Mamdani-Backed Claire Valdez, Darializa Chevalier Stage Upsets in NY

In the weeks leading up to New York State’s primaries,  Zohran Mamdani took an unusual gamble. 

The mayor of the country’s largest city didn’t bow to New York’s various establishments and the custom of letting incumbents be incumbents; instead, he went full Ryland Grace to try to steer the world in the direction he wanted at a moment he saw as existential. Fueled by Mamdani (and no small dosage of leftist political streamer Hasan Piker), two races that many thought gimmes became battlegrounds between progressive Democrats and Democratic socialists, the mayor infuriating the Democratic Latino leaders in those areas in the process.

On Tuesday night the gamble paid off in a way Ryan Gosling couldn’t have dreamed of: both of Mamdani’s candidates won their primaries, joining a third left-flanking candidate he also aligned with to complete a hat trick of sorts. (Democratic primaries in New York City almost always determine the general winner.) The backstory and reverberations will be felt across the country  — and yes, may even boost Nithya Raman in her bid to take down her own establishment Democrat in Los Angeles.

Oh, and in the meantime an anti-AI candidate lost narrowly in Manhattan, a social-media Kennedy lost a lot worse in Manhattan and an upstate Trump-aligned sticker mogul (!) pulled off a stunner of his own. We break down the four most noteworthy New York primary races from a wild Tuesday and what it means for entertainment and beyond 

Congressional District 7, aka The First Whopper

A long, long time ago — or, like, back at Thanksgiving — Democratic Congressional leader and Latina trailblazer Nydia Velázquez announced her retirement after 32 years in Congress. A representative of the hipster-Hasidic-Puerto Rican neighborhood of Williamsburg  (as well as Greenpoint and Ridgewood, Queens, among others), Velazquez is an icon in New York City politics, having become the first Puerto Rican woman to be elected to Congress. (She also is the first person in her family to graduate high school.) Velázquez supported Mamdani during last year’s mayoral race, helping lock down support for him among the city’s large Puerto Rican population. 

So, when it came time to retire the seventysomething kingmaker wanted to anoint her protege Antonio Reynoso —  the Brooklyn borough president and a progressive — to take over her seat, Logan Roy-style. But Mamdani, feeling his oats and wanting a DSA candidate, went Shiv Roy on Velázquez and backed a young pol named Claire Valdez, who had a similar trajectory to his own — thirtysomething new-ish State Assembly member who came from far away (Texas), had a bifurcated identity (she’s also a citizen of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Nation) and found activism at an elite college (the School of the Art Institute of Chicago).

That made Velázquez apoplectic — and became an instant test for Mamdani’s upstart DSA vibe against Velázquez’s establishment order. Polls coming into the race had Valdez and Reynoso them neck-and-neck. Casey Bloys has already greenlit two seasons.

And then the kicker: On Tuesday Mamdani was vindicated, and Velázquez humbled, in a big way. Valdez won by a definitive 20 points, erasing any doubts that the legacy candidate was donezo or that Mamdani didn’t have the muscle to take on the establishment — again. One of the great political dramas in recent memory had a definitive series-premiere-level ending.
 
The topper? One of the more high-profile celebrities living in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint area is Kieran Culkin. Yes, all this drama was to represent Roman Roy.

Congressional District 13, aka The Second and Even Bigger Whopper

Backrooms had less twists than this one.

The political area of Manhattan north of 96th Street — Harlem et al — and spilling into the Bronx has long been a…conventional type of place. You kissed the ring and you paid your fealty. For more than 45 years the area was represented by Charles Rangel, one of the most powerful Congress members of the 20th century. The district lines shifted, but Rangel’s power didn’t. Even when he was felled by an ethics scandal in 2010 he held on another three terms. Then the seat was passed to his chosen protege. Adriano Espaillat was seeking a sixth term, and until a couple months ago it seemed like a lock. Mamdani himself said he would endorse him.

Then the mayor changed his mind. The reason? A 32-year-old named Darializa Avila Chevalier.  A child of Dominican immigrants Chevalier had never run for office before; she was an organizer and helped organize the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment protests at Columbia University, which she once attended as a student. She also reportedly attended a controversial pro-Palestine rally in Times Square on October 8, 2023.

Chevalier was challenging the first-ever Dominican-American elected to Congress in a district that includes the heavily Dominican-American Washington Heights. But that heritage gas become fraught: Chevalier walked out of an interview Tuesday with the radio station La Mega in a heated discussion about why she didn’t include the Dominican flag in her social bio (she called Dominican nationalism “violent”). Whether the attention helped or hurt her as people were heading to the polls is unclear. Certainly she got a boost from other viral media platforms, appearing with popular-polarizing left-wing livestreamer Hasan Piker and Valdez at a Bushwick club two weeks ago; Piker had come in from LA to stump. Another big rally took place last Thursday, as Mamdani and his three chosen candidates (they also include former rival and ex-city comptroller Brad Lander) took the stage at the historic King’s Theater in Brooklyn; Sara Bareilles also performed in a moment that seemed to galvanize the candidacies of all three.

All of it paid off in a big way Tuesday when Chevalier had an AOC-level upset, defeating Espaillat by about three points, or 2,000 votes, with 90% of the total counted. With her near-certain victory in November, Chevalier will instantly become the biggest progressive lightning-rod in Congress, passing AOC, who had a similar win over the establishment during the midterm of Trump’s first administration eight years ago. If you love Hasan Piker and progressive rabble-rousing (or are a conservative who likes dining out on it), she is great news; if you’re a moderate Democrat, less so.

Chevalier and Valdez will join Lander, also a Mamdani-aligned Democrat who beat an incumbent, Dan Goldman, in Congressional District 10 in downtown Manhattan and largely-gentrified Brooklyn. While not officially a member of the DSA, Lander will unite with Valdez in what has been nicknamed — affectionately or derisively, depending on who’s saying it — the Commie Corridor, which stretches from a northwestern part of Brooklyn across that part of the boro into western Queens, where many young progressives live. And they’ll have a third point on the triangle up in northern Manhattan.

Congressional District 12, aka the Jack Schlossberg (but really the Big Tech) Circus

This district includes pretty much all of Manhattan from 14th Street to 96th Street — Broadway, Madison Square Garden 30 Rock, Lincoln Center and pretty much where every media company is located and ever entertainment decision is made — was already an anomaly in that it did not feature any far-left Democrats. It has center-left Democrats and slightly further center-left Democrats. The two boldfaced names it had were Jack Schlossberg and George Conway — both popular on social media, both tankers in the polls.

The real race was between Alex Bores and Micah Lasher — respectively, a 35-year-old tech veteran and engineer who has been in the State Assembly, and a 44-year-old political lifer (he worked under Mike Bloomberg and former NY State AG Eric Schneiderman) who has also been in the State Assembly. Lasher had the blessing of retiring Congress member Jerry Nadler from the Upper West Side; Bores had the blessing of longtime Congress member Carolyn Maloney from the Upper East Side. This is Ferris Bueller-level parental politics.

But the real drama came with AI. Bores sponsored New York’s strong-ish AI regulation the RAISE Act (it requires, among other things, that AI companies publish and impose safety plans). And so anti-Bores money came pouring in from Leading the Future, a Big Tech super PAC underwritten by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale  and VC Marc Andreesen, funding eye-popping anti-Bores ads that didn’t pass the sniff test. (They seized on his past at Palantir, as if whistleblowers weren’t a thing.) The message was clear: Big Tech did not want Bores in Congress. As Bores said Tuesday, “I didn’t get in this race to make a point about AI but some of the most powerful people on the planet, a handful of oligarchs hellbent on preventing any regulation of this industry….decided to make an example of this race.”

He added, in a line sure to resonate with Hollywood guilds and throughout the industry,  “Americans everywhere are seeing AI work its way into every aspect of their lives and their economy and they’re looking to see who will stand up for them.” For those in the entertainment biz looking for a friend on Capitol Hill to curb the Stay Puft-appetites of Big Tech, Bores would have been their go-to ghostbuster.

His was a fascinating coalition, uniting moderates who liked his foreign policy and progressives who liked his anti-AI stance. (“You could make a sitcom,” gun-control advocate and former rival Cameron Kasky tartly said.) Plenty of film-and-television names live from 14th Street-96th Street, and at least one — La La Land composer Benj Pasek — endorsed him. Oddly, so did a more safety-centric Anthropic, countering OpenAI’s attack ads.

But come Tuesday night, Lasher wound up defeating Bores by four points, or 4,000 votes, with 90% of the tally counted. 

Bores sought to sound a hopeful note on AI regulation in his concession speech. And he may well be right; this isn’t the end. “Future victories will be built on the progress of this campaign; that’s how movements work,” he said.

Lasher is likely to be a little more centrist on a number of issues. As for AI, he was keen to remind Big Tech that, while he wasn’t Bores, he also wasn’t their pawn.

“I have some news for the two big AI companies that took such an unusual interest in this race,”  Lasher said in his victory speech. “I won’t be taking cues from either of you.”

Congressional District 21, aka The Bizarro World

We need to close with this bit of zaniness. Remember Mike Lindell, the Pillow Guy? Welcome to the reboot: Anthony Constantino, the Sticker Guy.

Lest you think New York City has all the nutty storylines, let us introduce you to the way upstate (and way out there) drama of the 21st CD, which runs from mid-upstate all the way through Plattsburgh to the Canadian border (and all the way west to Vermont). Adirondacks territory. This is where Elise Stefanik comes from, and these are the people vying to replace her in the Republican primary.

People, bucking creatures, who can say. This race between Constantino, an upstart if ever there was one, and Robert Smullen, an Assembly member who had pretty much the whole Republican establishment behind him, is the stuff of Alexander Payne’s Election reboot. Constantino is an ex-boxer and Smullen is an ex-Marine colonel, and they each just brutalized each other in the run-up. Constantino called Smullen evil in a text; Smullen called Constantino a Democrat.

What was crazy is how the latter even got into the race.

Constantino was nobody politically; he ran a sticker company called Sticker Mule (tagline: “custom printing that kicks ass”). But in 2024 he posted a a 100-foot red lighted “Vote for Trump” sign over his office you could see from the highway. The city of Amsterdam, NY, hadn’t approved it and thought it could cause drivers to crash; Constantino responded it was free speech and that “I spent my day, to my surprise, talking to friends and family and UFC superstars asking what to do.”

Somehow Trump took notice (I mean how could you miss it), endorsed Constantino, and as of Tuesday night, the Sticker Guy is the Republican nominee for Congress, having beaten Smullen by 20 points. (There were 216 write-ins; I don’t even want to know.) Anyway, he’ll now advance to face a Democrat unknown named Blake Gendebien (tagline: “Join us to send a dairy farmer to Congress.”) This is going to make a helluva satire one day — or just a great documentary in real time. Wonder if Stefanik is reconsidering that resignation right about now.

As for the Democrats back downstate, of course the question will now be whether this is a more permanent state of affairs in the Democratic Party or will mimic the progressive uprising during the first Trump administration, when a number of left-wing Congressional candidates swept into power but many, like Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush, were swept out when Trump was no longer in office. Is this DSA emergence in New York a Trump-enabled movement, to be gone when he is? Or a fundamental change, propelled and embodied by Mamdani, that we’ve only begun to fathom? That part of the script, at least, is not yet written.