Despite Valdez’s union background, Reynoso has overwhelmingly more endorsements from unions. It can get confusing. At a canvas at Maria Hernandez Park, in Bushwick, I overheard Valdez introduce herself to a voter named Andy. “And you got endorsed by every union, right?” he asked. “Not me,” Valdez said, a little wistfully, “but that’s O.K. I’m endorsed by mine.” (“You’re an autoworker?” Andy, who used to work with cars, asked. “No,” Valdez said.)
A common narrative among Valdez supporters is that she is a background organizer who somewhat reluctantly has run for Congress—sort of like the D.S.A. equivalent of a fairy tale. At the May Day rally, I met Oren, a special-education high-school math teacher, who had known Valdez from D.S.A. circles since before she was an Assembly member. When I asked him to describe her, he told me, “I would say the word ‘cadre’—which means core organizer devoting your life and subordinating your own needs to the needs of the whole working class.” Mamdani has likened Valdez to Ella Baker, a civil-rights activist who coined the term “spadework” to describe the unflashy, often overlooked work that makes political change possible.
It’s no secret, meanwhile, that Reynoso wasn’t Velázquez’s first choice to run. At one of his rallies, Velázquez told the crowd that she initially wanted her and Mamdani to back the same candidate, and she had proposed Tiffany Cabán, a D.S.A. member who has Puerto Rican heritage and strong community ties, and currently represents Astoria as a City Council member. Mamdani preferred Valdez. According to a Reynoso staffer, Velázquez then suggested Julia Salazar, another D.S.A. member who is a state senator. Mamdani still insisted on Valdez, and Salazar ultimately wasn’t interested.
I asked Valdez if it was true that she had been a reluctant candidate. She told me, “I was asked to run for this office and I was asked to run for State Assembly.” She drew a parallel to her true love, union organizing. “The essential role of an organizer is to ask somebody to do something they probably don’t want to do. I was organized to run for Congress.” She told me that she’d found the transition—from cadre to candidate—hard. I asked what was difficult about it. She paused for an unusually long time. “It can feel very lonely,” she said.
Who will win? It can sound like a riddle: unstoppable democratic-socialist force meets immovable progressive object. “I am going against the energy of Zohran Mamdani and D.S.A, and this is a district where he won with the largest lead,” Reynoso told me. Reynoso’s staffers seemed anxious about an inevitable wave of D.S.A. endorsements, as if bracing for a storm. (The real cyclone has not arrived: New York’s only D.S.A. congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has, not endorsed a candidate in the race.)
Still, Reynoso has been endorsed by the New York Working Families Party, a long-standing progressive coalition to the left of the Democratic establishment. The Seventh District may have delivered Mamdani’s biggest margin, but Jasmine Gripper, the state director of the N.Y.W.F.P., told me that the seat is also one of the country’s biggest followers of the W.F.P. ballot line. “This is our seat,” Gripper told me. “There are parts of this district where the W.F.P. line can generate ten to twenty per cent of the vote share.” Mamdani’s sixty-five-per-cent landslide in the district came after he was added to the W.F.P. line, and after a cross-endorsement deal brokered with Brad Lander.
Earlier, I’d spoken to a Valdez campaigner, Mateo Striedinger, who previously voted on the W.F.P. line but said that the endorsement of Reynoso was a “betrayal.” (Striedinger, a former marine, had been born in Colombia, served in Japan, and then moved to New York, he said, because it was walkable.) I asked Gripper whether, if Valdez were to win the primary, it would signal a handover of relevance between the D.S.A. and the W.F.P. “This race will demonstrate what voters are listening to,” Gripper said. “We’ll see.”
