Two Congressional Races
It's Getting Ugly Here
I threw this together quickly. Apologies for typos if any.
All political parties in NY State will have primaries on June 23. Since in most of NYC there are no serious Republican candidates, that means we look only at the Democrats.
For my entire life, I thought that there was nothing more boring than NYC politics. Or national politics NYC-style. We’re a Democrat machine — the results are mostly foregone. It’s watching paint dry.
No longer.
Let’s have a look these two Congressional primaries: NY-10 and NY-13.
They both span multiple neighborhoods but to simplify, NY-10 is lower Manhattan-White Hipster Brooklyn and NY-13 is upper Manhattan Dominican-remnant black-white gentrifier. The common denominator is “progressive” whites, with this caveat: they are the dominant force in NY-10, while in NY-13 they are growing.
The progressives in NY-10 are split between outright DSA radicals, DSA-leaners, and the 'traditional' progressive base. By 2026, this 'traditional' label defines a constituency whose political roots are clearly downstream of 1960s radicalism, yet sanded down by reality. They are the voters who secretly voted for Bloomberg. They tend to be both older and live in Manhattan.
The fight in NY-10 is between the incumbent, Dan Goldman, and the current city comptroller, Brad Lander.
Dan Goldman should be a shoo-in. He’s progressive, he led the impeachment fight against the evil fascist… but he’s getting his ass beaten by Lander, a mediocre bagman for Mamdani. It’s hard to pinpoint the cause: because the DSA is the new power in NYC politics, or because of Israel. Or are they the same?
Let’s put it this way:
Goldman is the guy that the DSA hates. He’s rich, Jewish, a scion of a capitalist family who thinks you can appease the wolves and keep power.
Lander is the guy that the DSA despises — and uses. He doesn’t appease: he grovels. The wolf will devour him, too, but he’s too blinded by his own ambition to see it.
“The New York Primary That Is All About Israel” begins with what sounds like an elegiac opening to an obituary: “Not long ago, Dan Goldman was a hero of the resistance.”
It depicts this chilling anecdote:
Lander has gotten it from the other direction, too. On a recent subway ride, a young man called his name. Thinking it was a supporter, the candidate extended his hand. “He looks at me and says: I don’t shake hands with Zionists,” Lander recalled.
Then Lander adds:
“The Jewish amygdala is badly dysregulated,” he added. “And with good reason.”
What a weird thing to say — does he not realize that he, too, will be devoured by the same forces that once thought Dan Goldman was “a hero of the resistance?”
I was struck by this:
Even some Jews who are critical of AIPAC are unsettled by its sudden demonization.
That’s me. Unsettled. I’ve never liked AIPAC. But if you can’t see that “demonizing” it isn’t a symptom of something far darker and more primal than just political opposition, I don’t know what to say.
This is a civil war between Jews — Jews who don’t know what hit them on October 7.
Onto NY-13, where another incumbent is being challenged: Adriano Espaillat. This is just as train-wreck interesting as the NY-10 primary.
If Goldman should be a shoo-in, Espaillat should be a literal walkover, as in a bedridden man who should be waltzing over the finish line. Instead, he’s facing a genuine challenge from a Maureen Galindo-level nutcase.
Espaillat is a Dominican‑American, a proud former ‘undocumented immigrant,’ who defeated the chosen heir to Charlie Rangel.
In NYC politics Charlie Rangel was an institution — an icon, really, to use that overused word.
Rangel was first elected in November 1970. He was part of the black Harlem machine that was already mature by the 1940s. He picked Wright, endorsed him, and campaigned for him. Everyone knew that a vote for Wright was a vote for Charlie Rangel.
And Wright lost.
The enormity of this shock was profound — and actually, it —the decay of the Harlem black Democratic machine — deserves treatment that I’m not capable of here. Suffice it to say: it’s big. Huge.
He became chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on November 20, 2024. He has power.
About local politics, he was firmly ensconced in the Cuomo-machine from the time Cuomo was governor. There was no other option. He was a loyal foot soldier. Then things got interesting.
Espaillat officially endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor on May 10, 2025, during a Mother’s Day event in the Bronx.
Following Cuomo’s defeat in the Democratic primary, Espaillat shifted his support to Zohran Mamdani for the general election, even as Cuomo continued his campaign as an independent. This wasn’t a betrayal; Espaillat was going with his party’s candidate.
The betrayal came from the other side: Mamdani apparently promised Espaillat that he’d back the older established Dominican Democrat for re-election… and then turned around and backed the Maureen Galindo-lite DSA chick: 1
Isn’t she perfect? The keffiyeh is only part of the costume. The hair. The Tlaib-sized glasses — which are recent. It’s facial expression that caps it off. There’s a thing called resting bitch face. This is resting cunt face.
She might win.
Yep, a DSA-backed loony with zero political experience might well unseat the incumbent, whose win was a signal victory for Dominican political power in NYC just a few short years ago.
But let’s circle back to Mamdani’s betrayal of Espaillat. Mamdani has only been mayor a few months and already he’s acting as if he’s the don, the boss of all bosses. Sure, politics is full of betrayals, but you don’t do something like this so soon in the game. And to somebody like Espaillat. It’s shocking.
Ten years ago, a little-known state lawmaker in Upper Manhattan staged a major upset, winning a congressional seat that had for years been central to Black political power and making history as the first Dominican American and undocumented immigrant elected to the House.
Now, that history-maker, Representative Adriano Espaillat, is in a tough re-election fight of his own, resulting from the same type of shifting demographics that once propelled him to victory.
Mr. Espaillat, who has built the trappings of a small political machine and chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, is facing a Democratic primary challenge from Darializa Avila Chevalier, an organizer and democratic socialist nearly 40 years his junior.
And as Mr. Espaillat, 71, works to blunt the ascent of Ms. Avila Chevalier, 32, another prominent democratic socialist has thrown his support behind her.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed Ms. Avila Chevalier in a joint interview with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki on Thursday evening.
“She grew up with a commitment to the very people that politics have left behind, and what I see in her is that commitment fulfilled,” he said, lauding her fights against immigration detentions and her support of his affordability agenda. “I can’t wait for her to be introduced to so many across the city and across this country as we fight for that affordability agenda, from New York City to D.C.”
Mr. Mamdani had committed to supporting Mr. Espaillat last year, according to three people familiar with the pledge. It came after the congressman dropped his support for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral bid and got behind Mr. Mamdani after he won the Democratic primary.
….
The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is supporting Ms. Avila Chevalier, is increasingly bullish about her prospects.
…
Mr. Mamdani trounced Mr. Cuomo throughout the 13th Congressional District Mr. Espaillat represents, which runs through Upper Manhattan and the Bronx and has, in some areas, been gentrified considerably over the last decade.
New York’s democratic socialists2 have sought to expand their footprint citywide and has seen its fastest growth in the 13th District, feeding leaders’ enthusiasm for a challenger like Ms. Avila Chevalier, who has been a member since last year. Her campaign plans to hold more than a dozen canvasses each week leading up to Primary Day.
The race for the seat is shaping up to be more expensive in its final weeks. On Wednesday, Justice Democrats, the group that helped power the rise of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, announced that it planned to spend $250,000 on ads for Ms. Avila Chevalier, bringing its total spending on the race to more than $380,000. And on Thursday, BOLD PAC, an organization affiliated with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, announced that it would spend $600,000 to support Mr. Espaillat.
In a statement, Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the group, said that voters would support Ms. Avila Chevalier against “machine politicians funded by AIPAC & the real estate lobby like Adriano Espaillat and Andrew Cuomo, and are ready to usher in a new era led by courageous, unbought leaders like Darializa.”
(There’s that demon AIPAC again.)
Ms. Avila Chevalier, who helped organize protests at Columbia University against the war in Gaza, has condemned the support Mr. Espaillat receives from AIPAC, the influential pro-Israel lobbying group, and argued that he is too beholden to real estate interests and corporations.
Mr. Espaillat, asked about AIPAC’s donations to him, said, “no one that donates to my campaign has control over how I vote. Only my constituents tell me how to vote.”
Ms. Avila Chevalier’s stances on the matter have also drawn criticism. During a candidate forum in January, she would not condemn Hamas’s fatal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Actually, Chevalier attended a rally on October 8 that was so awful even Lander condemned it:
Brad Lander said at a NY1 debate Monday he canceled his decades-old DSA membership3 after the socialist organization “advertised a rally that I thought was heinous, that spoke about Hamas in ways that I just thought were vile.” He was referring to the gathering in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 organized by leftist groups like The People's Forum and Al-Awda New York, where rallygoers held signs such as “Resistance is Justified when People are Occupied.”
DSA members are literally colonizing the shabby, sclerotic, wheezing, clanking Democrat machine that runs NYC.
Here are their candidates. Notice anything interesting about their attire?4
And the response from “the business community”?
Crickets.
Why would Zohran Mamdani do something so ostensibly stupid? This isn’t the same as Lander v. Goldman. Lander was well placed to cut Goldman’s legs off at the knees. Chevalier - not so much. She’ll probably lose. If so, he threw away political capital on a loudmouth neophyte while alienating a powerful politician and enraging his powerful constituency, Dominican New Yorkers. Why?
Because he’s got convictions, that’s why, one in particular. An overwhelming, animating passion. If he wins, it’s a massive coup. If he loses, so what? He’ll live to fight another day - and he’ll have stood up for the thing that animates him:
Hatred of Israel.
He lives for it, he breathes for it, it’s the key to his entire political worldview - as it is with the whole DSA crew, Jacobin magazine, and everyone to the side and behind them.
They’re not going after AIPAC, they’re going after Jews and Jewish participation in civil life. They — the DSA’s goal — is to push Jews back into the ghetto. The fact that some of them are ethnically Jewish is irrelevant.
Remember what I said about 1391?
The word “Palestine” appears seven times in this puff piece. “Wage” and “rent” - zero.
Note the lower case “d” and “s.”
I never knew Lander had actually been a member of the DSA. Whether he resigned or not, he’s still their loyal footsoldier.
And the facial expressions don’t exactly say, “I’m your friend.”