Nearly a week after three far-left candidates swept New York City's congressional primaries, New York State Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs still had not picked up the phone to congratulate any of them, and he made clear he has no plans to endorse the most controversial winner, Darializa Avila Chevalier, anytime soon.
"What I'm going to say to you is that I'm willing to work with her, okay, and whether I endorse her or not, we haven't had that conversation and frankly she hasn't asked for my endorsement," Jacobs told the Washington Free Beacon.
That is not the language of a party chair rallying behind his nominees. It is the language of a man looking for the nearest exit.
The results landed like a brick through the window of the New York Democratic establishment. In NY-13, covering Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx, Chevalier, a 32-year-old City University of New York doctoral student and self-described democratic socialist, toppled Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The Washington Examiner reported she won 49.4% to Espaillat's 46% with 87% of ballots counted.
In NY-10, former city comptroller Brad Lander knocked out Rep. Dan Goldman. And in an open House seat spanning Brooklyn and Queens, socialist assemblywoman Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso, the establishment favorite.
All three winners carried the endorsement of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. As we previously reported, Mamdani openly credited anti-Israel campaigning for the sweep, a telling admission about the energy driving these races.
Chevalier insists she is not a communist. Her social media history tells a different story, or told one, until she started deleting posts.
In 2020, she retweeted a quote attributed to Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther who fled to Cuba after being convicted in the killing of a New Jersey state trooper, praising Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, and crediting Marx and Lenin with "contributions to revolutionary struggle too great to be ignored." In another archived post from 2022, she condemned the 1997 children's animated film Anastasia as an "explicitly anti-USSR kid's movie." In 2021, she labeled Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun" as "bootstrap capitalist propaganda." A separate archived post suggested she considered herself an "expert" in communist theory.
CNN, on June 29, unearthed still more deleted posts in which the presumptive congresswoman shared praise for communist leaders including Vladimir Lenin and offered sympathetic assessments of Marxist ideology.
Jacobs called those posts "reprehensible." Then he added, with the dry understatement of a man trying not to set his own house on fire: "Apparently, she does too, because she's removed them."
But the social media posts are not the whole picture. Breitbart reported that Chevalier co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the group that led the 2024 tent encampment protests at Columbia. That organization publicly declared it was fighting for "the total eradication of Western civilization" and standing "in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South." Chevalier also stated it would be "discriminatory" to deport illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, including child rape and murder.
This is the woman whom House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries congratulated on social media with the breezy message: "From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different but the work is the same."
Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was not nearly so diplomatic. The Democrat, who has increasingly broken with his party's progressive wing, unloaded on all three winners in comments to the Free Beacon.
"This is not a 'big tent' party issue. This would be embracing individuals who are irredeemably, ideologically broken."
Fetterman reserved particular fire for Lander and Valdez. On Lander, the senator said he "simped his way into Congress to someone who believes Israel doesn't have the right to exist as a Jewish state, with a spouse who 'liked' multiple posts of the 10/8 celebration of the 10/7 massacre." The reference was to Mayor Mamdani's wife, whom Fetterman did not name.
"I don't know how he reconciles that," Fetterman added.
On Valdez, Fetterman was blunter: "Valdez will perfectly fit with the pro-Hamas caucus." On social media, he called Chevalier "Crazypants." Whatever else one thinks of Fetterman, he is not pretending these results are normal. As he warned in a separate broadside, Democrats are "drifting firmly into communism."
The state party chair tried a different approach: downplay. Jacobs argued the results reflect nothing more than the peculiarities of low-turnout primaries in very progressive districts.
"To use a broad brush and say that the Democratic Party has moved far to the left because of the results in a couple of very progressive districts, which are distinguished from other competitive districts, I think this is inaccurate."
He elaborated: "In those districts we tend to have, as in all primaries, a lower turnout. It favors activists, the activists tend to be more progressive."
There is a grain of truth in this. The New York Post reported that Chevalier won with votes from only 7% of active Democrats in the district. Early analyses showed young, college-educated, high-income Black and white voters drove her victory, with white voters backing her 61% to Espaillat's 39%. Longtime residents expressed shock. "There are a lot of new people who've moved in," one Washington Heights resident named Nancy told the Post, "and the populations that [Espaillat] served and he mostly speaks to, don't necessarily make it to the polls."
But "low turnout in progressive districts" is a description of the problem, not a rebuttal. The activists showed up. The establishment's voters did not. And the result is that a woman who co-founded a group calling for the eradication of Western civilization is now the presumptive congresswoman from NY-13.
If Jacobs was cautious and Fetterman was combative, Jeffries chose the path of least resistance, congratulate the winners and move on. But his situation may be more complicated than his social media post suggested.
Jeffries narrowly avoided facing a socialist challenger of his own after Mamdani reportedly pulled the plug on a potential primary run by city councilman Chi Ossé. Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican representing a swing district in neighboring Westchester County, offered a pointed interpretation the day after the primary.
"Jeffries effectively cut a deal with Mamdani to avoid a primary of his own yesterday but pretty much threw everybody else under the bus as sacrificial lambs."
Whether Lawler's characterization is accurate remains unconfirmed. But the optics are hard to ignore: the House Democratic leader was spared while two of his allies, Espaillat and Goldman, were not.
On election night, democratic socialists at their victory party were filmed chanting "You're next" as Jeffries appeared on television. The congratulatory post that followed read less like confidence and more like an attempt to keep the peace with people who had just publicly threatened his seat.
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville went further than anyone in the party establishment. Just the News reported that Carville urged Democrats not to seat Chevalier in the House Democratic Caucus if she wins in November. "Her views are totally against anything that any Democrat has," Carville told NewsNation. "We believe in pluralism... she is not a Democrat."
An unnamed senior New York City Democrat described the elections as a "wake-up call" and "very frightening."
Meanwhile, on the ground in NY-13, residents were less diplomatic. Yvette Thomas, a 69-year-old Harlem voter, told the Post: "When she was first called on it, she changed her tune. For me, when someone shows you who they are, believe it the first time."
That skepticism extends beyond one district. New York City union leaders have warned that blue-collar workers are leaving the Democratic Party over exactly this kind of ideological drift. And the socialist surge is not confined to New York, a democratic socialist candidate recently ousted a 15-term incumbent in Colorado, extending the pattern to a second state.
Jacobs wants to treat these results as an anomaly, a quirk of low turnout and hyper-progressive enclaves. Fetterman sees them as an ideological emergency. Carville wants to expel the winners before they arrive. Jeffries wants to pretend everything is fine.
None of these responses changes the underlying fact: the Democratic Party's activist base, in district after district, is choosing candidates who praise communist dictators, call for the eradication of Western civilization, oppose deporting violent criminals, and lean hard into anti-Israel rhetoric. The establishment keeps losing to them. And the party's leadership cannot agree on whether to fight the trend, accommodate it, or simply hope voters in November will clean up the mess their own primaries created.
When your state party chair won't endorse your nominee and your most outspoken senator calls her "irredeemably, ideologically broken," the problem is not low turnout. The problem is what your party has become when the base actually shows up.
