The race to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez in New York’s 7th Congressional District has become one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in Brooklyn and Queens this year, and at its center is a fight between two very different visions of progressive politics: Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who has assembled a wall of labor unions and elected Democrats behind him, and state Assemblymember Claire Valdez, the democratic socialist backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The only public poll of the contest so far, a May 16-17 Emerson College survey for PIX11, put Valdez at 23 percent and Reynoso at 21 percent, with City Council Member Julie Won at 13 percent and 43 percent of likely primary voters undecided. The Democratic primary is June 23, and in a district this heavily Democratic, whoever wins it is almost certain to go to Washington. This guide draws on the candidates’ own campaign materials and on independent reporting and public records — FEC filings, the New York State Assembly, Emerson polling, and outlets including Hell Gate, City & State, Gotham Gazette, The Intercept, Queens Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Paper and CBS News; where a claim rests only on a campaign’s own account, it is attributed as such.
NY-7 is an open seat for the first time in more than three decades. Velázquez, who in 1992 became the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress and is known among supporters as “La Luchadora,” announced on November 20, 2025 that her current term would be her last. “After much reflection, I have decided that this will be my last term in Congress,” she said. The district was drawn to give New York’s Puerto Rican community real congressional representation, and it stretches across heavily Latino and immigrant sections of Brooklyn — including Williamsburg, Bushwick, the Southside and parts of Greenpoint — into Queens. It is also one of the most left-leaning districts in the city: by NYC-DSA’s accounting, NY-7 voters favored Mamdani over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by 43 points in the 2025 mayoral primary. That tilt is the backdrop for everything that follows.
Reynoso, the borough president and a former city councilman from the Williamsburg-Bushwick area, entered the race as the front-runner and has campaigned as a lifelong organizer who came up through the neighborhood. Widely known to supporters as “Hijo de Los Sures” — a son of Williamsburg’s Southside — he is the son of Dominican immigrants who grew up in Section 8 housing; he now has two sons in New York City public schools. By his campaign’s account, Reynoso started as a union organizer for childcare workers, beat the Brooklyn Democratic machine to win a City Council seat at 30, co-chaired the Council’s Progressive Caucus, led efforts to curb illegal NYPD searches and worked to remove ICE from Rikers Island in 2014. As borough president, the campaign says, he helped more than 6,000 immigrants obtain work authorization and launched a $45 million maternal health initiative at the city’s public hospitals.
The public record fills in and, in places, sharpens that account. Reynoso, 43, grew up on public assistance in Los Sures — “whether it was welfare, Section 8, food stamps, Medicaid, you name it … my family had to take advantage of it,” he told Gotham Gazette — attended La Salle Academy on scholarship and earned a political science degree from Le Moyne College, and began his career organizing childcare workers with the New York chapter of ACORN before becoming chief of staff to his City Council predecessor, Diana Reyna. He won the District 34 seat in 2013, chaired the Sanitation Committee and co-chaired the Progressive Caucus, sponsored the 2019 commercial waste zones law and was lead sponsor of the 2017 Right to Know Act on police searches, and in 2021 became the first Latino elected Brooklyn borough president. One frequent campaign line needs a caveat: the 2014 city laws that ended ICE’s presence on Rikers and curtailed detainer cooperation were lead-sponsored by then-Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito; Carlos Menchaca, the immigration committee chair, was among the co-sponsors, and Reynoso voted for them but was not their author. His $45 million maternal-health investment as borough president is independently documented, directed to three Brooklyn public hospitals.
Velázquez made Reynoso her choice in a January 15 endorsement that set the tone for the contest. “I am proud to endorse Antonio Reynoso, Hijo de Los Sures,” she said in a statement released by his campaign. “He is a homegrown progressive leader ready to carry our fight forward. Antonio understands the struggles of working families because he has lived them … He will take on Trump unapologetically, stand against inequality and injustice, and fight to abolish ICE. He will stand up for Puerto Rico, our people, and our right to self-determination … As I pass the torch to the next generation, I ask New Yorkers to support him.” Reynoso called Velázquez’s backing “the honor of a lifetime.” Two days later, on January 17, the campaign said more than 400 people rallied for Reynoso at Turk’s Inn on Starr Street in Bushwick, where the actress and Brooklyn native Rosie Perez, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Council members Crystal Hudson, Lincoln Restler, Sandy Nurse, Jennifer Gutiérrez and Shekar Krishnan appeared in support. “Trump is building ballrooms while ordinary Americans can’t buy bread,” Reynoso told the crowd, according to the campaign.
What followed was an unusually broad endorsement push. Over four months, Reynoso announced backing from a long line of labor unions: the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which says it represents nearly 40,000 workers, on January 21; UNITE HERE Local 100, the food-service and restaurant workers’ union, on January 28; 32BJ SEIU, the country’s largest property-service union, on March 12; District Council 37, the city’s largest public-employee union with 150,000 members, on March 25; Communications Workers of America District 1 on April 7; and 1199SEIU, the healthcare workers’ union that Reynoso’s campaign calls the largest union in New York, on April 16. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union endorsed in February. In a recurring theme, Reynoso tied the labor support to his own family. “My mom was a proud 1199SEIU member, so I saw up close how the union helped lift our family out of poverty,” he said in the April announcement. Much of this labor coalition has been independently confirmed in City & State and Brooklyn Paper coverage; the campaign also lists Teamsters Local 237 as an endorser, which Bushwick Daily could not independently confirm for the 2026 race.
The endorsements extended well beyond labor. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards backed Reynoso on January 30, and the New York Progressive Action Network endorsed him on February 17. On March 1, in Woodside, Queens, Attorney General Letitia James and what the campaign described as 12 NYCHA tenant association leaders endorsed him. “He is the most experienced in this race,” James said, according to QNS. Rep. Jerry Nadler, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation, endorsed on March 10, and Rep. Pat Ryan, an Army veteran from the Hudson Valley, followed on March 19, saying he could not “think of anyone better to carry on the legacy of my friend, the indomitable Nydia Velázquez.” Reynoso also secured the Queens County Democratic Party endorsement in February. (His campaign additionally lists the Latino Victory Fund among its backers; Bushwick Daily could not confirm that endorsement, and the fund’s verifiable 2026 New York House endorsement is in a different district, NY-17.)
The most strategically important of Reynoso’s endorsements may have been the New York Working Families Party, which backed him on February 24 — a notable choice because the WFP is often aligned with the insurgent left that is powering Valdez. “Antonio is deeply trusted by our movement; he got his start organizing by knocking on doors in his community with New York ACORN,” said Jasmine Gripper, the party’s state director. By denying the WFP ballot line to the DSA-backed candidate, the decision deprived Valdez of an asset the socialist left has used to powerful effect in other New York races.
The endorsement was contentious. As City & State reported, the party’s Brooklyn and Queens chapters had voted to recommend endorsing Valdez, only for the statewide WFP body to endorse Reynoso instead — a reversal Valdez supporters called illegitimate, and one both Mamdani and Velázquez were reported to have worked behind the scenes. The episode underscored how blurred the lines have become in a race where the labor-progressive establishment and the democratic-socialist left are both claiming the mantle of the movement that elected Mamdani.
On the money, Reynoso entered the race first but has been outraised. Federal Election Commission filings for his committee show roughly $630,000 raised through March 31 and about $497,000 in cash on hand — the most of any candidate in the field — though first-quarter totals put both Valdez (about $752,000) and Won (about $645,000) ahead of him for the period. A Hell Gate analysis found only about 7.7 percent of Reynoso’s money came from small-dollar donors, with five contributors giving the $7,000 maximum.
Reynoso rolled out a series of policy platforms under a “Real Fights, Real Results” tour. On April 15, in Williamsburg, he unveiled an economic plan built around a wealth tax — a 5 percent annual levy on wealth above $50 million and 10 percent above $250 million, which the campaign estimated would raise roughly $6.8 trillion over 10 years while leaving more than 99.9 percent of Americans unaffected — along with stronger IRS enforcement and an end to the so-called mega-Roth IRA loophole. “Working people in Brooklyn and Queens are paying higher effective tax rates than billionaires who use insider loopholes to hide their fortunes,” he said. On April 29, alongside Make the Road Action, he released an immigration agenda calling for a pathway to citizenship and an end to ICE enforcement. On May 18, at a gallery on Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg, he unveiled a Puerto Rico agenda focused on self-determination and opposition to the island’s fiscal control board, joined by Velázquez, Rosie Perez and the Power 4 Puerto Rico coalition.
Immigration enforcement has been the defining issue of the spring, and Reynoso has put it at the center of his closing message. After ICE agents detained a man outside Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick in early May and video showed NYPD officers helping load him into a car, Reynoso joined Velázquez, state Sen. Julia Salazar, Assembly Member Maritza Davila and Council members Nurse and Gutiérrez at an emergency rally. “New York is a sanctuary city, and that means it is illegal for the NYPD to coordinate with ICE,” Reynoso said. He later pressed Mamdani for a “bright-line rule” telling officers when to disengage from ICE operations: “Every day without it is another day immigrant New Yorkers don’t know if the officer in front of them is there to protect them or to help take their neighbor away.” The episode, Gothamist reported, became a live issue in the race; Reynoso later hosted a Know Your Rights training at Brooklyn Borough Hall that drew about 200 people.
The immigration fight escalated again in mid-May. After U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel barred most ICE arrests at the Manhattan immigration courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza on May 18, and agents were reported to have continued making arrests there anyway, Reynoso unveiled what his campaign called a plan to “dismantle, investigate, and rebuild after ICE,” including a proposed federal Truth and Accountability Commission empowered to refer ICE officers for criminal prosecution. “When Democrats retake the House this fall, we will fight for truth, accountability, and reform,” he said at a May 21 press conference outside the federal building. Velázquez, appearing with him, said, “For years I have said ICE is beyond reform, and Antonio’s plan to dismantle it … is exactly the kind of leadership our city and country needs right now.”
On the organizational side, Reynoso’s campaign said it gathered more than 10,000 petition signatures using only volunteers — far more than required for ballot access — and submitted them in early April. As petitions were filed, the Queens Daily Eagle reported an objection against the Brooklyn portion of Reynoso’s signatures; the outcome of that challenge could not be confirmed, and all four Democrats were reported on the ballot as of mid-May. On May 22, the campaign launched its first television ad, “Scars,” backed by what it described as a six-figure digital and cable buy, recounting Reynoso’s fights against the Brooklyn machine, the PBA and former Mayor Eric Adams. “Took on the machine at 30. Beat ’em,” the narrator says.
Valdez, by contrast, has run the kind of volunteer-driven insurgent campaign that the city’s socialist left has used to win a string of upsets. A union organizer with UAW Local 2110 and a member of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, she represents the 37th Assembly District in Queens. NYC-DSA endorsed her on January 23, committing what it said are more than 13,000 members to volunteer, fundraise and organize for her, and explicitly tying her campaign to Mamdani’s: her bid, the organization said, would be “powered by the same volunteer army that propelled Mayor Zohran Mamdani to victory in 2025.” The group cast her as the race’s anti-establishment choice, noting she is the only candidate in NY-7 who has pledged not to take money from the real estate industry. DSA simultaneously endorsed tenant organizer Samantha Kattan for the 37th Assembly District seat Valdez is vacating.
Valdez’s biography is its own argument. She grew up in Lubbock, Texas — “a very conservative part of an even more conservative state,” she told Jacobin — moved to New York in 2015 to pursue art, and worked low-wage jobs (“at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Trader Joe’s”) before finding her footing in the labor movement. As a program assistant at Columbia University she joined UAW Local 2110, was elected her shop’s unit chair in 2022 representing about 500 coworkers, and took part in the reform movement that elected Shawn Fain UAW president. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America in 2019, energized by the 2018 wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar. “I didn’t come to politics through party machines or electoral ambition,” her campaign says. “I learned how this system really works in low-wage customer service jobs and found my power in a union.”
She arrived in Albany through an upset. In the 2024 Democratic primary for the 37th District — covering Ridgewood, Sunnyside, Maspeth, Woodside and Long Island City — Valdez won about 59 percent of the vote, defeating a party-backed challenger and a scandal-plagued incumbent, and was sworn in in January 2025. In the Assembly she has prime-sponsored bills on tenant protections, unemployment-insurance and gig-worker benefits, and workplace surveillance, and sits on committees including Cities, Social Services and Transportation. This spring she has gone further than Mamdani on housing, calling for a rent freeze and universal rent control and arguing rent stabilization protects too few tenants. “Making sure that as many people as possible are able to stay in their neighborhoods, are able to put down roots and raise families, is really important,” she said.
Valdez has slightly outraised the field. FEC records for her committee show about $752,000 raised in the first quarter and roughly $478,000 in cash on hand; the campaign said the money came from about 11,200 donors. “No dark money group or corporate PAC would ever consider giving me money. And I would never take it,” her platform states.
That platform is among the most explicitly left in the race. Valdez pledges to sponsor “Medicare for All on Day One,” supports a federal jobs guarantee and a four-day workweek, and vows to “fight to dismantle and abolish ICE.” On foreign policy she condemns U.S. military aid to Israel, writing that “Trump sent billions to fund genocide in Palestine.” She frames her candidacy around labor. “For me, the primary purpose of being in Congress would be building and supporting a labor movement that’s ready to fight for things like Medicare for All, for pensions for all, for more time off,” she told Jacobin. Asked why she is running, she told the Queens Daily Eagle: “It just felt that we needed to elect a true working class labor organizer to Congress.”
Her coalition, like Reynoso’s, is substantial — but it runs through the movement left. Mamdani endorsed her at a Bushwick rally in January, appearing alongside Fain and the UAW. NYC-DSA backed her after she cleared more than 90 percent at each stage of its member vote, and in April Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed her: “Claire Valdez is a union organizer who worked minimum-wage fast food jobs and understands firsthand how this economy fails working people,” he said. Ocasio-Cortez had endorsed her 2024 Assembly run. Valdez’s campaign site lists a broader roster — including Rep. Ro Khanna, former Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Cynthia Nixon — that is self-reported and not all independently corroborated.
The split between the two leading candidates is, at bottom, a split between two power centers in New York’s Democratic politics — and the rupture has been unusually public. Mamdani’s endorsement of Valdez infuriated Velázquez, who told the new mayor, in effect, to stay out of her district. In an interview with the New York Times, as reported by Hell Gate, Velázquez questioned Valdez’s readiness: “She’s been in office for 11 months now. I really don’t know her,” she said, and questioned whether Valdez would “know her way around the entirety of the district.” She framed her own choice in personal terms — “For me, this is personal — this is a district that we went to court to fight for,” she said, calling Reynoso “the only one in this race who has actually governed and delivered for this community.” Her sharpest words were for Mamdani. “Honeymoons are short, and people need to pay attention to the work at hand,” she said, warning that “primaries sometimes can be a distraction.” City & State framed the dispute as an “endorsement war” between Velázquez and the DSA.
The friction predated the public sniping. The New York Times reported in January that Velázquez had approached Mamdani about a joint endorsement, that he declined, and that his camp favored Valdez. For a district that Velázquez helped create and represented for more than 30 years, the fight over her successor has exposed the fragility of the alliance between mainstream Democratic progressives and the democratic-socialist left that has defined recent New York campaigns. NY-7 is now the proxy battle.
The contest is not strictly two-way. City Council Member Julie Won of Queens, who represents a District 26 that overlaps significantly with the congressional seat, entered the race in early February and has run as a third lane — an immigrant-rooted candidate with her own base in western Queens. Won is the first woman, first immigrant and first Korean American to serve on the City Council; she won a 15-way primary in 2021 and would be the first Korean American elected to Congress from New York. She immigrated from South Korea at age 8, graduated from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School and spent a decade at IBM before entering politics, and is raising two young children. Her campaign slogan is “a Lifetime of Care.”
Won has built her campaign on her City Council record and on national Asian American and women’s political networks. By her campaign’s accounting, she has directed more than $2 billion to her district, led the OneLIC rezoning that the campaign calls the largest in New York City in 25 years, delivered free internet to NYCHA residents and secured more than $100 million for local schools. She reported raising $640,000 in her first seven weeks — with nearly 90 percent of contributions from people of color and about two-thirds from Asian American donors — and said she refuses corporate PAC and dark-money contributions. Her endorsements include Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey, several members of Congress, the ASPIRE PAC and women’s groups including Vote Mama PAC and Vote Run Lead Action. Her platform leans into a “New Deal for the Digital Age” to retrain workers displaced by artificial intelligence, federal legislation criminalizing nonconsensual “nudify” deepfake tools, and the defense of birthright citizenship. At an emergency rally over Trump’s threats against Iran, Won spoke about her family’s survival of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where she said her great-grandmother was killed and her grandfather was left chronically ill.
A fourth Democrat, public defender Vichal Kumar, launched his campaign with a kickoff in Bushwick on March 3, running on immigrant justice, economic opportunity and what he calls institutional accountability. A former president of the South Asian Bar Association, Kumar has framed his candidacy around restoring faith that government can work for working people.
Where the two front-runners differ most sharply is in their theory of the race. Reynoso is betting that a wall of unions, the borough’s institutional Democrats and Velázquez’s blessing can carry a seasoned local official across the line; Valdez is betting that the same volunteer-and-small-donor machine that elected Mamdani — plus Sanders, the DSA and a narrow early polling lead — can send a rank-and-file organizer to Washington. Won, with the second-largest war chest and a distinct western-Queens, immigrant-and-women’s coalition, is the wild card who could deny either an outright plurality. With 43 percent of voters undecided in the only public poll, the race remained unsettled heading into June.
One earlier caveat now carries less weight: while the Reynoso operation flooded local inboxes with near-weekly announcements and the Valdez campaign sent comparatively little directly, Bushwick Daily has since drawn Valdez’s record and platform from independent reporting and public records, cited throughout. We continue to seek an interview with the Valdez campaign and will update this guide with her responses in her own words.
Here is how to vote. The Democratic primary is Tuesday, June 23, 2026, with polls open 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Early voting runs June 13 through June 21. The deadline to register or update a registration for the primary is June 13, and the deadline to request a mail ballot online or by mail is also June 13 (in person, June 22); a completed mail ballot must be postmarked or returned by June 23. New Yorkers can confirm their registration and find their poll site through the New York City Board of Elections and review the full calendar at NYC Votes. The candidates’ own sites are reynosoforcongress.com, clairevaldezforcongress.com and juliewon.com. The general election is November 3, 2026. Bushwick Daily will continue to update this guide as the race develops, and as we hear directly from each candidate.
