New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s win has sparked progressives to target House seats across the city, including some currently held by Democratic heavyweights.
New York City Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés are reportedly weighing bids to oust House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Reps. Dan Goldman, respectively — and have sought the backing of the city’s DSA chapter to do so. And left-wing challengers have emerged against Reps. Ritchie Torres, Adriano Espaillat and Grace Meng.
Experts have called some of the campaigns long shots, while organizers believe Mamdani’s momentum can help them overcome the odds. Mamdani was famously polling at 1 percent before surging to win the primary and general elections.
“Mamdani’s win absolutely has energized and put a set of excitement for not only socialists and left-leaning people or progressives, but anybody that is desirous of a change,” said Andre Easton, a Party of Socialism and Liberation member who launched a campaign against Torres.
Mamdani’s November win saw the city’s highest voter turnout in almost a century. He outperformed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an Independent candidate after losing the Democratic primary, in nine of 13 congressional districts, including those held by Jeffries and Torres.
“We’re seeing that Zohran really picked up a lot of areas that many would say underperformed in the primaries,” said Sebastian Leon Martinez, coordinator of the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) New York City chapter’s youth branch.
The DSA led aggressive on-the-ground campaigns for Mamdani this cycle and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez against incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, a moderate Democrat, in 2018.
The Justice Democrats, another organization key to Ocasio-Cortez’s win, just endorsed a Harlem-based organizer, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is primarying Espaillat.
“I think that Zohran’s win convinced so many on the left that this is possible,” Avila Chevalier, a former Columbia student, told The New York Times earlier this week. “And I think we have to build on that momentum, because if we let that momentum go, then we did all that work for nothing.”
Rep. Grace Meng (D) has drawn a challenge from the left in Chuck Park, a former foreign service worker who most recently worked at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. He has attacked Meng for taking corporate donations and called her out of step on affordability, the main theme of Mamdani’s campaign.
Grace Mausser, one of the New York City DSA’s co-chairs, said the organization’s membership had doubled in the past year to over 12,000 people — enabling them to potentially support more candidates’ campaigns in the 2026 election cycle.
“Now that we have a citywide elected official who is coming into office with a very strong mandate, we think we have the opportunity to elect quite a few people who are aligned,” Mausser said.
“And if we don’t, even when there’s no opportunity to put a new person into office, we are going to be able to leverage Zohran’s electoral success to pressure electeds to align with some of the policy ideas that he needs to implement his agenda,” she said.
But opposition to primarying elected officials has come from Mamdani himself. The mayor-elect discouraged the DSA from endorsing Ossé’s bid against Jeffries, saying it would be detrimental to implementing his affordability agenda. The DSA voted against endorsing Ossé last week, leaving the future of his campaign uncertain.
Mamdani also reportedly said he would endorse city comptroller and former mayoral candidate Brand Lander in a race for Goldman’s seat — which both experts and organizers believe is particularly vulnerable to a primary since he won his initial election to Congress with less than half his district’s vote.
With the exception of Goldman, Lupe Todd-Medina, president of Effective Media Strategies and a political consultant, said incumbent Democrats in New York City were particularly popular in their districts.
“The comparison to what happened over the course of this past year with the election of Mamdani to mayor, is going to be very different than these races,” said Todd-Medina, who formerly worked with Jeffries as a political communications director.
She also called Mamdani’s lack of endorsements so far in congressional primary challenges strategic.
“I think that’s smart of him,” she said. “He can’t get involved in this. I mean, he has to put together an administration.”
Jack O’Donnell, a veteran campaign strategist and managing partner at O’Donnell & Associates, said it wasn’t unusual to have “folks in activist and more progressive communities pushing back”
He noted that Jeffries and Torres seemed to enjoy strong support in their districts, likely making them safe from primary challenges. And having worked on Schumer’s past campaigns, he warned against counting out the senator even if Ocasio-Cortez does mount a primary against him in 2028.
The retirements of two longtime congressmembers are poised to kick off more political turbulence — and opportunities for progressives to expand their power in New York City and Washington.
Rep. Jerry Nadler and Rep. Nydia Velázquez announced they will retire next year, both citing the need for generational change within the party. Nadler’s seat has already drawn nine challengers, with Velázquez’s seat likely to inspire similar competition.
“There are certainly some open seats in New York that are drawing a lot of candidates and attention right now,” said Justin Chae, CEO of New York-based Supernova: Creative & Crisis, who is working with candidate Cameron Kasky, who hopes to succeed Nadler.
Even if some of the socialist and progressive candidates fail to recreate Mamdani’s electoral success, the pipeline for future challengers is also expanding.
Martinez noted that the NYC-DSA’s youth arm had inspired more colleges in New York City — including Columbia University — to create their own YDSA chapters.
“You’re going to see a lot of these young organizers who were activated by the Zohran campaign moving on to other races, whether they’re local, state, or federal, and I know that they’re going to play a crucial role in building up true working-class power,” Martinez said.
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