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.
