Mamdani Slate Sweeps NYC House Primaries, Ousting Two Incumbents
Three candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won New York's Democratic House primaries, with two beating sitting members of Congress in a pointed message to party leadership.
Three House candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their Democratic primaries on Tuesday, and two of them did it by unseating sitting members of Congress — a result that carries the city's democratic socialist movement from City Hall toward Capitol Hill.
Former city Comptroller Brad Lander took the 10th District, beating two-term Representative Dan Goldman with about two-thirds of the vote. State Assembly Member Claire Valdez won the open 7th District, where Representative Nydia Velazquez is retiring, defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. In the 13th, community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Representative Adriano Espaillat, who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The arithmetic matters more than the noise. All three districts are safely Democratic, so Tuesday's winners are heavily favored in the fall and would arrive in Washington in January as three new Mamdani allies. That is the practical effect of a primary night the mayor's team framed as proof his 2025 upset was not a one-off.
Lander, who allied with Mamdani during last year's mayoral race, leaned into that lineage in his victory speech. We ran this campaign like a team sport, because that's what it takes to stand up to billionaires and bullies
, he told supporters, according to CBS New York. He called it a glorious time to be a New Yorker
.
What gives the night its edge is who lost the bet. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries campaigned against the Mamdani slate and watched all three of his preferred candidates fall, the Associated Press reported. The intra-party fight ran along a now-familiar line: Israel's war in Gaza, where the challengers pressed incumbents from the left, and a broader argument over how far the party should move to win back disaffected voters.
Avila Chevalier, who once helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, was the slate's most contested pick, and her win over a Hispanic Caucus chair will be the result establishment Democrats study hardest. The contrast with Washington is the point: this is the same coalition that pushed the chamber's housing fight, where the Senate's affordability bill cleared on a lopsided bipartisan vote earlier this session.
Not every contested race in the city broke the same way, and the slate's reach into swing territory remains untested. But in three blue seats, the message to the party's leadership was unambiguous. When Barack Obama opened his presidential center in Chicago with a plea about the fragility of democracy, he was speaking to a party still arguing over its own direction. On Tuesday, a slice of that argument got settled at the ballot box, and the left won the count.
