DSA’s and Mayor Mamdani’s candidates rocked establishment incumbents backed by unions and political bigwigs. In most cases it wasn’t even close.

by Whitney Curry Wimbish and David Dayen

June 24, 2026 (Prospect.org)

Progressivism threw a wrench in New York’s machine politics Tuesday night, as a trio of leftist congressional candidates beat establishment and corporate-backed foes who came with far more money. 

Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander’s race in the Tenth Congressional District was the first of the group called shortly after polls closed. He took the vote with nearly 66 percent of the vote against incumbent Dan Sachs Goldman, the Levi Strauss heir who poured millions of his own money into keeping his job. This race had become an afterthought for weeks, with Goldman fated to lose after prevailing over a split left wing in 2024.

In District Seven, New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a former UAW organizer, beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso with 56.1 percent of the vote. Reynoso had been longtime Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s choice to succeed her after she did not seek reelection this year, and he had backing from the state Working Families Party, a progressive force in New York. 

Read: In New York’s ‘Commie Corridor,’ a Race Over How to Build Power

And in the 13th Congressional District, Darializa Avila Chevalier beat Adriano Espaillat with 49.4 percent of votes, the closest of the three races. Her campaign faced nearly $7 million in super PAC spending and ongoing racist smears from Espaillat, whose senior advisor said in Spanish language media that Chevalier wanted to replace Dominican New Yorkers with Muslims and Haitians. 

“Today we make it clear that the politics of the past ends today,” Chevalier told supporters Monday night after her election was called, adding that she stood with Haitians, a rejection of the racism and bigotry she faced.  

Her win represented a new dawn for the district, she said, which covers the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx. It includes Columbia University, where Chevalier organized for Palestinian rights and helped lead the student encampment in 2023 and 2024, which Columbia’s administration violently crushed with help from the New York City Police Department. 

“No longer will uptown and the Bronx be neglected, forgotten, or overlooked. No longer will we accept the politics that throws scraps at us and acts as if we should be grateful for them,” she said. “No longer will we accept anything less than respect and a seat at the table that our labor built.” 

Political analysts viewed the primary as a test of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s power. He endorsed the three candidates and called them his slate; a memorable campaign ad during the New York Knicks playoff showed the four on a basketball court. “This is the team,” Mamdani said. “This is our year.” 

But city organizations that rallied behind the candidates and sent hundreds of volunteers to knock doors, as they did for Mamdani’s campaign, said that while it fits in with old narratives to imagine Mamdani as a “kingmaker,” he did not decide the election alone. 

The local ground campaign was assisted by outside spending that kept the candidates competitive. That included Justice Democrats and American Priorities, the new PAC designed to counter AIPAC’s influence in Democratic primaries. American Priorities spent $2.1 million in the Valdez and Chevalier primaries. 

“Valdez and Avila Chevalier—along with Lander—will immediately change the face of the New York congressional delegation, but their victories will echo much further, from districts in all five boroughs and New York State to across the country,” said American Priorities in a statement. “Elected officials who have avoided taking clear positions will face increasing pressure from their own voters, and there is no going back.”

Local and national unions, meanwhile, largely threw in with the establishment, funding super PAC ads for Reynoso and Espaillat down the stretch. The split between labor leaders and rank-and-file New Yorkers reflects a disconnect that will have to be managed.

Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) was among the groups who sent 200 volunteers across 500 shifts to knock doors for Lander and Eli Northrup, who won his race to represent New York’s 69th Assembly District. On Tuesday, the group had about 75 people canvassing down to the last minute. 

Both races were a struggle for power between out-of-step establishment candidates who marched in the Israel Day Parade and “a grassroots Jewish left that has a vision for our community,” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, communications director for JFREJ. She said that while Mamdani likely had a strong influence in some races, so too did the volunteers that were knocking on doors to get the word out about candidates and their policy positions. Building that political power will help defeat fascism, she said, a belief candidates told the Prospect they also shared. 

“I think that something that’s amazing about this organizing is how people develop their own leadership. Anyone can show up to a canvas,” Ellman-Golan told the Prospect. “People who get the experience of talking to a voter and hearing their concerns and persuading them one way or another is a feeling of power and knowing you made a difference.” 

You don’t always win, but when you do? “People carry that with them for the rest of their lives.”  

The organization was also part of the core battalion of volunteers responsible for Mamdani’s win, knocking on 10,000 doors, making 80,000 phone calls, and bringing grassroots organizing to the streets. 

The victories did not only play out at the congressional level. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America defeated two state senators and five state assemblymembers in New York last night, in an anti-incumbent fervor that even crossed over to Maryland, where two state senators and one member of the state House of Delegates went down.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) did not endorse the congressional slate, and some leaped to criticize her for shrinking from creating tensions in Washington. But Mamdani, who needs support and funding from Albany for his legislative agenda, did not endorse any of the DSA-backed Assembly candidates going up against incumbents. AOC did, and they won last night too.

That suggests that the movement on the ground, not candidates from on high, was the deciding factor in the sea change in New York politics.

The losing incumbents included state Sen. Jessica Ramos, a mayoral candidate who dropped out and endorsed Andrew Cuomo over Mamdani last year. Ramos, who was one of the original Democrats who deposed an incumbent that was caucusing with Republicans in Albany as part of Cuomo’s “Independent Democratic Conference” slate, lost to state assemblywoman Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas.

The one open-seat congressional race in the city where Mamdani did not endorse was the 12th District, to replace the decades-long run of Jerrold Nadler. The AI industry made an enormous investment in this race to take out state Assemblymember Alex Bores. Ultimately, Bores did lose to fellow Assemblymember Micah Lasher, a former Nadler aide, by a 39-35 count. (Political royalty failson Jack Kennedy Schlossberg was well back in third.) But in his victory speech, Lasher, who co-sponsored the AI safety bill that turned the industry against Bores, directly confronted the oligarchs: “I have some news for the two big AI companies who’ve taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat: I won’t be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, our environment.”

Before you go.

I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work. 

The Prospect doesn’t answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us. 

Independent, reader-supported journalism is critical at a time when the free press is under assault. 

If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you’ll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.

Donate Now

David Dayen
Executive Editor

Related

America, We Have a Super PAC Problem

March 25, 2026

Brad Lander Is Building a United Progressive Front

February 27, 2026

In New York’s ‘Commie Corridor,’ a Race Over How to Build Power

June 17, 2026

Whitney Curry Wimbish

writers@prospect.org

Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish

David Dayen

ddayen@prospect.org

David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen