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THE SOCIALIST FUTURE IS BEING WRITTEN IN NEW YORK  
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Branko Marcetic
June 24, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Tuesday's socialist sweep in New York was built on the organizing
power of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has now
established itself as the leading political power in the city. _

Congressional candidates Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa
Avila Chevalier raise their hands with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani
during a Get Out the Vote rally on June 18, 2026 in New York City.,
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

 

It’s not unusual to hear chants of “U-S-A” at a political event.
But the chant that rang repeatedly around Williamsburg’s 99 Scott
Studio after last night’s near-total sweep by socialist candidates
was off by one letter: “D-S-A.”

The acronym refers to the Democratic Socialists of America, whose New
York chapter, NYC-DSA, emerged as the major winner in last night’s
primary elections in New York: all but one of its ten-person slate of
insurgent candidates won their races
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US Congress and New York’s state legislature. They did so on the
back of a furious, sweat-drenched door-knocking operation that has, a
year after a similar grassroots effort catapulted another member,
Zohran Mamdani, into the New York mayor’s office, firmly established
the group as a formidable political force — one that bested unions
and even the Working Families Party
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for decades the leading progressive electoral power in the city.

Even in their disbelief at how quickly and decisively the results had
gone their way, the hundreds of rapturous DSA members who packed
into the now–Democratic nominee for New
York’s Seventh Congressional District Claire Valdez’s official
watch party were keenly aware of their newfound power.

“You’re next! You’re next!” they chanted as House Minority
Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a longtime foe of the Left, appeared on the
screen. One winning candidate after another came up to implore those
listening to join the organization.

“The water is warm — join us,” Diana Moreno, who had won a
special election to replace Mamdani in the New York State Assembly
earlier this year, told the crowd. “Join this beautiful movement.”

That included Valdez, a union organizer and barely first-term
state assemblywoman who won a major upset with her 21 point
victory over the WFP-backed Brooklyn borough president, Antonio
Reynoso, for the House seat held for sixteen terms by longtime
progressive stalwart Nydia Velázquez.

Even for a congressional campaign involving a socialist insurgent,
Valdez’s race took on unusually high stakes.

One reason was the WFP’s involvement, turning the contest into
something of a progressive turf war. The WFP’s New York director
told the New York Times they had advised
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that he “can’t cede the left lane to Claire [Valdez] and the
DSA.” Reynoso himself framed
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race as “the DSA and Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders versus the
WFP, and [attorney general] Tish James, [public advocate] Jumaane
Williams, the group of progressives that have been doing a lot of work
for a long time.”

The other reason was Mamdani himself. Rather than choosing a DSA
candidate approved of and mentored by Velázquez, of whom there were
several, Mamdani opted to back someone he considered a closer ally in
Valdez, triggering an unusually bitter and public falling out with the
outgoing congresswoman, who had been one of his earliest backers when
he launched his longshot mayoral bid. The move was a risk: a loss
would have, perhaps fatally, diminished both himself and the movement
behind him barely half a year into his term.

After alarm at a collapse in turnout prompted an emergency DSA
meeting, the organization kicked into high gear, with many members
canvassing incessantly. The weekend before the vote saw a surge of
door-knockers, some doing back-to-back three-hour shifts.

Coming on the back of months of patient door-knocking, the
last-minute burst of pavement-pounding seemed to have done the trick.
Several canvassers said their concerns about Election Day, poll
numbers, and the predictions made by pundits withered in the face of
their interactions with real voters in the progressive, pro-Mamdani
districts they campaigned in, who again and again told DSA
door-knockers they intended to vote for the socialist candidates over
their opponents.

Beyond the candidates, both DSA and socialism itself appear to have
gone mainstream with last night’s result. Only a few years after DSA
candidates were occasionally de-emphasizing their democratic
socialism to try and win over ordinary voters, canvassers this time
found the label an asset.

The voter response to DSA was “unprecedentedly positive,” said DSA
member Max, thirty-four. One voter, a middle-aged South Asian woman,
professed she was voting not for any particular candidate but for DSA
itself. “I’m voting up and down party line,” was the way another
voter described voting for the DSA slate. At a time when both
established parties and most politicians are widely viewed as corrupt
and dishonest, voters at the doors appeared to value candidates who
identified as democratic socialists, reported Simon, thirty-six,
another DSA canvasser.

It’s a development that likely couldn’t have happened without the
Democratic Party’s collapse in standing among its own voters over
the past year and a half. In fact, beyond the socialist slate, last
night saw at least a dozen
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incumbents trail more progressive challengers, including former New
York City Comptroller and Mamdani endorsee Brad Lander, who trounced
two-term Rep. Dan Goldman, hammering him
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not going far enough to criticize Israel’s genocide or restrict arms
sales in response to it.

Last night’s elections, then, are of a piece with the trend seen
across the country, whether in Maine Democratic voters’ overwhelming
rejection of their centrist governor for a scandal-plagued political
novice, Graham Platner way to her left, or Mamdani’s own victory
over onetime Democratic Party princeling Andrew Cuomo. With the
Democratic brand in the gutter thanks to what is widely viewed as the
party establishment’s feckless and inept opposition to Donald Trump,
the door has been blown wide open for the left-wing insurgents who
have previously had to fend off, and even fell to, charges of party
disloyalty or not being “real” Democrats. Just look at
Congresswoman-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier, who weathered what were
meant to be damaging revelations
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that she had, among other things, called Joe Biden a “war
criminal” and once tweeted “F-ck Kamala Harris.”

They’re also of a piece with a different trend. As Chevalier and
Lander’s victories point to, besides a win for DSA and the socialist
left, last night’s result was a major defeat for the pro-Israel
lobby, which had once more spent big
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defeating socialist candidates critical of Israel and its genocide of
Palestinians. Coming a year after Mamdani’s own win over Cuomo’s
obsessively pro-Israel campaign
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result solidifies the fact that unconditional support for Israel —
as it meddles in US politics and rampages across the Middle East —
is no longer good politics nor good policy, even in New York, once the
beating heart of American Zionism.

Zohran Mamdani Is on a Winning Streak

Speaking of Mamdani, the New York mayor comes out of last night the
other big winner. Besides his gamble in the Seventh District working
out, voters last night sent six of his allies to the state legislature
(seven if we count the incumbent Moreno, who won her primary last
night), beefing up the number of votes he will have there as he
pressures Albany to get his major campaign promises over the line,
including taxing the rich to fund free city buses and universal
childcare — a version of which is currently being pushed by
Governor Kathy Hochul, albeit in limited form.

Just as important to his efforts to pressure state lawmakers, voters
have also shown in the most visceral way that the mayor’s public
appeal is deep, and that his coattails are long.

“Oh yeah, they’re Mamdani’s people. I’m voting for them,”
were the words of one voter, according to a DSA canvasser
door-knocking for Valdez and Christian Tate
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won his election to state assembly with 62 percent of the vote last
night.

This wasn’t an outlier. Many voters may not have known who most of
the candidates were or that there was even an election going on, but
they liked the mayor and were more than happy to vote for the
candidates he gave his nod to. Mamdani’s endorsement proved a major
asset for canvassers, serving as a persuasive shorthand for swaying
busy voters or simply starting a conversation, especially in the
young, diverse “Commie Corridor” that had overwhelmingly gone
for him last year.

As a result, establishment lawmakers in Albany now face a clear
choice. They can back Mamdani’s agenda, and vote it over the line,
and reap the rich reserves of electoral rewards that are there for
those voters view as his allies. Or they can block it and face a
primary where they will have to endure both voter resentment and the
organizing power of DSA.

Looking beyond his legislative agenda, this new political reality will
give a boost to the grander, longer-term ambition Mamdani outlined
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a week ago at a rally with Bernie Sanders, who also lent his
endorsement to the socialist slate. There Mamdani launched into a
Sanders-like broadside against the conservatism of the Democratic
Party — “our party,” as he called it — as it currently is,
charging that the party establishment saw “its job as managing
decline instead of delivering material change for working people,”
and warning that this approach would deliver ongoing failure at the
ballot box. He offered New York’s socialist slate as a vision of the
future of the party, his “answer” to its dismal state today.

Looking at the results from last night, Democratic voters clearly
agree.

And not just Democratic voters in New York, either. As regular,
longtime readers of this magazine may be aware, socialist
candidates, usually coming out of DSA, have been steadily winning
power
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local, state, and federal levels for the past decade by running
as Democrats, winning office and legislative majorities on both
coasts, the Midwest, the Southwest, and even the South, to the point
that there are now more than
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250 DSA members holding elected office across forty states. Several
socialist candidates are in place to possibly notch high-profile wins
in the year ahead, including Fran Hong, who is currently neck and
neck
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the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor.

Establishment political circles have tended to focus on maligning
and mocking DSA, even as it has continually grown its ranks of
elected officials. In fact, socialists have often built power at
the exact same time
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politicians and commentators have confidently dismissed them as a
political force. Last night showed they’re still steadily building
power. The difference is, no one’s dismissing them anymore.

_Branko Marcetic is a __Jacobin__ staff writer and the author of
__Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden__._

* Democratic primary
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* nyc
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* DSA
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* Zohran Mamdani
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