New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's handpicked slate of democratic socialist candidates ran the table in three congressional primaries on June 23, unseating two Democratic incumbents and capturing a third open seat, a result that sent shockwaves through the party's establishment wing and drew a sharp public rebuke from state Attorney General Letitia James.
All three of the congressional candidates Mamdani endorsed won their races. In total, nine Democratic incumbents, seven state lawmakers and two sitting members of Congress, lost their seats in a single night. The scale of the rout left veteran Democrats scrambling for explanations and openly questioning whether the party's left flank has become ungovernable.
The results amount to the most dramatic intra-party upheaval New York Democrats have faced in years, and they raise a question the party's national leadership would rather not answer: What happens when your base decides the establishment isn't radical enough?
The marquee upset came in New York's 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a graduate student and Mamdani-endorsed candidate, defeated longtime incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Espaillat chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and was a close ally of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Newsmax reported Avila Chevalier took roughly 49.5% of the vote in the northern Manhattan district.
The second incumbent to fall was Rep. Dan Goldman in New York's 10th District. Brad Lander, another Mamdani-backed candidate, crushed Goldman by a staggering 66.5% to 33.5%, a jaw-dropping margin given that Goldman had won his 2024 primary by nearly 43 points and entered the race with endorsements from Governor Kathy Hochul and House leadership.
The third victory went to state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a self-described democratic socialist and DSA member, who won the primary for New York's 7th Congressional District with 58.3% of the vote. That seat is being vacated by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez. National Review noted that Mamdani's endorsement of a rival candidate in the NY-7 race caused a falling out with Velázquez, who had been an early Mamdani supporter.
All three districts are deep blue. Barring something extraordinary, these primary winners will be members of Congress come January.
Letitia James, the attorney general who famously prosecuted President Donald Trump on financial fraud charges, did not hide her frustration. She told CNN that Mamdani's endorsed candidates lack basic knowledge of the communities they now aim to represent.
"Some of the candidates that he has supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic."
James went further, drawing a direct comparison between Mamdani's movement and the populist upheaval on the right. She warned against tearing the party apart from within.
"All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don't blow it up. That's what MAGA has done."
Yet even as she pushed back, James appeared to leave the door open for accommodation. She told the New York Times she favors reaching "some sort of understanding" with the socialists to defuse tensions, a concession that suggests the establishment may lack the leverage to do anything but negotiate.
Fox News Digital contacted the New York State Office of the Attorney General for comment the day after the election. The office did not respond.
The demographic picture behind these results tells a story that should trouble Democrats far more than any single race. Precinct-level data compiled by the New York Times showed that in the NY-13 contest, Espaillat overwhelmingly won lower-income and majority-Black precincts, while Avila Chevalier carried areas with higher incomes, more university graduates, and younger residents.
In other words, the socialist insurgency is being driven not by the working class but by affluent, college-educated transplants, precisely the demographic that veteran Democrats have warned is pulling the party away from its traditional base. In New York City, these young, well-off newcomers are more likely to have moved from elsewhere in the country than the general population.
An unnamed Democratic political operative put it bluntly to the New York Post:
"[Black and Hispanic voters] don't like the trick the DSA is trying to pull in Harlem, using the forces of gentrification to try to supplant our agenda and subvert our priorities. Abolishing the police and releasing every prisoner, even rapists and murderers, isn't progressive. It's nuts. It isn't people with a doorman who have the most to lose; we know it's us, people of color, who are going to suffer most from the DSA's reckless agenda."
That quote captures a tension the national media has largely ignored: the Democratic Socialists of America's agenda, abolish-the-police rhetoric, mass decarceration, open hostility to law enforcement, lands hardest on the minority communities the party claims to champion. The people most exposed to the consequences of soft-on-crime governance are not the gentrifiers in renovated brownstones. They are the longtime residents of neighborhoods where public safety is not an abstraction.
The mayor himself showed no interest in reconciliation. Speaking at a Brooklyn watch party on election night, Mamdani cast the results as the next chapter of a movement that began with his own rise to power.
"We are showing that last June, a year ago tomorrow, was not an anomaly. It was not the end. It was the beginning."
The AP reported that Mamdani framed his endorsements as electing "better Democrats" who would "put working people back at the heart of politics." But the precinct data suggests his coalition is less blue-collar than boardroom-adjacent, young professionals with graduate degrees who arrived in Harlem after the rent went up.
Mamdani's political operation has already drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts. His decision to back candidates with incendiary records opened an early rift with party leaders, and his City Hall tenure has generated its own controversies.
The DSA's New York City chapter was prepared for the moment. Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the chapter, said before the results came in that "the stakes couldn't be higher for us." He was right, and his side won.
The fallout extended well beyond New York. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania called the results "a banner night for the dirtbag left in New York," a characterization that captured the contempt establishment Democrats feel toward the insurgency but also their inability to stop it.
Van Jones, the political analyst and former Obama administration official, offered a more structural diagnosis. He told Breitbart:
"This is a battle between the establishment and this insurgency. And the roof is collapsing on the Democratic Party establishment. This is no longer a movement, this is a movement and a machine at the same time."
Political analyst Lincoln Mitchell reinforced the point: "For a long time, they were told that candidates too far to the left could not be elected because they wouldn't be able to win. But if they succeed now, that argument will no longer hold."
Some Republicans, for their part, viewed the socialist sweep as a gift. The prediction, unnamed but widely shared on the right, is that political newcomers steeped in DSA ideology will generate inflammatory comments that damage the Democratic Party's national brand. Commentary surrounding the results noted that the movement's members have advocated positions including abolishing the Senate and the Supreme Court.
Whether that prediction holds will depend on whether the new candidates can restrain themselves once cameras are rolling, a discipline the democratic socialist wing has not historically demonstrated.
The deeper problem for Democrats is not that they lost nine primaries. It is what those losses reveal about the party's center of gravity. When large numbers of Democratic voters express deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, the energy flows not toward moderation but toward radicalism. The candidates who won on June 23 did not campaign on pragmatism. They campaigned on ideology, and the voters who showed up rewarded them for it.
James's instinct to seek "some sort of understanding" with the socialists may be politically rational in the short term. But it concedes the fundamental point: the establishment no longer controls the terms of the debate within its own party.
Mamdani now has a growing roster of allies heading to Washington. His City Hall operation has faced its own questions about accountability, but his political machine is delivering results at the ballot box. The Democratic Socialists of America are no longer fringe activists crashing party meetings. They are winning primaries, ousting incumbents, and daring the establishment to do something about it.
The establishment, so far, has responded with disappointment, hedging, and requests for understanding. That is not a strategy. It is a surrender dressed up in talking points.
When the people who run your party are asking the people who just took it from them for a truce, the takeover is already well underway.