Can Zohran Mamdani Sway the Commie Corridor’s “Civil War”?
On January 27th, the third day of New York City’s record-breaking snowstorm, Zohran Mamdani, the newly inaugurated mayor, sent out a text to his enormous fleet of campaign volunteers. “My friend Claire Valdez is running for Congress,” he wrote. “Do me a favor and watch the video,” along with a clip he’d just filmed with Valdez, a fellow-member of the Democratic Socialists of America, promoting her campaign for New York’s Seventh Congressional District. A day later, as the snow was still coming down, Mamdani texted again. “Hello my friend,” the message began. “It’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani again, just following up on my text from yesterday.”
To those with a secure attachment style, double texting can come off as needy or desperate. But it was probably a smart move to circle back. The Seventh District is, by many measures, home to the most left-wing voters in America. It covers neighborhoods such as Long Island City and Ridgewood, in Queens, and Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, in Brooklyn—like a Maginot Line of the city’s most democratic-socialist neighborhoods. The Seventh District voted sixty-five per cent for Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary—his largest margin in the city—and has elected D.S.A. candidates at the state and local level for at least six years. It is in the ninety-ninth percentile nationally for millennials and ninety-ninth for renters. In Congress, it has been represented for the past thirty-three years by Nydia Velázquez, a legendary progressive, who is not a member of the D.S.A., but is widely respected by the D.S.A. and the rest of the New York left. All this was explained to me, shortly after Mamdani’s primary win, by Michael Lange, a local-politics analyst who is widely credited with coining the term “Commie Corridor” to describe the areas of New York that elected Mamdani and other D.S.A. candidates. I asked Lange, if the Seventh District was such a leftist hotbed, why it didn’t have a D.S.A. congressperson. “Nobody is going to primary Nydia,” he told me. A few weeks later, Velázquez announced that she would retire. It set off a scramble. Mamdani endorsed Valdez; Velázquez picked Antonio Reynoso, another progressive, as her chosen successor.
Lange has called the upcoming primary, set for June 23rd, a “civil war in the Commie Corridor.” As in most civil wars, the two camps have more in common than not. Valdez is a current State Assembly member and a former union organizer at the United Auto Workers—which represents, in America’s unique labor system, autoworkers and graduate students. Reynoso, the current Brooklyn borough president, previously co-founded the New Kings Democrats, a group of insurgent candidates who challenged the Brooklyn Democratic establishment in the twenty-tens. Both support abolishing ICE and ending the war in Gaza, and both campaigned for Mamdani—although Valdez endorsed him earlier. Marina Robinson, a Valdez canvasser, told me, “Antonio is a nice progressive person. If Claire wasn’t running in this, probably, like, sure, fine. The problem is he is what I would consider a ‘focus-group’ progressive. He waits to see where the wind blows.”
Reynoso was born in the district, and much of his campaign against Valdez, who moved to Bed-Stuy from Texas in 2015, has been about his stronger local ties. Velázquez, in a withering interview with the Times, said that she was unsure whether Valdez knows her way around the whole district. (During the first TV debate, Valdez blanked when asked to name her favorite local food cart, responding, “Oh, no . . .” before settling on a juice cart near a Queens library.) When Velázquez was first elected to Congress, in 1992, the Seventh District had a notably working-class Hispanic electorate, and Velázquez has heavily implied that supporters of Valdez are largely newer arrivals to the city. (The word “transplant” has hovered, perhaps unkindly, in the background.) In February, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show featured a surprise cameo from Toñita, a beloved icon of Williamsburg’s historically Puerto Rican Los Sures neighborhood. Reynoso posted a photo with her later that day.
Valdez supporters, chief among them Mamdani, say that Valdez has stronger and longer-held convictions. Two months before polling day, I watched the Mayor speak to a rapt crowd at a star-studded arts-and-culture-themed fund-raiser, held in the Weylin, a grand converted bank in Williamsburg. In some ways, it felt like the political was personal. Valdez, Mamdani said, had been the only elected official to support him at the launch of his campaign, when he was polling less than one per cent, standing in an empty lot in Long Island City. “She does not wait to find out if the right thing is the popular thing,” he told the crowd. “She does the right thing and then does the work to make it the popular thing.”
Mamdani has done his best to bring his nascent celebrity and the momentum of his mayoral win to bear for Valdez: it was early in the campaign, but at the arts-and-culture fund-raiser, it seemed to be working. James Murphy, the front man of LCD Soundsystem, told me, “I’m in the middle of making a record, so my head is down, but my wife, who is much smarter and tapped in than I am, was, like, You’re donating money and I’m donating money, and we’re going to this.” The room of artists and creatives talking about affordability, he told me, felt like “the New York that I moved into in 1989.” Malgosia Turzanska, the costume designer for “Hamnet” and “Train Dreams,” told me, of Valdez, “The fact that she supports taxing the rich and her socialist-democratic approach is what I agree with.” Famously, mayors of New York City seldom graduate to higher office, but, in Valdez, Mamdani and the D.S.A. have an immediate surrogate. Mamdani spelled it out. His opponents, he said, “want my election to be an exception . . . . Claire winning is how it stops being an exception.”
Ideologically, the race can resemble an Olympic sprint final, in that it can sometimes be settled by who came out of the blocks first. As Robinson, the Valdez canvasser I met on the campaign trail, told me, “I’ve had people at the doors in Williamsburg who are, like, ‘O.K., I’ve looked at their websites, this stuff sounds the same.’ The challenge is to say, ‘I know it looks similar, but Claire has been fighting for this since the beginning.’ ” Alexis Bittar, a designer and the lead organizer of the arts-and-culture fund-raiser, told me that he supported Valdez because she had called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide first. “Antonio, I think, actually lagged a little bit,” he said.
“She did,” Reynoso acknowledged, when I brought it up. “But she didn't say that she wanted ICE out of Rikers before me. She didn't say that she wanted to remove illegal consent searches from police departments before I did.” He added, “There’s always somebody who said something first.”
May 2nd—the day after May Day—was a busy one for both campaigns. Valdez, who wore black jeans and a light black puffer, held a labor-themed rally at Queensbridge Park, in Long Island City, along the East River. “May Day is one of my favorite holidays,” she told me. “I love hearing workers talk about their struggle and how they organize.” She said that one of her main aims, in Congress, would be to promote a general workers’ strike in 2028 that had been called for by her old boss at the U.A.W., Shawn Fain.
Despite Valdez’s union background, Reynoso has overwhelmingly more endorsements from unions. It can get confusing. At a canvas at Maria Hernandez Park, in Bushwick, I overheard Valdez introduce herself to a voter named Andy. “And you got endorsed by every union, right?” he asked. “Not me,” Valdez said, a little wistfully, “but that’s O.K. I’m endorsed by mine.” (“You’re an autoworker?” Andy, who used to work with cars, asked. “No,” Valdez said.)
A common narrative among Valdez supporters is that she is a background organizer who somewhat reluctantly has run for Congress—sort of like the D.S.A. equivalent of a fairy tale. At the May Day rally, I met Oren, a special-education high-school math teacher, who had known Valdez from D.S.A. circles since before she was an Assembly member. When I asked him to describe her, he told me, “I would say the word ‘cadre’—which means core organizer devoting your life and subordinating your own needs to the needs of the whole working class.” Mamdani has likened Valdez to Ella Baker, a civil-rights activist who coined the term “spadework” to describe the unflashy, often overlooked work that makes political change possible.
It’s no secret, meanwhile, that Reynoso wasn’t Velázquez’s first choice to run. At one of his rallies, Velázquez told the crowd that she initially wanted her and Mamdani to back the same candidate, and she had proposed Tiffany Cabán, a D.S.A. member who has Puerto Rican heritage and strong community ties, and currently represents Astoria as a City Council member. Mamdani preferred Valdez. According to a Reynoso staffer, Velázquez then suggested Julia Salazar, another D.S.A. member who is a state senator. Mamdani still insisted on Valdez, and Salazar ultimately wasn’t interested.
I asked Valdez if it was true that she had been a reluctant candidate. She told me, “I was asked to run for this office and I was asked to run for State Assembly.” She drew a parallel to her true love, union organizing. “The essential role of an organizer is to ask somebody to do something they probably don’t want to do. I was organized to run for Congress.” She told me that she’d found the transition—from cadre to candidate—hard. I asked what was difficult about it. She paused for an unusually long time. “It can feel very lonely,” she said.
Who will win? It can sound like a riddle: unstoppable democratic-socialist force meets immovable progressive object. “I am going against the energy of Zohran Mamdani and D.S.A, and this is a district where he won with the largest lead,” Reynoso told me. Reynoso’s staffers seemed anxious about an inevitable wave of D.S.A. endorsements, as if bracing for a storm. (The real cyclone has not arrived: New York’s only D.S.A. congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has, not endorsed a candidate in the race.)
Still, Reynoso has been endorsed by the New York Working Families Party, a long-standing progressive coalition to the left of the Democratic establishment. The Seventh District may have delivered Mamdani’s biggest margin, but Jasmine Gripper, the state director of the N.Y.W.F.P., told me that the seat is also one of the country’s biggest followers of the W.F.P. ballot line. “This is our seat,” Gripper told me. “There are parts of this district where the W.F.P. line can generate ten to twenty per cent of the vote share.” Mamdani’s sixty-five-per-cent landslide in the district came after he was added to the W.F.P. line, and after a cross-endorsement deal brokered with Brad Lander.
Earlier, I’d spoken to a Valdez campaigner, Mateo Striedinger, who previously voted on the W.F.P. line but said that the endorsement of Reynoso was a “betrayal.” (Striedinger, a former marine, had been born in Colombia, served in Japan, and then moved to New York, he said, because it was walkable.) I asked Gripper whether, if Valdez were to win the primary, it would signal a handover of relevance between the D.S.A. and the W.F.P. “This race will demonstrate what voters are listening to,” Gripper said. “We’ll see.”
After going to Valdez’s May Day rally, I headed to the Reynoso campaign’s headquarters in Williamsburg, where Reynoso, who is Dominican, had organized a Dominican Day rally. The office was covered with Dominican flags, and a few older men and women played dominoes, quietly, in the corner. I found myself standing next to Radhamés Rodríguez, the president of the United Bodegas of America, as a folk dancer dressed in the colors of the Dominican flag twirled past us.
A common critique of Valdez is that, until she was endorsed by Mamdani, she was relatively unknown. Reynoso, in various offices, has long been active in the community. “I’ve seen Antonio do that work for over twenty years,” Carmen De La Rosa, a City Council member, told me. “I think she’s impressive as well,” De La Rosa added, of Valdez, “but I can’t tell you I’ve seen Claire do that for twenty years.”
De La Rosa talked me through how she would convince a pro-Mamdani voter to vote for Reynoso. “I think that the Mayor has the right to support who he wants,” she said. “I’d tell them, ‘I support Mamdani, but he’s not on the ballot right now.’ ”
The Mayor is still muddying the waters, though. Outside Reynoso headquarters, I met Ralph Rosario, a South Williamsburg local who works as a union foreman. He and his wife, Caylee Clay, had spent the day canvassing for Reynoso and were eating a quick lunch of empanadas. Rosario said that he first met Reynoso ten years ago, when the candidate, who was a councilman at the time, supported his union in a dispute with a property company. “Antonio is always there for the working class,” Rosario told me. “He’s my neighbor. I run into him at restaurants.”
Rosario and Clay were both staunch Mamdani supporters, and I asked them what they made of the fact that Mamdani had endorsed Reynoso’s opponent. Rosario was taken aback: he hadn’t known that had happened. “Mamdani’s not supporting him?” he asked. “That’s something we’re going to have to work with,” he said, to Clay. I asked if it bothered them to be on the opposite side of the Mayor. “A little bit,” he said. “Yeah, that’s a little weird,” Clay said.
Rosario chewed on his empanada. “To be honest,” he added, “I think my union at first didn’t support Mamdani.” (Clay noted that this was true: his union had initially endorsed Cuomo.) “Sometimes they make mistakes,” Rosario said. Clay replied, “Mamdani could make a mistake, too.” Rosario said that he was going to do some research on Valdez, “just to give her a fair shot.”
Clay remained upbeat. “It sounds like we have two really good candidates!” she said. “It sounds like we’re really lucky as a district. Considering what’s going on in the country, we are some of the luckiest people, right? It sounds like we can’t lose.” ♦