To the casual observer, the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in New York’s Seventh Congressional District to replace retiring 16-term stalwart Nydia Velázquez may look indistinguishable. New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso are both Democrats, and both intend to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fund affordable housing, institute health care for all, and end Israel’s war on Palestine, which they agree is a genocide.
Both candidates have substantial endorsements from powerful figures and organizations. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani backs Valdez, a fellow Democratic Socialists of America member, as do DSA-NYC and Justice Democrats; Rep. Velázquez, the New York Working Families Party, and state Attorney General Letitia James back Reynoso.
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Both candidates can point to actions that show them standing up to institutional injustice. Reynoso supported a bill to successfully and permanently ban federal immigration agents from Rikers Island. Valdez was arrested at immigration court in New York, when she and other electeds sought to inspect the conditions at 26 Federal Plaza, where imprisoned immigrants have been illegally detained in squalid conditions.
But the two have distinctly different ideas about how to build power, the best way to halt fascism, and the role of everyday people in their campaigns and in politics.
For Valdez, the project is not only to win a seat in Congress, but to use her campaign to develop leaders among those helping her get there. That’s the best way to maintain the political engagement and momentum of volunteers who knocked doors for Mamdani, she told the Prospect.
The goal is “to recognize the political potential in every single person,” she said, “not just to capture the excitement but to hold [volunteers] as politically powerful people who can think strategically, who can consider resource allocation, and who can be real organizers in that way.”
That’s how the left will build durable power and beat back the threat of fascism, she said.
Reynoso has a different strategy. He faults “an unimpressive presidency by Biden” and the fact that no one was held accountable for the crimes of Donald Trump’s first presidency. “We didn’t hold people accountable. What we need to do is hold people accountable,” he told the Prospect. “I’m going to be somebody who is really invested in oversight … I won’t let the Democratic Party cower and let the Democratic Party tell us that ‘this is partisan politics.’ No. Accountability is going to be central to my advocacy.”
Asked to respond to criticisms that Democrats are not doing enough now, he said the only thing that’s available at the moment is “making a lot of noise.”
“We don’t have any technical power at every single level of government, the Supreme Court, presidency, Congress, Senate,” he said. “This is not like an ineffectiveness conversation, this is about the reality of government being run entirely in one party. Those are realities that exist.”
The race also puts in opposition two rising progressive forces in New York City politics: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Working Families Party (WFP). Along with its coalition of multiple organizations, WFP endorsed Reynoso, despite a vote by its Brooklyn and Queens chapters to recommend endorsing Valdez. According to an explainer from City & State, the two chapters were outvoted by WFP’s nonprofit affiliates, who make up the majority of the WFP coalition. New York City has about 3,000 individual dues-paying members versus 175,000 affiliate members.
Some of the unions that endorsed Reynoso are simply baked into the WFP coalition, including the state AFL-CIO, both major Service Employees International Union locals in the city, the state nurses association, and many more, said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats.
“Longer-standing institutions feel threatened by the power and ascension of NYC-DSA and Zohran, and Claire,” he said. They’re intimidated by the pledges they promise to deliver for working families and “the overwhelming popularity they have.”
In May, an Emerson poll found that 23 percent of Democratic primary voters supported Valdez and 21 percent supported Reynoso. At the time, 43 percent of voters were undecided.
NY-07 IS A 22-SQUARE-MILE SECTION of New York City that covers neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, and includes much of what political analyst Michael Lange last year referred to during Mamdani’s campaign as the “Commie Corridor,” where a “young and hungry leftist base” is “reshaping politics in New York City.” Census data shows that the vast majority of the district’s residents are under 64 years old; 40 percent are white, and 33 percent are Hispanic. Nearly 20 percent live below the poverty line. Mamdani won 67.3 percent of the vote in NY-07 last November, the highest rate of any congressional district in the city.
Velázquez has represented this part of New York City since 1993. She is the first Puerto Rican woman to serve in Congress, and shortly after Mamdani’s election she announced that 2026 would be her last year in office. Two months later, Velázquez formally endorsed Reynoso in an interview with The New York Times while scolding Mamdani for endorsing Valdez. He shouldn’t involve himself in city elections, she said, because doing so could divide his base.
But organizations backing Valdez say that dealing with that division has been a long time coming, in part because DSA and Justice Democrats have different ideas about how to build power than WFP.
“The reason DSA and the mayor and UAW are excited about Claire is because she comes out of movement politics and union organizing and puts not only those values but that practice ahead of traditional politics that is all about relationships and who does favors for who,” said Grace Mausser, co-chair of NYC-DSA. “Dealmaking can only get you so far. You really need a strong outside movement to change macro-political conditions.”
The two candidates are also financing their campaigns from distinctly different sources. Since April 1, Valdez has raised $564,000 from more than 22,000 individual donors. She is also a beneficiary of some of the $2 million that pro-Palestine super PAC American Priorities pledged to spend on her and two other progressive congressional candidates in the state, Darializa Avila Chevalier, running for NY-13, and former New York City comptroller Brad Lander (NY-10), both of whom are facing incumbent Democrats and both of whom Mamdani also endorsed. American Priorities formed early this year to act as a counter to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as the Prospect reported.
Leaders We Deserve, the youth-oriented PAC run by David Hogg, and Justice Democrats have each spent $175,000 for Valdez in the race, and a separate PAC, New Yorkers for Lower Costs, which has some linkages to Mamdani donors, has spent $250,000.
Reynoso has raised $253,000 for the period, including from individuals who have also donated to AIPAC. Last Friday, Real Fight NYC, a super PAC that had filed with the Federal Election Commission just two days before, made a $250,000 ad buy attacking Valdez. The spending has since risen to $650,000. Because of the timing of the filing, the donors behind the new PAC won’t be known until after the election, though Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim reported that the money comes primarily from labor unions including the American Federation of Teachers, whose affiliate in New York has endorsed Reynoso. (The Reynoso campaign is asking for an apology from Valdez for claiming the PAC was a shell for AIPAC donors.)
Reynoso has benefited from support from several other union PACs, including SEIU 32BJ’s United American Dream Fund ($67,000) and Laborers Building a Better New York ($48,885), as well as another undisclosed PAC, Luchando Por Nueva York ($174,000).
Though Reynoso also takes super PAC funds, he wrote in an earlier joint statement with a third candidate, New York City Democratic Councilmember Julie Won, that Valdez’s “hypocrisy is staggering” because she is doing the same. He also told the Prospect that Valdez was “beholden to Zohran” and took too long to criticize federal immigration agents who arrested a man outside Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in May.
“I’m not beholden to anyone. I stood up right away. I didn’t wait for Zohran to make a statement,” he said in an interview. “My opponent could say the same things I’m saying but when it’s time to take action, it’s a different story.”
Those remarks reveal that Reynoso “believes that people in Congress are lone actors and not part of a collective movement,” said Mausser, who added that it is sexist to imagine Valdez would only do what Mamdani told her to do.
These disagreements make for an “uncomfortable” fight in NY-07, said New York WFP Executive Director Jasmine Gripper. She told the Prospect that the group endorsed Reynoso because it wants to send “our best champions, our proven fighters” and had a different view of the race than those who said it had grown ugly.
“The fact there’s not a right-wing candidate means we can have this healthy democracy where we can just have a fight on the left without feeling like we’re making room for a more conservative person to come in,” she added. “It’s a progressive left district and it’s going to be that no matter what. We all agreed to have a clean fight as much as possible and run on the issues and the candidate’s records. And that’s what we’re all doing.”
Early voting has been under way in the race since June 13 and will run until June 21. Election Day is Tuesday, June 23.
David Dayen contributed reporting.
