Mayor Mamdani stopped in Bushwick’s Maria Hernandez Park Saturday afternoon with now Democratic congressional candidate Claire Valdez.
Kingmaker Mamdani makes a pit stop at Maria Hernandez in a last-ditch push to elect DSA ally Claire Valdez.
BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
BUSHWICK — Beaming, sun-dappled and clad in a summery slate-gray suit, Mayor Zohran Mamdani strode into Bushwick’s Maria Hernandez Park like a K-pop star about to play MSG early Saturday afternoon. Next to him, almost completely obscured by three towering bodyguards and a gaggle of press flashing cameras and smartphones, walked State Assemblymember, congressional candidate and fellow DSA-member Claire Valdez, who’d come to rally the dozens of canvassers who’d begun gathering nearly an hour before to door-knock for the NY-7 hopeful.
The DSA-organized canvass was an 11th-hour push to get out the vote for Valdez in perhaps the closest-watch race of Tuesday’s Democratic primary election. Maria Hernandez Park sits in the heart of New York’s 7th Congressional District, which is by some counts the most left-wing political district in the country, with nearly 67% of Bushwick constituents voting for Mamdani last year. The race for the seat — occupied by the retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez — has thus been cast as a battle for the soul of New York City’s Left and the national progressive movement more broadly.
Both Valdez and her closest competitor, Brooklyn Borough President and Velazquez protege Antonio Reynoso, have touted populist policies like universal healthcare and childcare, an end to US military interventionism and support for Palestinian sovereignty. But Valdez is backed by Mamdani and the DSA, while Reynoso has nabbed endorsements from the Working Families Party and Velazquez herself, setting up what some pundits have described as a left-wing “civil war.”
As the DSA army assembled, a lone canvasser for public defender and fellow NY-7 candidate Vichal Kumar criss-crossed the park, handing out fliers. Meanwhile, a group of Spanish-speaking men played soccer on the Maria Hernandez field, largely unbothered by the political assembly playing out just a few yards away.
Surrounded by canvassers armed with tote bags, sun hats, and signs displaying slogans like “Free Palestine” and “Workers Deserve It All,” Mamdani and Valdez delivered rousing speeches from atop the park’s stone podium, evoking Mamdani’s upset election almost exactly a year prior. Mamdani began by telling a story of a last-minute canvass to get out the vote during his own campaign last year, when he encountered a man who’d admitted he had not yet voted because the polling site was too far away.
“I was like, ‘come with me,’ and I put him in the car that was supposed to take me somewhere and I said ‘go to the poll site,’” the Mayor recounted. “That’s what I need you to do today. A little bit deranged, a lot of dedication.”
“I look at this district, I look at this candidate, and what I see is courage,” he continued. “What I see is clarity. What I see is conviction.”
At various points throughout the rally, the crowd — made up of largely twenty and thirty-somethings — broke into cheers of “Claire was there!” referring to Valdez’s long-term dedication to organizing for progressive causes. Valdez, whose background is in art and labor organizing, traces her political beginnings to her involvement with the United Auto Workers union while working at Columbia University (The union represents graduate student employees as well as workers in heavy industries).
“There will be fights that we know we will be fighting in the next year— there will be some that we have not yet even heard of,” Mamdani said. “And no matter which one it is, we know that Claire will be on the right side.”
In a hopeful speech, Valdez drew through lines between foreign policy, immigration, and confronting the billionaire class, and highlighted the continuity of her values through each of the issues she campaigned on.
“Tenants are on the ballot, medicare for all is on the ballot, Palestine is on the ballot,” Valdez said to roaring applause.
She continued: “If we believe in a world in which human rights in Ridgewood and Rafah are the same, in which we have to fight across borders, beyond the shop floor, in every single neighborhood, for every single working-class person, we can do that. We can organize for a future beyond war. We can organize for a future in which the billionaires and the bosses are no longer controlling our lives.”
