Claire Valdez ran for Congress promising to keep superPACs out of her race. On June 3, on the debate stage, she said she would take their help after all.
The reversal came at the NY1 debate for New York’s 7th Congressional District, the open seat that covers parts of north Brooklyn and western Queens, and it was first reported by the New York Post. Pressed by her two rivals over a pledge she had made just months earlier, Valdez, a Democratic socialist state Assemblywoman, landed on a blunt justification. “The fact of the matter is, we have a campaign that we need to win,” she said.
That was a sharp turn from March. “No superPACs. No. No. Thank you,” Valdez said at a March 10 forum, and she built her campaign on small-dollar donations.
What changed in between was outside money. Her campaign quietly began posting guidance for outside supporters on how to back her, a practice called red-boxing that Politico first spotted. Direct coordination between a candidate and a superPAC is illegal, so campaigns drop their instructions into a literal red box on their website, where any PAC can read them without ever picking up the phone. It is a legal workaround for an illegal conversation.
Then the money showed up. The day before the debate, a new superPAC bankrolled by pro-Palestinian donors announced it would spend $2 million to elect Valdez, along with Darializa Avila Chevalier in the NY-13 primary and Brad Lander in the NY-10 race, according to the Post. All three, like Valdez, had been endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Councilmember Julie Won pressed first. “Could you help me understand?” Won said, bringing up Valdez’s March pledge. “How are you going to go on to end Citizens United?”
Valdez answered by pointing at the other side’s spending. “Right now, AIPAC, crypto and AI is spending millions and millions of dollars trying to influence election 2026,” she said. Then she redrew the line she had once drawn around all PACs. “I would never accept money from PACs, fossil fuel PACs, the real estate industry,” she said.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, the third candidate on stage, joined Won in questioning Valdez. He is not clean on the issue himself: his campaign site also has a red box, though no superPAC has come out for him. Reynoso took the same no-PAC pledge in March, then left himself an opening, calling his earlier position “uninformed” because he knew little about political action committees at the time.
The seat is open because Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who has held it since 1993, is not seeking another term. Valdez went on to win the June 23 Democratic primary, beating Reynoso in a race Bushwick Daily covered as a progressive civil war.
