Tuesday’s primary elections in New York City were a huge victory for Mayor Mamdani and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a significant defeat for the establishment of the Democratic Party. Like Mamdani’s election in 2025, they also showed that there is a huge sector of voters in New York who are attracted to socialist ideas and fed up with rising rents, inequality, ICE, and U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza and the Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.
This desire for change was particularly evident in the results of the several hotly contested congressional primaries in New York City, where all three of the candidates that Mamdani endorsed and campaigned for, including two DSA members, won their primaries against Democrats to their right.
Brad Lander, a former DSA member who supported Mamdani’s campaign against Cuomo, crushed the incumbent — genocide apologist Dan Goldman — in District Ten. Though Lander has called himself a liberal Zionist, and actually quit DSA after October 7, 2023, he has since moved away from his earlier support for Israel, strongly denounced the genocide in Gaza, and vowed to oppose all weapons shipments to Israel, including aid for the country’s Iron Dome air defense systems.
Meanwhile, DSA candidate Claire Valdez trounced establishment candidate and Brooklyn Borough President, Antonio Reynoso in District Seven, which includes several neighborhoods in Brooklyn that are part of the so-called “commie corridor.” This, despite the fact that Reynoso had secured the endorsement of the Working Families Party and several establishment Democrats, including the former District Seven congressperson, Nydia Velázquez, as well as Attorney General Letitia James.
But perhaps the most important and surprising race of the day took place in the heavily Hispanic District 13, where DSA candidate and Palestine activist, Darializa Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated the ten-year incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espaillat. Espaillat was a staunch supporter of Israel, and had received more than $600,000 from Pro-Israeli PACs seeking to defeat Chevalier, who ran on an explicitly anti-Zionist and anti-establishment platform.
Though Espaillat’s supporters tried to smear Chevalier by calling attention to her earlier statements about Israel, immigration, and the Democrats — including a tweet that read “Fuck Kamala Harris,” — the attempt seems to have backfired. It’s impossible to know how many people turned out for her explicitly because of that tweet, but it was surely more than zero. The fact that Espaillat lost to a young upstart with no previous political experience in office shows not only the rising discontent and widespread disgust with the establishment of the Democratic Party and its support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, but also the almost magical power of Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement.
Even more surprising is the fact that many of these candidates, including Chevalier and Valdez, won despite facing stiff opposition from the Working Families Party as well as major unions that endorsed and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting their establishment opponents.
The worst culprit by far was the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) whose affiliates, the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), represent hundreds of thousands of New York City teachers and educators. Both Reynoso and Espaillat received millions of dollars from anti-socialist super PACs partly funded and supported by the UFT. This is just another example of why working people and rank-and-file union members cannot trust and should not rely on the labor bureaucracy to fight their battles for them.
While these congressional races received the lion’s share of attention, DSA also quietly won six primaries for State Legislature, meaning that the total number of DSA electeds in the legislature will likely rise to 15 come January, increasing the mayor’s influence in Albany.
All in all, Tuesday was a good day for DSA and shows that Mamdani’s victory in 2025 was not a fluke or merely the product of a savvy media campaign. It was made possible by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of working-class voters who are struggling to make ends meet in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and who are increasingly attracted to and open to socialist ideas. How the Left builds on these victories and whether or not we can organize these new sectors as a force for working class power (rather than just a mass of maneuver to win elections) will be the deciding element in the future of socialist politics in New York City and across the country.
Mamdani’s “Socialist” Coalition and the Limits of Electoralism
Like Mamdani, all of the candidates he endorsed ran on a platform that was far to the left of the Democratic establishment, but still clearly within the limits of what a capitalist economy would allow. Alongside other DSA electeds and progressives — including Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and Bernie Sanders — Lander, Valdez, and Chevalier all support a whole host of basic social-democratic demands, including universal healthcare, free public college tuition (though bizarrely often only at community colleges), affordable public housing, and a significantly higher minimum wage. They are also all strongly opposed to ICE and Trump’s deportation policies as well as U.S. support for Israel. For instance, Chevalier has called for a halt to all deportations, while Valdez’s platform includes the abolition of ICE and support for “Palestinian freedom.”
These populist demands have resonated widely with working and oppressed people in the city and across the country who have experienced a real decline in living standards and who are tired of seeing their tax dollars spent on murdering children abroad and terrorizing their immigrant communities at home. In fact, national polling shows that only 42 percent of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while 66 percent say they have a positive view of socialism. Even when you include Republicans and independents, support for socialism still reaches nearly 40 percent compared to just 54 percent for capitalism, the lowest approval rating since the poll started in 2010.
Tuesday’s elections were also the latest and one of the most salient examples of the seismic crisis of the Democratic Party and the ongoing collapse of public support for both of the major parties and the institutions of the capitalist state. Like capitalism itself, support for both the Republican and Democratic parties are at their lowest point in decades, and since 2020, their approval ratings have hovered below 40 percent. This rejection of the establishment is partly to blame for the increasing appeal of populist ideas on both the Right and the Left.
And yet, despite this, millions of these same people continue to vote for Democrats, and DSA continues to use the Democratic Party ballot line to run its own candidates. This is why we have to be clear that when we talk about socialism, we are talking about more than reform, and that when we talk about organizing we’re talking about more than merely door-knocking or lobbying our representatives to pass this or that piece of legislation. The working class and oppressed need a party that is not only independent of capitalist interests, but grounded in a strategy of working-class struggle for socialism in the streets and in the workplaces, not only at the ballot box.
Once Again with Feeling: The Democratic Party Cannot Be Reformed
All three of Mamdani’s endorsed candidates were elected in heavily Democratic districts and are practically guaranteed to enter Congress in January. How these candidates navigate their likely first terms remains to be seen, but while the mayor was already making backroom deals with Democrats before his election, both Valdez and Chevalier are much more organic of the labor movement and the movement for Palestine, and neither of them, unlike Mamdani, has yet endorsed Hakeem Jefrries or any other democratic establishment figure for Speaker.
Once in office, however, these candidates, like Mamdani and AOC, will find themselves and their agendas held hostage by the Democratic Party. By controlling committee assignments or threatening to hold up legislation or funds to member districts, the party can put enormous pressure on its members to fall in line. The temptation to play along to get along and to make backroom deals to deliver for their constituents will be strong. AOC’s and Jamaal Bowman’s backward positions on the Iron Dome and the defense of Israel are perfect examples of how even socialist candidates who claim to oppose U.S. imperialism wind up endorsing imperialist policies when they see themselves as part of the party and rely on it for their political futures.
But even if they do stand by their principles, working within and attempting to reform the Democratic Party poses a more fundamental problem. It inevitably helps the party paper over its corporatist economic agenda and present itself as the party of the working class, drawing ever more progressives into the trap of the two party system of U.S. imperialism. This is why the Democratic Party is called the graveyard of social movements and why the working class needs a clean break with the party once and for all.
Unfortunately, the union leaderships and DSA’s leaders will almost certainly treat Tuesday as proof the strategy of using the Democratic ballot line is working, and then dig in even further. That’s the trap: every win inside the Democratic Party is held up as a reason to stay inside it, while the very forces that have the members, the trust, and the money to start building an independent working-class party instead choose to keep that possibility off the table.
In a rally with all three candidates the week before the election, Mamdani said, “This slate today is our answer. The Democratic Party must change.” Meanwhile, every publication, from the New York Times to the National Review are referring to Tuesday’s results as a “Tea Party moment” for the Democrats, implying that these victories could have a lasting impact on the political direction of the party. But even if this were true, no amount of DSA victories and political dissent will convince the Democratic Party, or any reformist party for that matter, to give up its fundamental commitment to defending and upholding capitalism and imperialism. And building a so-called socialist project that helps such a party rehabilitate itself is nothing less than a betrayal of everything that socialists stand for.
Instead of helping the Democrats channel working-class anger back into the welcoming hands of the capitalist state, we need to break with the party once and for all and build a real working-class party for socialism. Tuesday’s elections, as well as the victories of democratic socialists in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington D.C. show clearly that there is enormous appetite across the country for socialist ideas and working-class political alternatives.
However, the union leaderships and the DSA leaders, particularly the NYC DSA — which will surely now double down on its Democratic Party ballot line strategy — are currently blocking the development of such a formation. Breaking this impasse will require greater levels of working-class resistance and self-organization. This means fighting both inside and outside DSA, from our workplaces and schools, in our communities, and in all our struggles — from Minneapolis to Delaney Hall — to break with the Democratic Party, strengthen self-organization, and build a working-class party with a socialist perspective that will inspire the thousands of workers and young people who are in the process of political radicalization.
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