Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent part of the weekend of June 20 working the dance floors of Bushwick and Ridgewood, turning nightclub stages into campaign stops for Assemblymember Claire Valdez and a slate of other candidates days before the June 23 Democratic primary. The mayor’s club circuit was first reported by Hell Gate in its Morning Spew newsletter.
The stops included Xanadu, where Mamdani stunned a Bushwig host, and Paragon, where he gave a short speech, along with other venues across the two neighborhoods. Valdez is the Democratic Socialists of America candidate in New York’s 7th Congressional District, the seat retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez is leaving open, and Mamdani has made her one of his marquee endorsements this cycle.
In an appearance alongside Valdez, NY-13 candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, and NY-10 candidate Brad Lander, the mayor did a somewhat faithful, if Australian-accented, impression of Iain Stirling, the Scottish narrator of “Love Island.” The accent, per Hell Gate, was the part that didn’t land.
The club circuit is part of a broader fight over who leads the New York left. Valdez’s NY-7 race has become the cycle’s clearest proxy war between the DSA, which put Mamdani in City Hall, and the Working Families Party, which is backing Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the same seat. Both groups are collaborating on other races this primary, but in NY-7 they are directly opposed, and the outcome is widely read as a test of whose endorsement and ground game carries more weight.
Mamdani kept up the pace beyond the clubs. He voted early at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his new polling place now that he lives at Gracie Mansion, then headed to Harlem to stump for Avila Chevalier at a National Action Network forum, where she is trying to unseat five-term Representative Adriano Espaillat. There, Espaillat accused his opponent and her supporters of driving up rents. “We need to be careful of fair weather friends that come around and say that the rent is too high, but they’re the ones that are driving up the rent,” Espaillat said. “They are the gentrifiers!”
The mayor framed his endorsements as a package deal. “I do wish that every New Yorker had the chance to vote for Darializa Avila Chevalier, for Claire Valdez, for Brad Lander,” he said, calling the three “incredible partners in the fight to make the country’s most expensive city into one that’s affordable.”
Mamdani is betting his coalition, the young transplants who knocked doors for him last year, can be reached where they already are on a Saturday night.
Featured image: Claire Valdez for Congress (video by Anthony DiMieri and Ted Maniatakos)
