With Americans in turmoil amid the police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 elections, many politically attuned millennials took to their screens to vent their frustration.
And with most everyone hunkered down during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a large, captive audience ready to engage — the more provocative the post, the better.
Now, several years later, some of those same millennials are running for office to challenge the political establishment they had been attacking online. And their posts, forever archived on the internet, are being used against them, from Graham Platner in Maine to Mallory McMorrow in Michigan.
That dynamic is now at play in New York, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is facing scrutiny for numerous social media posts that she has since deleted.
From 2018 through 2022, Ms. Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Representative Adriano Espaillat, unleashed an extraordinary torrent of social media posts, often using profane and dismissive language as she railed against establishment Democrats, questioned the origins of the pandemic and criticized interracial relationships on Twitter, now known as X.
The June 23 Democratic primary in an Upper Manhattan and Bronx district has become one of the most contentious races in New York City this year, and may test just how much voters care about provocative thoughts expressed in a couple of hundred characters, if they care at all.
The race encapsulates the challenges of running for office in the social media era, particularly for young and passionate candidates across the country who have lost trust in institutions and in the two major political parties. By communicating their thoughts and feelings for years, they created a written record they must now answer for.
“It’s definitely a double-edged sword,” said Jon Paul Lupo, a consultant who advises Democratic candidates in New York and is not involved in the congressional race.
“The energy in the party now is around fresh faces and outsiders. That can provide a huge tactical advantage to a campaign because they don’t have the baggage of a lifetime of controversial votes and endorsements that can be used against them,” Mr. Lupo added. “But as the digital generation comes of age, the typical baggage is being replaced by a lifetime of tweets and TikToks that are proving to be their own problem, as we’re seeing in this race.”
Mr. Espaillat, 71, and his allies are seeking to bury Ms. Avila Chevalier, 32, in her own words, and to use them to argue that she lacks the experience and judgment necessary to serve in Congress.
Outside groups supporting both candidates have pledged to spend millions of dollars on the airwaves. One super PAC backing Mr. Espaillat plans to shell out seven figures for an advertisement amplifying a post by Ms. Avila Chevalier calling veterans “war criminals,” according to a representative for the group, Progressive Unity Fund. So far it has spent just shy of $500,000, which includes buying airtime for an ad during Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals on Saturday night.
Two groups backing Ms. Avila Chevalier — American Priorities and Justice Democrats — have promised to spend more than $1.2 million collectively on advertising for her.
Charlie King, a political consultant working for a super PAC supporting Mr. Espaillat, said his group, United for Progress, planned to spend $250,000 on an ad highlighting one post from 2021 in which Ms. Avila Chevalier used crude language to criticize Kamala Harris, then the vice president.
In the post, which was in response to Ms. Harris’s suggestion that migrants not try to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, Ms. Avila Chevalier wrote: “I have no nuance to add. [Expletive] Kamala Harris.”
She also called Joe Biden a “rapist” in April 2020, as he was on his way to clinching the Democratic nomination for the presidency, though she recently said she voted for him.
“If they were innocuous, why did she erase them?” Mr. King said of the posts, adding, “It’s not the politics of the past if you’re tearing down the person who is running against Trump, who lost to Trump, while we’re actually living in the politics of Trump present.”
In other posts, Ms. Avila Chevalier, who is Afro-Latina, suggested white people should not be in interracial relationships and disparaged their methods of personal hygiene in response to a post from a white Republican governor saying corn husks might be used instead of toilet paper, which was in short supply at the start of the pandemic.
Replying to a white woman offering a hotline number in response to her post lamenting long voting lines in 2020, she wrote, “Listen Karen, instead of worrying about my vote, go collect the 53% of your peers that got us in this mess to begin with.”
She also amplified an assertion that the coronavirus originated in France, not the Wuhan province of China, and wrote in 2022 that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States had “been bullying Russia” since the Cold War ended. And she mocked Israeli soldiers who cut their hair to create wigs for cancer patients in Gaza.
Ms. Avila Chevalier said in an interview that she deleted her Twitter account when Elon Musk was preparing to buy the company, a sale that was finalized in October 2022; her campaign has a new account on X. She said she has evolved, and that she believes voters are more interested in her opponent’s congressional record than in the angsty posts of a 20-something-year-old.
“I am actually very sad that much of the way I spoke in that time has really sowed some division here,” she said.
“As anyone knows, in your 20s you go through a period of very rapid growth, and I am someone who has always sought to center my values and values around dignity and around justice and around accountability in my fight for my community,” she added. “I regret the way those values were portrayed on Twitter. I would obviously express them very differently today.”
Vetting social media histories has now become a standard checklist item for political campaigns, internally and for opponents.
“It’s the first thing we look for: tweets, Facebook, all their social media,” said Chris Coffey, who ran the 2021 New York City mayoral campaign of Andrew Yang. “You’re trying to figure out, who is this person you’re running against?”
Reflecting on the Upper Manhattan race, which he is not working on, he said, “If somebody can get elected with tweets like these that are so over the top they’re beyond the pale, then it shows nothing matters anymore. Where you are on the left-right spectrum is the only thing that matters.”
In New York last year, Mr. Mamdani tested a more mild version of that theory. He was forced to defend social media posts that included disparaging remarks about former President Barack Obama and the New York Police Department. He later apologized in interviews, including with Fox News.
But Mr. Mamdani was more widely known than Ms. Avila Chevalier when the posts surfaced as a campaign issue in the mayoral race. There were also fewer of them, making it more difficult for his opponents to weaponize them.
In the interview, Ms. Avila Chevalier did not denounce any individual messages she had written. She said she voted for Ms. Harris for president in 2024, despite concerns about her candidacy. And she rued that so much focus was being directed to her social media posts rather than the issues core to her campaign: affordable housing, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and getting the United States out of funding foreign wars.
Mr. Espaillat’s spokesman, Reginald Johnson, explained the reasoning behind the campaign’s focus on Ms. Avila Chevalier’s social media posts. “When you run for office, you have to own your record,” he said. “Congressman Espaillat is proud of his and stands by it.”
Ms. Avila Chevalier, who raised more funds than Mr. Espaillat during the first quarter of this year, contends that he is out of touch with the needs of the diverse district. She has criticized him for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations over the years from America’s pro-Israel lobby.
In a televised debate Friday night, Ms. Avila Chevalier said she did not think the United States should continue to send weapons and military funding to Israel. Mr. Espaillat criticized Israel’s expansion of its settlements and called for a two-state solution.
Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed and is canvassing for Ms. Avila Chevalier, acknowledged that social media was “on everyone’s mind more now” when the organization screens potential candidates.
“Obviously it’s come up repeatedly this year; to some degree that’s a reflection of people who grew up online coming into power — a generational phenomenon,” Mr. Gordillo said.
The organization, which clinched its biggest political win with Mr. Mamdani’s victory last year, asks would-be candidates to review their social media, “and we do the same,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Mamdani has said he did not know about Ms. Avila Chevalier’s social media history before endorsing her, but added that “her views have evolved” and that her campaign “is reflective of what she’s going to be fighting for.”
And Ms. Avila Chevalier’s social media posts typically do not arise when New Yorkers in the district interact with canvassers, according to people who have knocked on doors for her and for Mr. Espaillat.
Brandon Mancilla, director of a regional branch of the United Auto Workers, which is backing Ms. Avila Chevalier, said voters were focused on affordability, America’s involvement in foreign wars and Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement.
“I don’t really hear much about the tweets, to be honest with you,” Mr. Mancilla said.
“I think people are very understanding of the fact that social media is a snapshot of your thinking at one given moment in time,” he added. “I don’t think it represents you forever.”
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