Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three fellow socialists in the New York City Democratic Congressional primaries and all three won last night.
Democratic incumbent Dan Goldman lost to Brad Lander, who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America until 2023. DSA Member Claire Valdez won nomination for a Brooklyn House seat.
But the eyepopper is the victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old DSA member and PhD graduate student, in East Harlem and the Bronx. She defeated Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and will easily become the most radical House member since Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party represented the same area in the 1940s.
Chevalier called the United States “a f—— disgrace,” and referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land
The night before his election in November, Zohran Mamdani filmed a video honoring his “radical” hero, Marcantonio.
Chevalier’s views would send even Marcantonio into orbit. DAC – as she will inevitably be dubbed – is so ideologically extreme that Jeff Maurer, a former writer for unrelentingly left-wing comic John Oliver’s HBO show, is gobsmacked by her. Maurer began his latest Substack post by announcing “My challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level s—show truly is.”
DAC has called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders. As recently as last week, she refused to back down on those views when given an opportunity: “All deportations are wrong,” she says, even for those convicted of a crime.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the militant student group behind the violent 2024 occupation of Columbia after the Hamas attacks in Gaza the year before. CUAD is explicitly anti-Enlightenment: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one…”
Chevalier called the United States “a f—— disgrace,” and referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land. She’s written favorably about communism and seizing “all properties from landlords.”
She has criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel, and is known as a key leader in the “left of AOC” faction of Democratic Socialists of America.
Even Chevalier is not the most extreme. Seven of the eight candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America for the New York State legislature won their primary elections.
Coming from pure Blue Democratic districts in January, they will boost DSA numbers in the state legislature to 14, up from nine.
Among them is Aber Kawas, a Muslim activist, who won the Democratic nomination to represent 317,000 people in Queens as a state senator. She has bitterly criticized the US “system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy and Islamophobia” because it expects apologies for “a terror attack that a couple people did when there is no apology or reparations for genocide and for slavery etc.” She finds that “kind of reprehensible.”
Founded in 1982 by the social critic Michael Harrington as a vehicle to push the Democratic Party leftward, the DSA languished in obscurity until the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and the 2018 upset victory of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez over the third-highest ranking member of the House Democratic leadership.
Now the DSA is the fastest growing political group in the US.
CNN data analyst Harry Enten notes that it has a net favorability rating of +17 among Democrats, compared with just +4 for congressional Democrats. “They’re a better brand at this point than Democrats in Congress,” he says.
In recent months, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been elected as mayors in New York City and Seattle, and won the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, DC last week. DSA member Nithya Raman is leading in polls against incumbent Karen Bass in the November race for mayor of Los Angeles.
Emboldened by its victories this week, you can now expect its army of foot soldiers will be one of the most powerful forces in Democratic primaries, capable of intimidating Democratic officeholders into backing many of the DSA’s radical views.
Earlier this month, the DSA’s leadership issued an updated platform that calls for abolishing the US Senate, defunding the Pentagon, offering universal amnesty to illegal immigrants, transferring the ownership of major corporations to the public and replacing “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” It also includes a demand that police budgets be cut “annually to zero.”
Van Jones, a former Obama administration official and CNN commentator, notes that New York City is home of both Mamdani and AOC, who represent the socialist insurgency, and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He said on CNN on Tuesday night that the party now faces “a battle between the establishment and this insurgency. And the roof is collapsing on the Democratic party establishment tonight.” He said the DSA “is no longer a movement but a movement and a machine at the same time.”
Where will that machine go next? DSA activists tell me it will be in Denver. The Congresswoman Diana De Gette, who was first elected in 1996, is in danger of losing her June 30 primary to Milat Kiros, a 29-year-old graduate student and immigrant who was born in Ethiopia before De Gette first went to Washington. In a March convention held by local Democrats, Kiros won the votes of 67 percent of delegates. A mid-June poll by the progressive think tank Data For Progress reported that Kiros was leading the incumbent De Gette by five points.
After Denver will come the Democratic nomination battle for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Progressive hopes lie with Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, who backs nationalized health care, says Israel committed genocide In Gaza and calls for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). The average of all recent polls cited by Real Clear Politics show El-Sayed leading Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who is strongly backed by AIPAC and allied pro-Israel groups, by 32 percent to 31 percent.
Going forward, the Mamdani Machine’s success in New York will also have national implications in the 2028 presidential race. At a rally last Thursday on behalf of the DSA members he had endorsed, Mamdani responded to calls from the raucous crowd calling on AOC to run for president: “When does the [presidential] race for 2028 begin? It starts now. It starts on Tuesday.”
It’s not just Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who now have reason to fear that the ground on which they stand in the Democratic Party is shifting beneath their feet. As Van Jones warns: “This is a new era for the Democratic Party.”
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