The four-way Democratic primary for Nydia Velazquez’s open congressional seat ends June 23, and in a district this blue, that primary is the whole election. Here is the strange part: Antonio Reynoso and Claire Valdez, the two front-runners, agree on nearly everything. Both want to abolish ICE, tax the rich, fund Medicare for All, and end the war in Gaza. The race still turned into a brawl, over real-estate money, a Mamdani snub, and which wing of the New York left gets to claim NY-7.
The clearest fault line runs straight through Zohran Mamdani. Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough President, was an early endorser of Mamdani’s run for mayor. Mamdani did not return the favor: when Reynoso entered the NY-7 race, the new mayor backed Valdez, a first-term state assembly member and fellow Democratic Socialist, instead. Reynoso and Mamdani, former allies, traded fire over the mayor’s visits to Trump’s White House. “I don’t think we should be visiting the White House and talking to Trump,” Reynoso said at the NY1 debate, calling the president someone “we should be getting ready to impeach” for “war crimes.” Mamdani hit back the next day, telling reporters he would “leave it to the borough president to explain why he would prefer a New Yorker continue to be unjustly detained by ICE” rather than have the mayor meet Trump to win that person’s release, a reference to a Columbia student freed from ICE custody. The New York Post framed the whole thing as a civil war between the Working Families Party progressives Reynoso runs with and the Democratic Socialist wing behind Valdez. One Democratic operative put it less politely to the Post: “It’s definitely a choice to turn NY-07 into a turf war when the candidates are 95% the same.”
The money fight is sharper. In a video this past weekend, Valdez accused Reynoso of accepting more than $100,000 in real-estate donations in a district that is 77 percent tenant. Her campaign named names: a developer indicted for defrauding the state’s 421-a tax break, a real-estate investor who settled a Section 8 voucher-discrimination case with the city, and a string of brokers and landlords with portfolios running into the hundreds of millions. The charge lands because Reynoso pledged during his 2025 Borough President run not to take real-estate money, then did, as the Daily News reported. Pressed on it, he has drawn a narrower line, saying he only swore off “big” real estate; in a Breaking Points interview he put it bluntly: “I’ll take money from a real estate agent, a broker.” Valdez, a Ridgewood tenant who says she has refused every real-estate dollar, is running on rent control for every tenant and millions of publicly built union homes. Her campaign says she enters the final stretch with a 2-point polling lead, more than 3,000 volunteers, 250,000 doors knocked, and $1.3 million raised from 22,000 donors at an average under $50. She is endorsed by Mamdani, Senator Bernie Sanders, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, and the United Auto Workers.
Reynoso’s answer to all of it is his record, which even his opponents do not really dispute. He is the rare borough president who built a career picking fights and winning them. As a City Council member in 2017 he pushed through the Right to Know Act, which requires NYPD officers to tell New Yorkers they can refuse certain searches, over the objections of a nervous Mayor de Blasio. “Everyone told me my career would be dead if I passed that legislation,” he told the Queens Ledger. “I fought against my own friends to make it happen.” Born in Brooklyn to Dominican parents and raised in the Los Sures section of Williamsburg, he organized for the community group ACORN, founded the reformist New Kings Democrats, and in 2013 knocked off the notorious Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez to win his Council seat. The establishment is behind him this time: the Working Families Party, the Queens Democratic Party, Attorney General Letitia James, and Velazquez herself, who is retiring after more than three decades and has made him her heir.
That establishment muscle is the spine of how Reynoso is closing. In mid-June he rallied in Sunnyside with a wall of unions, 32BJ, DC 37, 1199SEIU, RWDSU, the Hotel Trades Council, CWA and more, alongside James and Velazquez, then sent more than a hundred union members out to canvass. “I am a union baby,” Reynoso told the crowd. “My first job was organizing for labor. The unions gave me food on the table and a roof over my head, and I’m going to spend every single day in Congress making sure that I pay that back.” James, introducing him, said the moment called for “someone who is not new to this, but someone who is true to this.” Velazquez was blunter: “You can take his word and go to the bank.”
The rest of the closing argument is pure borough president: be everywhere, in every language, at every party. Days earlier Reynoso rallied against ICE in Bushwick, steps from Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, where federal agents had recently frightened patients away from care. “New York is a sanctuary city, and that means it is illegal for the NYPD to coordinate with ICE,” he said, flanked by Velazquez, Council Members Jennifer Gutierrez and Sandy Nurse, and Make the Road organizers. Through his Borough Hall office he has been rolling out the kind of programming that keeps a politician in a neighborhood’s good graces: “Brooklyn Mundial,” a run of free World Cup watch parties with Telemundo and live performances in Greenpoint, Coney Island, Bushwick and Cypress Hills; “Bushwick 1000,” a four-year, roughly $600,000 effort with RiseBoro, Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow and St. Nicks Alliance to find work for 1,000 unemployed young people from Bushwick; and “The People’s Runway,” a Borough Hall fashion show with KidSuper’s Colm Dillane that hands five Brooklyn designers $5,000 each. None of it is a campaign event, exactly. All of it is Reynoso in front of voters.
He has been at it since the snow. On a frigid January Saturday, more than 400 people packed Turk’s Inn in Bushwick to launch the campaign and toast Velazquez, “La Luchadora,” who had just endorsed the “Son of the Southside” to carry her seat. “Today, Washington has lost its way,” Reynoso told them. “Trump is building ballrooms while ordinary Americans can’t buy bread. Where I come from, we believe in something simple: if we organize, if we fight, we win.” Rosie Perez, who said she met him when he was first elected to the Council, remembered thinking, “Who the hell is this guy? He was smart. He was tenacious. And he was standing up for the people.”
Reynoso and Valdez are joined on the June 23 ballot by City Council Member Julie Won and public defender Vichal Kumar. The seat runs from downtown Brooklyn through Bushwick and Williamsburg and up into Queens, and whoever wins the primary is, barring a shock, the next member of Congress. Both front-runners are making their closing case at reynosoforcongress.com and clairevaldezforcongress.com; confirm your early-voting site or your June 23 poll site at the New York City Board of Elections before you go.
