The left brought out its biggest names. Senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani headlined a get-out-the-vote rally at the Kings Theatre in Flatbush, billed as “Our Team, Our Year,” to rally voters behind a slate of progressive candidates just days before the June 23 Democratic primary.
The event backed an entire endorsement slate, not a single candidate. The headliners threw their weight behind Claire Valdez, running for Congress in NY-07, Brad Lander, running in NY-10, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, running in a Manhattan race, the same cluster of insurgent campaigns trying to ride the energy that just put Mamdani in City Hall into Congress and Albany.
Kings Theatre is a massive, restored Flatbush landmark, the room you book when you want to project momentum. Putting Sanders, the national figurehead of the American left, on a stage next to a sitting New York City mayor and a slate of down-ballot challengers was a deliberate statement that these campaigns are one movement. The pitch to the crowd was that voting the whole slate is how you shift the Democratic Party.
It also signals where these races stand. Campaigns do not fly in Bernie Sanders for a coronation; they bring him for a fight they think turnout can win. A rally three days out, aimed at getting specific Brooklyn voters to the polls, is a bet that the gap between winning and losing a low-turnout June primary is the people a Sanders-Mamdani rally can get off the couch.
For voters, the rally was a map of who the Mamdani-Sanders left is asking you to vote for, up and down the ballot. The primary is Tuesday, June 23, and early voting is already open. The most organized force in the city just spent a night at Kings Theatre trying to move your race. Look up your poll site and go.
