The Hostile Takeover: Mamdani’s Purge of the New York Democratic Party
A mayor with no race of his own on the ballot used his office to take out three sitting Democrats who wouldn’t move further left. The party may not recognize itself by morning.
A Just the Facts dispatch based on election calls in three key NY Congressional races
I registered as a Democrat the week I turned eighteen. My first presidential vote, cast in San Francisco in 1972, went to George McGovern. I didn’t think much of it at the time — in the San Francisco I grew up in, there wasn’t really a Republican Party to speak of, so being a Democrat wasn’t a choice so much as the only option on the table. McGovern’s 49-state loss to Nixon was the first time I understood how badly out of step my hometown was with the rest of America.
I stayed a registered Democrat for nearly thirty more years, until shortly after September 11, when I became an independent. I’ve been there since, watching for whatever remains of the vanishing middle in either party.
I haven’t had to watch very hard on the Republican side. What began as the Tea Party insurgency in the early 2010s became, under Donald Trump, a hostile takeover of the party I grew up around. The Bushes were pushed out. Mitt Romney retired rather than fight for a place in it. Nikki Haley was reduced to an asterisk. Whatever you think of the result, it was a purge, and it worked.
Tonight, the Democratic Party got its own version.
Three Races, One Verdict
The major networks were quick tonight to call New York’s primary with sweeping wins to three candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Brad Lander in the 10th District, Claire Valdez in the open 7th, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th. Two of the three — Valdez and Avila Chevalier — are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The third, Lander, is a former DSA member who says he quit the organization this year.
In a city where Republicans barely field candidates, tonight’s races were a fight over who controls the Democratic Party itself — and the DSA wing just answered that question.
Start with what Mamdani was actually doing. He wasn’t simply endorsing candidates he liked. In the 13th District, he broke a reported understanding with Rep. Adriano Espaillat — who had endorsed Mamdani for mayor after backing Andrew Cuomo in the primary — and threw his weight behind Avila Chevalier instead. In the 7th, he passed over Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, the choice of retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez, in favor of Valdez. As one Democratic strategist told The Hill before the vote, this wasn’t a case of taking out a bad Democrat to install a good one — Espaillat and Reynoso are both reliable progressive votes. The point wasn’t ideology. It was control.
Who New York Just Sent to Washington
Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, is a public defender’s office investigator and doctoral student making her first run for office, and a co-founder, as a Columbia undergraduate, of the campus’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. CNN’s KFile reviewed more than 3,600 archived posts from a deleted Twitter account she ran between 2018 and 2022. Among them: calls to abolish police, prisons, and borders entirely (”No more police at all ever,” she wrote, rejecting even the softer “defund” framing); posts backing the seizure of landlord property and the nationalization of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and utilities; a 2019 post reading simply “Seize the means of production”; and a repost declaring, in response to a prompt about Israel disappearing, “Trick question — Israel doesn’t exist.”
In a 2021 exchange, when another user wrote that American violence was “categorically incomparable” to anything Hamas had done, Avila Chevalier replied, “Only one is a nuclear power that’s ever used that kind of force,” adding two minutes later, “Not to mention the countless other forms of colonial violence that it’s enacted.” In another deleted post, after running out of napkins, she wrote that she’d wiped her hands on an American flag instead. She has since said the posts don’t reflect who she is today: “I certainly wouldn’t use a lot of the language that I used back then.”
On October 8, 2023 — the day after Hamas killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel — Avila Chevalier attended a Times Square rally that the Times of Israel and multiple other outlets documented as a celebration of the attack, with demonstrators chanting “Resistance is justified” and “Globalize the intifada,” mocking Jewish counter-protesters, and gesturing the number of Israeli dead with throat-slitting motions. Footage from the rally shows her standing near a sign reading “Zionism is genocide.” She has said repeatedly, including in a primary debate this month, that she attended to protest what she expected would be a disproportionate Israeli response, not to celebrate the massacre: “I would never celebrate the death of any human being,” she said.
Avila Chevalier has also, as recently as this campaign, declined an opportunity to condemn Hamas directly. A left-leaning Manhattan Democratic club, the Broadway Democrats, said in its endorsement statement that when asked directly to condemn the October 7 attacks at their own endorsement meeting, Avila Chevalier “point-blank refused, turning the question into yet another attack on Israel” — and endorsed Espaillat instead, calling it “not an easy choice.” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries was asked on CNN whether Mamdani’s continued praise for Avila Chevalier, after these posts surfaced, troubled him. His answer: “The mayor and I have agreed to strongly disagree as it relates to this particular race.”
Claire Valdez, 36, a Queens state Assembly member, union organizer, and a self-described “cadre member” of NYC-DSA — she won the chapter’s internal endorsement vote with 97 percent support — took the open seat being vacated by Velázquez over the establishment’s chosen successor. Her own platform isn’t a matter of inference. She says it plainly on her campaign site: she will work in Congress “to dismantle and abolish ICE,” push Medicare for All “paid for by taxing billionaires and corporations,” and oppose sending “any more taxpayer dollars to Israel for bombs and weapons.” She has sponsored, in Albany, the Not on Our Dime Act — legislation that would let the state attorney general strip nonprofit status from charities found to support what the bill calls illegal settlement activity or war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza.
In a DSA candidate questionnaire obtained by Jewish Insider, Valdez pledged to refuse any affiliation with what the document called “Zionist lobbying groups,” naming AIPAC, J Street, and Democratic Majority for Israel specifically — meaning she ruled out engagement even with J Street, the progressive group that explicitly supports a two-state solution and has endorsed Democrats well to her right. She was arrested in 2025 outside the Manhattan offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand while protesting their votes against halting U.S. arms sales to Israel, and again that September at an anti-ICE demonstration at 26 Federal Plaza.
Mahmoud Khalil — the Columbia student activist the Trump administration has spent more than a year trying to deport over his role organizing the campus’s pro-Palestinian encampment — spoke at her campaign launch in January, leading the crowd in a “free, free Palestine” chant before introducing her. Valdez also sat for a friendly, nearly hour-long interview with a Twitch streamer who goes by “Mike from PA” and had been suspended from the platform after calling Jews a “demonic ethnicity,” a comment he later said was misspoken; he meant, he said, that “Jewish ethnicity in Israel is a Zionist construction.” Jewish Insider, which broke that story in May, also reported that shortly after the October 7 attacks, Valdez liked an X post reading “Glory to the resistance and the people of Palestinian” — which the outlet described as a post celebrating the violence — citing a screenshot provided to JI. At a rally days before the vote, Mamdani praised Valdez specifically for her position on Israel: “When other Democrats chose to look the other way as Netanyahu committed war crimes, Claire didn’t just name the genocide,” he told the crowd. “She organized for a ceasefire.”
Brad Lander, 58, is the case that maybe should worry Democrats the most. It’s two Jewish progressive Democrats — both self-described liberal Zionists, by their own description in a JNS-moderated debate — fighting over how far a Democrat is allowed to go in criticizing Israel and still be acceptable to a New York City primary electorate. It’s over how far left a Jewish progressive Democrat now has to run on Israel to win a Democratic primary.
Goldman, who served as lead counsel in Trump’s first impeachment and votes with House Democratic leadership consistently, opposes the Block the Bombs Act limiting weapons sales to Israel and marched in the Israel Day parade. Lander, the former city comptroller, had backed Mamdani for mayor and has been a useful foil for the mayor as somebody he can cite as a public Jewish supporter. Lander has called Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide, says he’d co-sponsor Block the Bombs, and sat out the parade — as did Mamdani, the first New York City mayor in sixty years to do so. At a May 15 speech at Al-Khoei Islamic Center, Queens—a mosque with a notorious history of Holocaust denial and promoting Hamas— Lander not only said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, but that he believed it was likely a genocide in Lebanon as well. He promised to work with Reps. Rashida Talib and Ilhan Omar if elected on reversing U.S. financial aid for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
NY-10 has one of the highest concentrations of Jewish voters of any congressional district in the country, between 20-24% of the electorate. Tonight, that electorate chose the candidate running well to the left of an impeachment manager on Israel.
“Monsters”
Five days before the vote, at a Brooklyn rally with Bernie Sanders, Mamdani told the crowd that the “monsters” arrayed against his candidates “take many different forms” — and named AIPAC specifically, describing the pro-Israel lobby as an organization for which “the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars.”
When reporters pressed him afterward, Mamdani said he was quoting the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci — “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born... now is the time of monsters” — and that the line was aimed broadly at dark money in the race, not “solely” at AIPAC. That explanation didn’t satisfy much of anyone who heard the original remarks.
The Anti-Defamation League’s New York/New Jersey chapter called the language “shockingly offensive,” warning it crossed from policy criticism into “dehumanizing and conspiratorial rhetoric with a long and troubling history in antisemitic tropes.” Rep. Josh Gottheimer put it more bluntly: swap “AIPAC” for “Jews” in that sentence, he said, “and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books.”
Even some of Mamdani’s own Jewish supporters flinched. Rabbi Misha Shulman, who backed Mamdani for mayor, called it “a little bit of a flag for me.”
This is, by now, a pattern rather than a slip. As a mayoral candidate, Mamdani was asked three separate times by NBC’s Kristen Welker whether he condemned the phrase “globalize the intifada” — a slogan widely understood, given its roots in two violent Palestinian uprisings that killed more than a thousand Israelis, mostly through suicide bombings — as incitement. He declined each time, saying it wasn’t his job to “police language.” He later said he personally wouldn’t use the phrase and would discourage others from doing so — a softening, but still short of the outright condemnation Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and many others asked for.
I have been critical of Mamdani’s record on this well before tonight, and nothing about these three results changes that view. What it does is extend the pattern from the mayor’s race into the party’s congressional bench.
The Disappearing Middle, Confirmed
Here is the detail of the night that tells you everything about where the party’s center of gravity has moved: Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, posted an Instagram story on primary day urging New Yorkers to vote for Valdez and Avila Chevalier. She did not mention Lander — the Jewish candidate, running in the race drawing the most national attention — at all. I don’t know why, and I’m not going to guess at her reasoning. But the omission, in a year when Israel was the central fault line of these primaries, is the kind of detail that’s hard to read as nothing.
I’ll concede the point my critics on the left would make here, because it’s a fair one: a DSA primary win in deep-blue New York City districts is not, by itself, proof that the national Democratic Party is moving anywhere. These are some of the most progressive districts in the country, and a socialist winning a safe-blue seat in Lower Manhattan tells you less about Iowa or Michigan than it does about the five boroughs.
Some on the left will also point out, accurately, that Espaillat and Goldman are not moderates by any normal definition — both vote with the party line nearly all the time, and the fight tonight was over degree, not direction.
But that’s exactly what makes this different from a normal primary challenge. This wasn’t insurgents beating Republicans-in-disguise. It was a sitting radical DSA mayor using the full weight of his office to purge sitting Democrats — reliable, party-line Democrats — because they wouldn’t move further left on Israel and class politics than the DSA wing demands. That’s not policy disagreement. That’s a faction deciding who gets to call themselves a Democrat at all.
It is not, to be fair, identical to what happened to the Republicans. Trump’s purge was built on personal loyalty to one man. Mamdani’s project — at least so far — looks more institutional: it’s the DSA and Justice Democrats using a popular mayor’s coattails to build a bench, district by district, the way the Tea Party built one in 2010. Whether it ends in a MAGA-style cult of personality or something more durable and more dangerous to the party’s coalition, I don’t know yet. Neither does anyone else.
What I do know is this: in San Francisco in 1972, I learned the hard way how far my corner of the Democratic Party had drifted from the rest of the country. Tonight, in New York, the rest of the party may be getting the same lesson — except this time the drift isn’t coming from the coasts in general. It’s coming from a mayor’s office, with a phone, an Instagram story, and a movement that just proved it can take a seat from an incumbent who agreed with it on almost everything except Israel.
That’s not a fringe anymore. That’s a faction with the votes.
When will 'moderation' not be a curse word?
When oh when, will the middle be a considered a good thing???
It's like Democrats looked at the viral infection that turned the GOP into an extremist, illiberal cult, and instead of getting vaccinated decided to have something like a chicken pox party.