Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images

For a variety of reasons, 2026 will be especially fascinating in New York City. A 34-year-old Muslim socialist will be the mayor, grappling with many of the same political forces and interest groups that aimed to crush him during the campaign season. The governor, seeking her second full term, will run for reelection. And the city’s House delegation may see its largest turnover in decades.

Many leftists despaired when Zohran Mamdani decided to actively work against the potential campaign of a young left-wing City Council member who aimed to challenge Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries, who may be Speaker of the House in 2027, only offered a tepid endorsement of Mamdani in the general election, but the mayor-elect decided that a war against him wasn’t worthwhile and could undermine his push to secure funding for universal child care and free buses. The race, to Mamdani and his allies, wasn’t winnable, and the DSA ultimately voted against endorsing the challenger.

The good news for the socialists who did want to battle in a marquee House race next year is that now they’ll have their chance: Recently, Nydia Velázquez, a popular progressive Democrat who has been in office more than 30 years, announced her retirement. She represents a chunk of Brooklyn and Queens that includes prime DSA territory — and one where Mamdani performed extremely well against Andrew Cuomo in the primary and general elections. The DSA now has a shot to claim its second congressional seat in New York City — the first being the one held by DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It appears that the DSA is beginning to settle on a candidate: Claire Valdez, a 36-year-old Queens assemblywoman and former union organizer who was elected just last year. Valdez is popular within the DSA, and her deep roots within the United Auto Workers appeals to the rank and file, which has hoped to build stronger ties with large labor unions. Mamdani’s inner circle has been boosting Valdez and, when asked about her potential candidacy, the mayor-elect has spoken warmly about her in public. If DSA moves to formally endorse her, it’s likely Mamdani will follow.

But Valdez, if she chooses to run, will have a tough battle on her hands for the primary next June. Antonio Reynoso, the 42-year-old Brooklyn borough president, has already declared his candidacy, and he immediately rolled out endorsements from four City Council members who overlap with the district. Valdez, who is Puerto Rican like Velázquez, could theoretically have a chance to win the endorsement of the retiring congresswoman, but the reality is Velázquez has a much deeper relationship with Reynoso, who was a Brooklyn City Council member for eight years before his election to the borough presidency in 2021. At the minimum, Velázquez would be neutral in a DSA-vs.-Reynoso war, and assuming the borough president finds momentum, he could be in line for an endorsement from the outgoing congresswoman.

A clash between Reynoso and Valdez — there will probably be other candidates, but these are the two most likely to have the volunteers and the money — would be intriguing for several reasons. It would represent a rare open war between the rising socialists and the traditional progressives who, for the most part, have been on the same side of most local political fights. The mayoral race threatened to divide them, with Mamdani, the DSA contender, up against Brad Lander, the progressive who is not an active DSA member, but Mamdani’s momentum and the eventual cross-endorsement in a ranked-choice-vote primary brought the two sides together.

In this congressional race, there will be no RCV, and Reynoso and Valdez will be forced to draw contrasts between one another. Reynoso has deeper roots in the district — he grew up there, while Valdez moved from Texas to New York in the 2010s — and a long history with the reform wing of the Democratic Party, which represented the leftist vanguard before the DSA’s rise. Reynoso co-founded New Kings Democrats, a political club in Brooklyn that was dedicated to battling what was, in the aughts, a much more potent Brooklyn Democratic machine. He belonged to the progressive wing of the City Council and made headlines as borough president for donating his entire capital budget, around $45 million, to maternal-health programs. In the mayoral race, he preferred Lander but eventually co-endorsed Mamdani.

The question is whether that record will be enough in a district that now contains the DSA hotbeds of Long Island City, Sunnyside, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood. Mamdani is extraordinarily popular there, and if he decides to dedicate serious political capital to aiding Valdez — boosts on social media as well as in-person campaigning — it is difficult to see how she’s not formidable. Fundraising would be easy. Valdez could promise, as the district’s representative, she’d immediately join the Squad and be an unapologetic pro-Palestine voice in Congress. Reynoso is no Israel hawk, but Valdez, as a DSA member, could quickly outflank him. For younger voters, the struggle for Palestinian rights — and hostility toward Israel — is vital in the way the movement to end the Vietnam War was to many 20-somethings in the 1960s and 1970s. The antiwar movement was larger and more pervasive, given the reality of the draft, but pro-Palestine politics matters a great deal more than it did just a few years ago.

Mamdani, who backs BDS, is an embodiment of this. And Valdez might be as well.

If Mamdani puts his weight behind her, it will be an early test of his strength. A defeat of Reynoso would prove, within certain pockets of Brooklyn and Queens, his popularity is more than transferable to others. A loss, though, would sting. If Mamdani couldn’t carry a DSA candidate over the finish line in Williamsburg and Bushwick, how powerful could he be? Next year, we may find out.

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed