An op-ed running in central Queens does not just want Grace Meng to win her June 23 primary. It wants her to crush it. In a June 3 opinion piece in the Queens Jewish Link, the writer tells the district’s Jewish voters that the goal is not merely reelecting the 13-year incumbent but running up the score, in the writer’s own words, “making sure that she wins with a comfortable margin so that the DSA will not try to run again in this district on any level, city, state, or federal.” The op-ed says so directly: a big enough win is meant to deter the next challenge.
Early voting is already underway. New York’s Democratic primary runs through June 21 at sites across the five boroughs, with primary day on Tuesday, June 23, according to the NYC Board of Elections schedule reported by CBS New York. NY-06 sits entirely inside Queens, covering Flushing, Elmhurst, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Bayside, Woodside, Jackson Heights and more, per the official U.S. Census Bureau district map.
Meng is the incumbent, and her roots in the district run deep. She was born in Queens in 1975, raised in Bayside and Flushing, won a State Assembly seat in 2008, and in 2012 became the first Asian American elected to Congress from New York, taking office in January 2013, per the U.S. House Biographical Directory. According to the Queens Jewish Link, her district work has included pushing to reopen the LIRR station in Elmhurst, funding a childcare center at Queensborough Community College, and backing programs at the New York Hall of Science tied to NASA’s Artemis III mission. She now chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
Her challenger is Chuck Park, 41, the son of Korean immigrants who, before they bought a house in Queens, sold jackets and jeans as street peddlers on Canal Street in Manhattan, per QNS. Park served as a State Department visa officer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, then resigned in 2019 in protest of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies, per QNS, and later worked at the city’s Economic Development Corporation and as a staffer for City Councilmember Shekar Krishnan of Jackson Heights, per City and State and NY1.
On October 21, 2025, ICE and other federal agencies ran an enforcement sweep on Canal Street, taking nine African immigrants into immigration custody, with Governor Kathy Hochul saying agents “used batons and pepper spray on street vendors and bystanders,” and the Street Vendor Project’s director accusing agents of “racially profiling vendors just based on their skin color,” per CBS New York. That is the same street Park’s parents worked. As he told City and State: “I’m running for Congress because I see what is happening in terms of (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids on Canal Street, the same street where my parents were desperate immigrants trying to scrape together a living.” Per QNS, his decision was that blunt: “In a fit of anger and frustration, I opened my phone and said, ‘I’m doing this.'”
The op-ed frames the contest as a fight over Israel, and the money lines up with that. Meng’s single largest career contributor is the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, per OpenSecrets career-contribution data, and her acceptance of that money is the heart of Park’s critique. Park, by contrast, takes none of it. He told City and State his campaign is “1,000%” PAC-free, adding, “if you find one, I will refund that money immediately,” and told PoliticsNY that Meng “has forgotten that she answers to the people of Queens, not corporate PACs and foreign interest groups.” The op-ed casts Park as a threat to the Jewish community because, in the writer’s telling, he “routinely uses the genocide slur to discredit Israel.”
A pro-Meng writer wants a blowout because the numbers say a win is not in doubt, leaving the margin as the only variable. By the close of 2025, Meng had raised $919,456 to Park’s roughly $140,000, per the Queens Daily Eagle, which also reported strategist Trip Yang predicting Meng wins by 30 to 40 points. By late March, the gap was about $1.4 million to Park’s roughly $283,000, per Salon. Meng has also locked down the establishment: retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez, State Senator John Liu, and Park’s own former boss, Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, per the Queens Daily Eagle.
That Krishnan endorsement landed on a brutal day for Park. The same day Krishnan backed Meng, the Working Families Party’s state leadership voted to deny Park its endorsement, overruling local Queens members who had voted more than 90 percent to recommend him and a regional council that passed it with a two-thirds majority, per City and State. Park’s response: “Apparently, the Democratic establishment convinced Working Families Party leadership to overturn two super-majority votes and the will of its members.” The op-ed wants a landslide to deter future left challengers. The institutions are already doing the deterring, before the votes are even counted.
The Israel question runs down the rest of the ballot too. Statewide, Governor Hochul faces no Democratic primary opponent, though the Brooklyn Democratic Party recently withdrew its endorsement ahead of the state convention, as Bushwick Daily reported. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, endorsed the full NYC-DSA slate this cycle, including a Bushwick Assembly candidate, the same left challenge the Queens op-ed says it wants to extinguish, as Bushwick Daily reported. And the same op-ed urges reelecting Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, praising his support for keeping the state pension fund invested in Israel bonds and in Palantir, the software company tied to Israeli defense work, per the Queens Jewish Link.
You can check the margin yourself. Early voting runs through June 21 and primary day is Tuesday, June 23, with the New York City Board of Elections reporting more than 16,000 ballots cast on the first day alone, per CBS New York, which also links the state’s poll-site lookup so you can find your hours and full Queens ballot. If you want to weigh the money behind each candidate, both campaigns’ FEC filings are public. In a race the establishment has already called, the margin is the one number you still get to set.
Featured image: U.S. House of Representatives / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
