It was a good night for Brad Lander. It was a good night for Zohran Mamdani.
As New York’s contentious primary season hurtled to a close this week, the constellation of mainstream Democratic politicians, operatives, and insiders who have long run this city started to feel something resembling hope. Flummoxed by Zohran Mamdani’s rise a year ago, they noticed a distinct shift in the vibes and thought their fortunes might change on Tuesday. Turnout for the early vote — which boosted Mamdani a year ago in his race against Andrew Cuomo — was weak. Those voters who did turn out skewed older, more rank-and-file Democrat than Democratic Socialist. It seemed to spell good news for the incumbents and Establishment politicians that Mamdani-endorsed candidates were against. The mayor had been campaigning relentlessly for the three congressional upstarts as well as for a handful of state-legislative candidates — a sign, many political professionals insisted, that he was nervous about the results. If his slate lost, he knew as well as everyone else that the Democratic Establishment would have the upper hand against him and surely be ready to take revenge.
Instead, a political class that had doubted Mamdani’s strengths a year ago found itself flummoxed yet again by a movement that they scarcely understand. The hotly contested primaries in New York were over almost as soon as the polls closed. Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, whom Mamdani endorsed on the day he announced his campaign, defeated incumbent Dan Goldman by over 30 points in a race dominated by Goldman’s support for Israel. Claire Valdez, a one-term State Assemblywoman who had only moved to New York a decade ago to pursue a career in the arts, defeated, with Mamdani’s support, the handpicked successor of retiring representative Nydia Velazquez, a pillar of the city’s liberal old guard. The margin was 21 points. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a graduate student and mainstay of Columbia University’s encampments in protest of the war in Gaza, had defeated Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican to serve in Congress and the boss of uptown Manhattan’s political machine. The entire roster of state-legislative candidates that Mamdani had backed won, as had a handful of others who ran without Mamdani’s explicit backing (he demurred, in deference to the folkways of Albany) but with the support of the wider DSA universe.
