NYC Socialists Are Trying to Expand Their Electoral Wins
Months after electing Zohran Mamdani as mayor, New York democratic socialists have an ambitious slate of candidates for this month’s Democratic primaries: one for the state legislature in Buffalo, seven in the city, and two for Congress.
NYC-DSA is aiming to use its momentum from electing Zohran Mamdani as mayor to elect a large slate of state legislators and congressional candidates. (Courtesy NYC-DSA)
When I arrive at the new headquarters for Eon Huntley’s socialist campaign for state assembly, a small crew is hard at work painting the space, a storefront on a lively block of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Tompkins Avenue. The window is festooned with the candidate’s commitments: signs promoting universal health care, rent controls, and “ICE out of NYC.” When the candidate arrives, fashionably tieless in a black jacket and khakis — Huntley works in high-end clothing retail, an industry in which he has been a labor organizer — we sit down and talk about the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) slate of local and federal candidates, the group’s largest ever, of which his campaign is a part.
It’s been a big couple weeks for that slate leading up to the Democratic primary elections on June 23. On May 15, Bernie Sanders endorsed the whole crew: the two congressional candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier for NY-13, a district comprising both Harlem and parts of the Bronx, and Claire Valdez of NY-7, encompassing a swath of what’s been called the “Commie Corridor” of Brooklyn and Queens for its high percentage of Zohran Mamdani voters and general openness to left politics; state assembly challengers Christian Celeste Tate for parts of Bushwick and East New York and Conrad Blackburn in Harlem; Aber Kawas and David Orkin in Queens; Diana Moreno in Mamdani’s former Queens district; Samantha Kattan in Valdez’s former Queens district; Illapa Sairitupac in Chinatown and the Lower East Side; and Adam Bojack in Buffalo. And Eon Huntley, who smiles calling himself a “Bernie bro.” The Sanders endorsement was “an amazing moment for me,” he says. “He’s part of why I’m here.”
About an hour after Huntley and I spoke on Thursday, Mamdani endorsed Chevalier, an organizer now working as an investigator with Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, in a contentious race against longtime incumbent Adriano Espaillat. The same evening, socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed three of the NYC-DSA challengers: Tate, Orkin, and Huntley.
Two days later, Mamdani endorsed the remaining NYC-DSA slate running in open seats and all the incumbents, but left out the assembly challengers, including Huntley, reportedly to avoid alienating Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who has been invested in protecting assembly incumbents.
City and State reporter Peter Sterne noted in his coverage that, between them, AOC and Mamdani endorsed almost the whole slate — excluding Blackburn, who is challenging a second-generation Harlem machine scion — with no overlap except Diana Moreno, whom both had already endorsed. (Mamdani also endorsed Claire Valdez, a former UAW organizer and current state assembly member, at the launch of her campaign.) In the same way that Mamdani avoided assembly challengers, AOC avoided congressional ones.
The Huntley campaign and NYC-DSA made no secret of their disappointment in the mayor’s incomplete endorsement. NYC-DSA members had organized a petition calling on him to endorse the entire slate, and it was signed by many in the organization’s leadership. The same Saturday morning, however, Huntley picked up another big endorsement: from city council member Chi Ossé, a rising socialist star whose district overlaps with the one Huntley is seeking to represent.
The landlord and ultrawealthy classes have noticed Huntley’s campaign. A super PAC called Moving Brooklyn Forward, with money from real estate developer Two Trees, currently has Eon as its only target. Other real estate developers like Daniel Brodsky are also spending heavily against him.
Socialists all over the world know that it matters that Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoralty last November. But local socialists’ assessment is that it’s more important than ever that NYC-DSA keep building power, partly by winning more seats in the state government.
NYC-DSA cochair Gustavo Gordillo called this primary the “first major test of socialist power in New York since we won citywide and demonstrated that our agenda is what New Yorkers want.” At stake, he says, is the mayor’s affordability agenda, which depends on taxing the rich more substantially than the governor agreed to do this year.
“We’re happy to balance the budget in the city,” says Gordillo, “but we elected the mayor to do more than that, and we think that electing this slate is part of the terrain that will determine whether that’s possible.”
Gordillo points out that while the mayor won significant victories this year — including money for childcare and a tax on some ultra-expensive second homes — by essentially upholding Trump’s tax cuts, the governor allowed hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to lose their healthcare and food stamps.
“The state budget is a public resource that should meet the needs of the people,” he says, “and it’s not doing that. “Mamdani needs more socialists in office to deliver more, says Gordillo, and he needs them both at the federal and state level.
As well, socialists have emphasized the importance of continuing to build power in neighborhoods where Mamdani and his ideas are wildly popular, but DSA hasn’t had much of a presence in the past. Chevalier and Blackburn are examples in Uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, and Huntley is another in Bed-Stuy. Although parts of Bed-Stuy are already represented by socialists — State Senator Jabari Brisport, Assemblymember Phara Souffrant, and City Councilman Chi Ossé — it is a huge neighborhood where DSA has a large membership presence and significant room to grow, as well as an entrenched Democratic machine to unseat.
Along with Chi Ossé, Huntley is bringing a socialist analysis to issues that have long plagued black neighborhoods in New York City like deed theft, which pits big banks against small homeowners — a constituency that Huntley notes “wouldn’t normally be thought of as part of the coalition supporting a DSA candidate, but they are very much out here, because they see the struggle for what it is.” Along with the standard New York City socialist slogans on his storefront, Huntley’s also features a sign promoting a fundraiser for Carmella Charrington, a district leader candidate who has become a community leader on the issue due to a complex dispute over her own home, which has become the site of anti–deed theft protests.
Mamdani’s victory was “a huge breakthrough coming out of painstaking long-term work, just wanting to be very thorough and build a strong base, and then suddenly seeing this opportunity arise where the Democratic establishment is totally feckless and unable to reproduce itself,” says Ashik Siddique, cochair of DSA’s National Political Committee. He sees a similar moment now, where Americans are furious with Trump and more opposed to war and imperialism than in many years, “marching on the street and showing up for No Kings or May Day or protests against ICE.”
Many of those people, says Siddique, aren’t going to be satisfied with a “return to the status quo. It’s not sufficient to just have [congressional] Democrats win a majority again. People need to know that they’re going to be fighters, people who can credibly challenge ICE as a rising fascist force.”
Asked what more socialists could do in Congress, with Trump as president and the majority of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle so dispiritingly beholden to capital and the war machine, Siddique points to New York State as a strong model, where even as a small minority in the legislature, socialists have been able to do remarkable things, passing huge reforms expanding renters’ rights, beginning a program to build publicly funded renewable energy, among other startling victories. “These things show that you can win a lot with a solid and strategic bloc,” Siddique said.
The stakes are high not only for the socialist movement and the success of Mamdani’s mayoralty but possibly for the nation: some in the organization feel that DSA needs to show its strength to have credibility for even bigger races. “My opinion is that we need to run a socialist for president in 2028,” says Gordillo, “and running congressional candidates is the rehearsal for that.”
Meanwhile, at Huntley headquarters, the space is shaping up. Two of the walls are a striking shade of orange. A bar sits in the middle of it, since it used to be a restaurant. It looks like a good space to put the “social” in socialism, and Huntley notes there will be a post-canvassing party there on June 6. During my time sitting out front, people keep coming by and peering in, curious to see what’s taking shape inside.