Populist Democrats, trying to pull their struggling party toward a left-wing economic platform, are already waging high-profile campaigns in swing states from Maine to the Midwest.
Now, the anti-establishment faction is taking aim at a Republican-held House seat in one of the reddest corners of New York City.
Allison Ziogas, a first-time candidate, will formally kick off a campaign for the seat on Tuesday, leaning on her biography as a union electrician in a long-shot bid to win back voters who have abandoned her party in droves.
To help shape that message, she has tapped Morris Katz, the strategist behind several of Democrats’ most-watched progressive populists, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, and Graham Platner, a Senate candidate in Maine.
In an interview, Ms. Ziogas framed her view of politics as a battle not primarily between Republicans and Democrats, but between workers and the nation’s wealthiest citizens. And she actively steered the conversation away from President Trump and other cultural issues and toward economic ones.
“It’s not surprising that working people have abandoned the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has abandoned working people,” she said, citing statistics showing that New York’s 11th District has among the highest concentration of union households in the nation.
Democrats have previously managed to win the district, which includes Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn and is far more suburban than most of the city, most recently during the 2018 midterm elections. But it quickly flipped back, and the incumbent, Nicole Malliotakis, the city’s only Republican representative in Congress, has easily won re-election.
This year is likely to be an uphill climb for Democrats, too, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court this month cut off a challenge by party lawyers who had hoped to redraw the district to be more politically favorable. Political oddsmakers do not consider it a top-tier race.
As in other parts of the country, Democrats trying to beat those odds in the district have advanced divergent strategies to flip Republican-friendly turf.
Past nominees have tacked toward the political center. Michael DeCillis, a former police officer who is running against Ms. Ziogas in the Democratic primary in June, has taken more combative stances against Mr. Trump. He has called the president a “racist, fascist felon” and declared that “ICE is terrorizing our communities and murdering our citizens.”
Mr. Katz argued that Democrats had struggled in places like Staten Island — home to tens of thousands of unionized policemen, nurses, sanitation workers and teachers — because they had “become inept at talking to working people.”
“Allison is going to run a campaign that is going to be a lot harder to place on an ideological graph,” he said in an interview. Instead, he said, she would be speaking about “the reality that billionaires and corrupt politicians” were using the political system to put their own interests above those of working people.
Ms. Ziogas, 42, worked as a labor organizer before she joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. She said she worked on repairs after Hurricane Sandy, on the construction of Hudson Yards in Manhattan and at ground zero. (The union was expected to endorse her campaign on Tuesday.)
In 2020, she became the head of labor relations for Orsted, the Danish energy giant building wind farms and other renewable energy projects on the East Coast.
In an interview, the candidate framed her work for the company as a matter of ensuring good-paying union jobs and “energy independence,” she said, not fighting climate change.
She was critical of Mr. Trump’s economic agenda and his military campaign in Iran. She called his signature legislative bill — which cut health, nutrition, education and clean-energy programs to expand tax cuts and fund other priorities — “deeply disturbing.”
She called Ms. Malliotakis’s record on labor issues “shameful.”
But Ms. Ziogas repeatedly declined to say if she agreed with Mr. DeCillis’s characterizations of Mr. Trump as a fascist or a racist.
“I think it matters less what I think of this guy,” she said.
Ms. Ziogas also said that she had “a lot of respect” for Mr. Mamdani’s focus on affordability and that she supported his proposals to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.
But she was critical of his threat to raise property taxes, which would hit her district hard, and she put distance between herself and Mr. Mamdani, who is unpopular on Staten Island. (He has not waded into the race.)
“Right now, it still feels like Staten Island is being left behind by City Hall,” she said.
Asked for whom she had voted in the mayoral election last year, Ms. Ziogas demurred: “What I do in that booth is between me and God.”
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
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