NEW YORK—Three progressive hopefuls, including two Democratic Socialists of America members, racked up wins over establishment politicians in New York City Democratic congressional primaries on June 24, virtually ensuring they’ll join the U.S. House next year from three deep-blue districts.
There was another big winner in the Big Apple, too: new New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a Democratic Socialist, who endorsed and campaigned for all three. And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was a big loser.
AIPAC, which genuflects to the right-wing regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pumped millions into re-election bids by Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat. Both lost.
Former city comptroller Brad Lander trounced Goldman by almost a two-to-one ratio in the lower Manhattan 10th District, which also includes parts of Brooklyn. And first-time candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier upset Espaillat in the West Harlem-Bronx district. Espaillat chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Both Lander and Avila Chevalier are highly critical of Israel and its war on Iran, aided by U.S. arms, military aid and right-wing President Donald Trump. Opposition to both the war and Trump are big issues in the Big Apple. Lander said one reason he wants to go to the U.S. House is “to vanquish Trump’s fascism.”
Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other in the city’s 2025 Democratic mayoral primary, which Mamdani won on ranked-choice voting, benefitting from pro-Lander voters naming him as their second choice.
“Brad has been a trusted ally and partner of mine, and I’m proud to support him,” the mayor said. “I know he’ll keep delivering for those who need government to show up for them the most.”
Ironically, the incumbent Lander beat, Goldman, was a House manager (prosecutor) against Trump in the House’s first impeachment try against the right-winger, over Trump’s attempt to tie U.S. aid to Ukraine to having that nation manufacture dirt on Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Goldman’s loss produced a tweeted chortle of glee from the president, a longtime but now former New Yorker. “Weak and pathetic Congressman Dan Goldman just lost BIG!” Trump wrote. “! I guess people didn’t like him illegally targeting President TRUMP. In any event, this jerk is finally GONE!”
Support from building trades unions for housing development in the city became an issue in the race, too, as Goldman, heir to the Levi Strauss outerwear fortune, tried to regain lost ground. He charged that Lander did not support mandatory wage floors for construction workers on housing projects of 100 units or fewer.
“I look around this room, and I see the faces of so many people who showed up for this campaign and who showed up for me and our community when it was not easy,” Avila Chevalier told her victory party at a Harlem bar. “People who never stopped believing in our vision for New York, for Uptown and The Bronx.”
“Today we make it clear that the politics of the past ends today,” she declared. The crowd erupted.
“My opponent and his supporters spread vicious lies about me and my family everywhere they could. Tonight our community showed that it will not stand for it, and in the words of Shirley Chisholm: ‘Even if the establishment machine has done everything in its power to keep our community from having a seat at the table, we’ll have some bad news for them. We brought folding chairs’,” she said.
Mamdani added his applause.
“I was asked time and again, why would I support this campaign? And I said then that I can think of no better person than the daughter of a single mother case worker who has fought for working people her entire life, who has stood up for New Yorkers unjustly detained by ICE, who has called for a foreign policy of investing in babies and not bombs,” Mamdani said.
The third winner, state legislator Claire Valdez, won an open-seat race in a Brooklyn-Queens congressional district. She beat another establishment candidate, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who also had the Working Families Party endorsement. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., backed Valdez. So did Mayor Mamdani.
“Solidarity forever, abolish ICE, free Palestine, organize your union, and join DSA,” Valdez told her victory party.
In a notable win outside New York, former Rep. Ben McAdams, a moderate turned progressive, for this campaign, won the Democratic nomination for a virtually blue U.S. House seat in Salt Lake City. He defeated three even more progressive hopefuls.
McAdams benefited from one Democratic win in the Trump-launched national redistricting wars. A non-partisan Utah electoral commission had given Salt Lake City, the sole reliably Democratic area of the deeply red state, its own seat among four districts. But the GOP legislature overturned the panel’s ruling and carved the city up among the four. Voters appealed, and the state Supreme Court sided with the commission—and the blue district.
When he won a prior seat in 2018, McAdams said he was anti-abortion, for example, but would leave the decision to a woman, her doctors, family, and faith counselors in heavily Mormon Utah. This time, after the national uprising against the U.S. Supreme Court’s GOP majority 2022 decision eliminated a national right to abortion, McAdam strongly supported abortion rights and insisted he’s “moderate only in tone.”
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