If you live in Bushwick, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Astoria or Long Island City, the three Democrats fighting to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez spent their first televised debate mostly agreeing with each other. Then they got to the money, and the gloves came off. On June 3 on Spectrum News NY1, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Queens Council Member Julie Won spent a chunk of the hour hammering Assemblymember Claire Valdez over one feature on her campaign website: a red box that candidates use to quietly tell outside super PACs exactly where and how to spend on their behalf, on the site of a candidate who in March said she would not take super PAC money at all.
A red box works like this. Candidates are legally barred from coordinating with super PACs, so campaigns post unmarked instructions, often literally inside a colored box, on a public page where the PACs can read them and “independently” follow along. It is a workaround of the coordination ban. On Valdez’s site, per QNS, the box directed a super PAC to spend in the richest part of the district. Reynoso went at her over it on stage.
The timeline is the problem. According to QNS, all three candidates agreed back in March not to accept super PAC funding. Valdez, a democratic socialist, had been the loudest about it. “No superPACs. No. No. Thank you,” she said at a March 10 forum, as the New York Post reported. Then a super PAC called American Priorities showed up to spend on her, and the box on her site showed up to help it aim.
On stage, Won laid the contradiction out plainly. “Could you help me understand how you could want to end Citizens United and no longer have super PAC funding our campaigns, yet take super PAC money yourself for your campaign?” she asked, per NY1. Pressed by both opponents, Valdez did not walk it back. “The fact of the matter is, we have a campaign that we need to win,” she said, as reported by the New York Post. She drew a line around which money she still refuses: “I would never accept money from corporate PACs, fossil fuel PACs, the real estate industry,” she said, per NY1.
So who is American Priorities? The super PAC was built in 2026 as a counterweight to pro-Israel groups like AIPAC, and it pledged roughly $2 million across Valdez and other vocal critics of Israel running for Congress, per QNS. On paper, that is outside money a left candidate could happily defend. The complication is who is paying for it.
One of the PAC’s biggest funders is Hussein Mahrouq, a Texas businessman who has put at least $525,000 into American Priorities, according to Jewish Insider. The same outlet reports Mahrouq has also bankrolled far-right Republicans, including recently ousted Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and that in 2024 he gave $100,000 to boost Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and $25,000 to GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Reynoso and Won keep pulling on that line: the candidate running hardest against big money and special interests is being helped by a pot that a Marjorie Taylor Greene donor helped fill.
Valdez did not argue the money’s pedigree. She pivoted to her own donors, and on the numbers she has a real answer. She told the debate she runs a grassroots campaign averaging about $45 a donation from around 20,000 contributors, per QNS. Her campaign manager, Ravi Sahai, put it harder afterward, telling BKReader the campaign is “powered by more than 22,000 small dollar donors, far more than both competitors combined.” The small-dollar campaign is real. So is the red box steering an outside PAC toward the district’s wealthiest blocks.
Reynoso and Won noted that immediately after the first televised debate, Valdez’s campaign updated the red box to direct its super PACs to attack the other candidates, per BKReader. The fight is no longer really about whether Valdez takes outside money. She does. It is about whether a candidate can run on ending Citizens United while running a machine that uses the exact mechanics Citizens United made possible.
The campaign-finance brawl was not the only place these three split, even though they agree on most policy. They also differ on Brooklyn’s own Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader. Reynoso has said he would back Jeffries for Speaker but plans to pull him leftward. “I’m not going to fight Hakeem on being the Speaker, but when he’s there, I’m going to push him to the direction that I think this party should be going,” Reynoso told the New York Editorial Board. Reynoso also walked in with the most institutional muscle of the three: in March, District Council 37, New York City’s largest public employee union, endorsed him for the congressional seat.
This is the seat Nydia Velazquez has held for decades, covering parts of north Brooklyn and western Queens, and whoever wins the June 23 Democratic primary in a district this blue is effectively going to Congress. If you want to decide for yourself whether a red box squares with a no-super-PAC pledge, you do not have to take any candidate’s word: super PAC spending is public. You can look up American Priorities and what it has spent in NY-7 on the Federal Election Commission’s database at fec.gov, then check your own registration and polling site through the New York State Board of Elections before you vote on June 23.
Featured image: Marc A. Hermann / Metropolitan Transportation Authority / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
