John Tarleton discusses The Indypendent’s coverage of the city’s historic June 23rd Democratic primary election, with a focus on Democratic Socialist of America party candidates’ victories and their likely impact on both local and national politics. The Indypendent is New York City’s free progressive monthly newspaper.
JOHN TARLETON: Hi, Scott. It’s great to be back on this show with you and all your listeners.
JOHN TARLETON: Well, yes, welcome from the Good News Capital of America if you’re a progressive or socialist. Yes, last week’s results, a sweeping triumph for Mayor Mamdani and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which are really the engine that propelled Mamdani into City Hall and who backed a large slate of socialist candidates. You talked about the congressional candidates, but they also won five more seats in the state legislature, including knocking off three incumbent assembly members. And that’s also important for Mamdani’s future prospects. The city is greatly reliant on what happens in Albany.
So it’s a real flex for legislators in Albany and I’m sure many of them are thinking or maybe rethinking where they want to come down next year when Mamdani makes another “tax the rich” proposal. And also Democratic socialists won a assembly seat in Buffalo, New York, hometown of Gov. Kathy Hochul. And currently another Democratic socialist, Maurice Brown, has a very narrow lead of less than 100 votes in a race in Syracuse, New York.
So altogether we’re looking at somewhere between 15 to 16 Democratic socialists heading to the New York State legislature next year. And of course the top line races were for Congress, Democratic socialist Assembly Member Claire Valdez won a term in Albany and she knocked off Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who’s been a popular figure in Brooklyn for many years, beat him by more than 20 points. She was endorsed on Day One by Mamdani. She’s very popular in the DSA chapter. And I mean the chapter went out and knocked on over 300,000 doors along with some allied groups like Jewish Voices for Peace and a UAW local that’s very left wing here that Valdez comes out of. And then Darializa Avila Chevalier— huge upset knocked off not only a five-term incumbent, but Adriano Espaillat is currently the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with more than $6 million in outside money.
Many of it from sources aligned with AIPAC and the Israel lobby poured into that district, both trying to puff up Espaillat and tear down Darializa and it all failed in the end. Espaillat has had a machine in upper Manhattan for many years, but it was no match for DSA and especially once the mayor got involved in that race with about four weeks left to go. And then the other race, Brad Lander did defeat two-term incumbent Israel hawk, Dan Goldman in a district, kind of an affluent district in lower Manhattan and swath of Brooklyn. And Lander is not a Democratic Socialist, but he was definitely to the left of Goldman. And Lander gave Mamdani crucial help in the primary last year. When Lander’s mayoral campaign was floundering, he made a strategic decision to really throw all his support behind Mamdani and was an important ambassador in particular to the Jewish community and sort of the liberal Jews that were nervous about Mamdani and Lander was a real validator.
And so this was sort of Mamdani returning the favor. And now Brad Lander will probably be one of the 10 or 15 most left-wing people in Congress. And Claire Valdez and Darializa will probably be right up there, top two or three most left-wing people in Congress along with probably Rashida Tlaib from Detroit.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, John, that’s great rundown of the victories for the left in these New York primaries. And I’ll also, in just a moment, we’ll talk about some of the other races around the country where members of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA emerged victorious, or maybe on the cusp of victory. But I wanted you to talk briefly about what were the major issues in these New York races. Israel played a prominent role, but of course, there were a lot of bread-and-butter kitchen table issues that brought out so many voters to overturn these long-running incumbents that usually have a green light for as many terms as they want, but that wasn’t the case during the primary.
JOHN TARLETON: Right. So Darializa Avila Chevalier won in her district, which is basically Manhattan north of 100th Street and then also part of the West Bronx, heavily black and brown district with a sprinkling of younger white people that have moved in, but it’s still heavily working class black and Latino district. And her lead slogan of “Babies Not Bombs” was a way of taking her long-running concern and passion for Palestinian rights and making the argument that we should be spending our resources on supporting the people most in need in this country and not using it to send more bombs to blow up hospitals and schools and refugee camps in Gaza or Lebanon or Iran. And I went out one afternoon with a couple of these DSA canvassers and that’s a whole other story, the whole DSA canvassing machine. And I went out with them and they canvased a public house.
We still have a large public housing system here in New York and they canvassed a public housing 14-story building in Harlem. And when they had the chance to talk to people at the doors, nothing landed more immediately than the argument that we shouldn’t be spending our money to send more bombs to the Middle East when we should be spending it on our own needs. I think it kind of captured people’s both disgust with the carnage that Israel has perpetrated and also the carnage and the stupidity of the war with Iran. So that proposition went over very well with a lot of people in her district. And obviously she won the race. And crucially, the real swing part of the district was more in the southern end of the district in Harlem, which still has a lot of black residents and black Harlem went for Darializa, not Espaillat.
And that’s been an argument used against socialist candidates. “Oh, black voters don’t want anything to do with this.” Well, that certainly wasn’t the case in Darializa’s district. As far as Claire Valdez, she was running in a different kind of district where there’s both the older generation of New Yorkers, working class immigrants and that, but also large numbers of transplants of people who are younger college-educated millennial renters, essentially, many of them white, but also many of them younger people of color who’ve ended up in this part of North Brooklyn and Western Queens, which has been a real bastion of DSA and the socialist movement over the last decade. So this was a district that was almost out of the playbook for someone like Valdez to succeed in. And she really leaned into her background as a labor organizer, as a former low-wage worker, and really leaned into a pro-worker message that I think landed with a lot of young people who the polls show overwhelmingly support unions, feel abandoned by an economic system where they don’t see a clear path forward in their life.
I think Valdez really spoke to them as someone who understood their lives because she had lived their lives.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, that tells the story right there that we have so many extremely wealthy people in Congress and that’s often what it takes to finance a campaign, a successful campaign. With the support of DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America and the canvassing operation that you and I’ve talked about before and you mentioned earlier, it’s really changed the game. You know, the combination of issues that resonate front and center with a lot of voters and these folks’ background, which is more like their own background in terms of their work history and the like.
So they create a whole life world for people to have meaningful and rich social experiences that go beyond their political interests, but really allow them to be human with each other in a way that a lot of people aren’t experiencing these days just because of how isolated and alienated our society has become.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. That’s so important.
JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. So we’re talking on Monday night tomorrow at Colorado, a big congressional race in Denver, a 29-year incumbent. Diana DeGette is facing 29-year-old Ethiopian immigrant Melat Kiros. Kiros immigrated with her family to the United States as an infant and grew up here in New York. And one of the things that altered her career as a young lawyer was within her workplace where she was working a few years ago, she spoke out on behalf of the campus protesters and was fired. I think she’s definitely inspired a lot of enthusiasm, certainly for younger voters in Denver. As I understand it, Denver has a tremendous cost of living affordability crisis like many places in this country. And the last poll that came out last week showed Kiros leading 41 to 36 with a large block of undecided voters, but that’s usually a bad sign for an incumbent. If you’ve been around 29 years and only 36 percent of your voters are certain they want to re-elect you with a week to go.
So also there’s going to be congressional races in St. Louis. Cori Bush backed by DSA trying to return to Congress after being knocked out two years ago by a wave of millions of dollars in AIPAC spending. Now AIPAC money is utterly toxic and Israel is toxic. So she may well bounce back. There’s a candidate, Donavan McKinney running in Detroit in August. And also there’s left populist. I mean, Graham Platner won big in the Democratic primary in Maine. Abdul El-Sayed also running for Senate in Michigan leading in all the polls now up there. You have Nithya Raman running for mayor of Los Angeles. She and Karen Bass finished one-two in the first round of voting and they’ll be in the general election in November. Bass led by a few points in the opening. Mayor Bass is well past 70 and really voters may be ready to turn the page on her.
Raman served on city council for a few years, identifies as a Democratic socialist, somewhat a rocky relationship with the local chapter there, but we’ll see how that goes. And then I think in the last week or two, Janeese Lewis George, a DSA-endorsed candidate, won the Democratic primary for mayor in Washington, D.C. So she’ll almost certainly be the next mayor of our nation’s capital. And then in New England, a 27-year-old Democratic socialist representative in Rhode Island David (Morales), I hope I got that name right. He is in his third term and he’s running for mayor of Providence, Rhode Island against a sort of a pro-corporate incumbent and that primary will be at the beginning of September and his campaign looks to be running well too. So we could have a socialist mayor in one of the larger cities in New England.
SCOTT HARRIS: Wow. No, that’s quite a roster and it speaks to people’s demand for change. I think we’ve talked before about how the Democratic party generally is in the dumps. The polling around the Democrats is as bad or worse than the Republicans. And we know people are upset with Congress and Republicans generally. And I think that the important thing to know about those polls is that there are many Democrats who are, when they’re polled, say, “No, I don’t like my party.” Yeah, that’s what’s causing the upheaval and the demand for disruption in business as usual.
JOHN TARLETON: Yeah. And it’s very much of a generational divide, younger voters and by younger, I think we can say almost anyone under 50 or certainly under 40, they are overwhelmingly skewing to the left and it’s really the older voters who maybe grew up in the Cold War and grew up with a fondness for Israel and haven’t let go of those kind of tropes. But the younger voters are definitely deeply frustrated because older voters are more likely to be homeowners and have those kind of assets that younger voters feel like is totally out of reach to them. And so yeah, generational divide and we’re living in a time of oligarchy in a second gilded age and people are feeling it. And Trump’s promises were always empty demagoguery. He wasn’t going to lower the grocery prices or help working people in any way, but some people hung their hat on that and of course have been greatly disillusioned.
So it’s a real moment for the left to breakthrough. And one of the things that’s so striking is the incredible pathetic response of the party establishment. I mean, they lost twice to Trump, which is completely discredited with many of their supporters who were in the past were more deferential to the party leaders, “Vote Blue no matter who” and all of that. And now the fury and the horror from the party establishment over Democratic socialists winning three congressional primaries in the last month, including the two in New York and Chris Rabb in Philadelphia in May is far greater than their upset over Trump getting re-elected. You really see what their priorities are, which is more about them holding onto power than anything else within their own party.
And one of the things that’s been really just both disturbing and funny is you see certain figures both in the sort of centrist media world as well as politicians saying, “Oh, we’ve got to keep the socialists out of our primaries or out of our party. They’re not real Democrats. Only we are real Democrats.” But your own voters, your voters, we certainly here in New York and other places are overwhelmingly voting for these kind of candidates. So this idea that somehow they have this sense of entitlement to decide who should be a real Democrat when voters are already making their decisions. So they’ve got to, I think, kind of come to grips with reality because the train is leaving the station fast.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, it’s interesting to watch the reaction of the Democratic Socialists of America candidates, victories in New York and elsewhere. You have Fox News, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and President Trump calling these candidates communists multiple times. They’re all speaking from the same script, obviously. And then on the other side of things, you have former President Bill Clinton’s political advisor, James Carville, he was quoted as saying, “There’s a schism in the party.” And he says, DSA candidates, who he labels as far left, should have no place in the Democratic party, just what you said a moment ago.
