There’s a seeming paradox at the epicenter of the political earthquake that hit New York City on Tuesday night, when a trio of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Zohran Mamdani–backed candidates triumphed in congressional primaries across the city. The progressive candidates who claim to represent a working-class revolution won thanks to the votes of the well-educated, credentialed, and affluent, while low-income New Yorkers tended to back the more moderate candidate. The results reflect a nationwide political reality: Across the country, higher education and income increasingly correlate with progressive voting, while working-class voters—including in long-established immigrant communities—opt for more moderate choices.
That pattern was on full display in New York’s 13th Congressional District last night, where Mamdani-backed Darializa Avila Chevalier dominated in higher-income precincts, while five-term Democratic incumbent Adriano Espaillat carried lower-income areas by 40 points. The race, featuring two Dominican American candidates, exposed a growing divide between the district’s long-established immigrant community and its more activist, college-educated heirs. Today, Rafael A. Mangual examines these dynamics, focusing not only on the contest itself but on the district’s particular character—and diagnosing what he sees as a new political framework in America: “The immigrant who built a career on becoming American has given way to the American-born activist who rejects American patriotism in favor of militant Third Worldism.” —The Editors
Darializa Avila Chevalier has narrowly won the Democratic nomination in New York’s 13th Congressional District, and the result is rightly being read as a victory for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who endorsed her, loaned her his organization, and broke an earlier promise to back her opponent, five-term Democratic incumbent Adriano Espaillat. And in a district this lopsidedly Democratic, winning the party’s nomination is usually tantamount to winning the seat.
But this contest is about more than Mamdani’s influence in such races. It was a primary fought in Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx, the largest center of Dominican political life in the United States, between two candidates of Dominican origin. The more revealing question is not about how Mamdani’s backing affected the outcome, but what Avila Chevalier’s victory tells us about the changing politics of race, ethnicity, and class within that community.
The man Avila Chevalier defeated is, in many respects, the embodiment of Dominican political ascent in New York. He came to the city as a child and for a time lived here without legal status; he won a seat in the state assembly in the 1990s, advanced to the state senate, and in 2016 succeeded the legendary Charles Rangel to become the first Dominican American elected to Congress, where he now chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
