In June, at Brooklyn’s historic Kings Theatre, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in front of a packed house and asked it to send a new generation of his allies to Congress. The crowd made its own demands. It chanted “Abolish ICE”, “Tax the rich” and “Free Palestine”, and it cheered each one, as Andy Hirschfeld recounted for Al Jazeera. Nobody in the hall could have mistaken what it wanted from the people it elects.
Within days, all three candidates the mayor had endorsed had won. On June 23 the Associated Press called the races for Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, and two sitting Democratic congressmen were out. ABC News called it a clean sweep.
The real election came in June
Today, November 3, the country votes in a midterm that a month ago looked like a contest between Democratic polling leads and Republican money. In these three New York districts it is barely a contest at all. They lean so heavily Democratic that the June primaries were the decisive fight, and the general election mostly confirms the result.
That is how one-party territory works, and it is worth a moment’s thought. Where one party always wins, the real struggle happens inside it, among people who share a ballot line. In June the insurgents won that struggle. Tonight they collect what they won.
Three biographies
Lander, the former city comptroller, is running in the 10th District, which takes in parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. According to Gothamist, he beat the incumbent, Dan Goldman, and celebrated with Mamdani on election night. Israel dominated that primary, in a district with one of the largest Jewish populations in the United States. Lander calls the war in Gaza a genocide and the occupation apartheid. He also calls himself a Zionist and supports a two-state solution, a combination that would be hard to place on most of the political maps Americans carry around.
About two weeks before the election, Israeli forces detained him in the West Bank, where he was volunteering with the olive harvest. His travel authorisation was later revoked. He came home with a sentence he plainly meant to repeat: “The main story that I come with is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.”
Avila Chevalier is a community organiser and a doctoral student at the City University of New York. She was new to politics when she defeated Adriano Espaillat, a long-serving Washington Heights congressman who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in the 13th District, which covers upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. Election-night reporting put her margin at roughly 2,000 votes, and Espaillat conceded. She interned in Nablus in 2014. Her platform, which she calls “Babies Not Bombs”, would move military spending into childcare and healthcare. “It’s important for us to see our budgets as moral documents,” she said.
After an ICE shooting she called on Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to resign, and she says New York police officers shoved her to the ground at the protests that followed. Tisch is no ordinary appointee. The Atlantic has reported that Governor Kathy Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani was tied to Tisch’s appointment. So the mayor’s own candidate is demanding that the mayor’s own police chief go.
Valdez, a state Assembly member and a former union organiser, won the open 7th District seat in Brooklyn and Queens that Nydia Velázquez is giving up. On the way she beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She supports the PRO Act, national rent control and government-run healthcare. “Public programmes and entitlements have been under attack by the right,” she said. She and Avila Chevalier belong to the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as Mamdani does, and the chapter backed both of them.
What the governor backed
All three share a programme taken from the theatre’s chants: abolish ICE, end US military aid to Israel, pass Medicare for All. Hochul had backed two of the men they beat. CNBC noted that both Goldman and Espaillat lost. Their defeat was partly a defeat for her, though she had already made her accommodation with the mayor.
Mamdani’s reach also had limits. He made no endorsement in the 12th District, where he lives at Gracie Mansion, and he would not say how he voted. State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won that crowded race, beating Alex Bores and Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, among others.
Potholes first
Insurgents face the same problem once they win. A movement that filled a theatre can lose its way in the corridors of the Capitol, where a freshman member has little power and seniority rules. The strategist Nomiki Konst has told the three to go after quick, visible wins, the way Mamdani promised to fill 200,000 potholes. “There’s no better time than the beginning,” she said.
Lander has named his first targets: a ban on stock trading by members of Congress, and restoring the health subsidies that expired at the end of 2025. On the stock trading ban: “Maybe that restores a little bit of trust.”
There is a precedent. In 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated Joe Crowley, then one of the party’s most powerful men in New York. In 2025 she joined Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna on a bill to cap credit card interest at 10 percent. A socialist from the Bronx and a Trump-aligned Floridian found one sentence they could both sign.
Avila Chevalier, who has been knocked to the pavement by the city’s police and wants its commissioner gone, seems to have learned the same lesson. “There is always something that two people can agree on,” she said.