angeles, DSA City Councillor Nithya Raman will contest a run-off in the Democratic primary for its Mayoral candidate against sitting Democratic Party Mayor Karen Bass, after coming a close second to her in a field of candidates. Ramon rose to prominence during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
The election will take place in November.
Seattle’s socialist mayor, public transport activist Katie Wilson, took office in January, after defeating the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, in November last year.
In Washington DC, socialist Janeese Lewis won the Democratic primary for mayor, and will certainly win the general election in November.
One takeaway is that “socialist” is a positive and acceptable label in urban centres.
All these socialist candidates will be under pressure from the Democratic Party establishment to toe the line in order to remain Democrats.
Mamdani’s appointments of establishment Democrats as police chief and sheriff show the influence of the national Democratic Party apparatus. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents freely roam the NYC airports.
The DSA seeks to reform capitalism, not overthrow it, and orients to working within the Democratic Party as part of that. There are members of DSA on its left who argue for a break with the Democrats, and remain concerned that the DSA's electoralist orientation will not work, especially when mass action is required to take on the police and ICE, for example.
The NYC elections, where pro-Palestinian activists were elected, show that the Democratic Party establishment can be defeated. The next step is for these candidates to use their campaigns and elected positions to mobilise and organise people’s resistance to Donald Trump’s MAGA politics and the power of capital.