The night started with a pulsing unce unce and a roaring “LET’S GOOOO!”
Claire Valdez, who was running for Congress, took the mic behind a D.J. booth. She looked out on a packed dance floor and interrupted the music with a plea. Tell your friends. Tell your co-workers. Even your ex. Go and vote.
Later into the night, she was on to a different spot, an astrology themed bar named Mood Ring. She stood outside with two young women who were in line at a food truck with $4.50 tacos. They made small talk about taxing the rich.
And then, she walked with Mayor Zohran Mamdani through the tree-lined backyard of Nowadays, where techno lovers flock for marathon dance sprees.
“Zohran’s Mar-a-Lago,” Ms. Valdez, 36, said in a short video of her club tour, referring to President Trump’s private club. She shared the video on X.
The late-night jaunt illustrated what a growing number of politicians in New York City and beyond are embracing in their endeavor to capture young voters: Even if Gen Z is drinking less, they will still be out somewhere on a Saturday night.
And for those eager to show they will meet voters where they are — from a Florida state representative running for mayor of Orlando to a Texas Senate candidate — that has sometimes meant club crashing, bar crawls or nocturnal side quests.
It was certainly the case for Ms. Valdez, a first-term democratic socialist assemblywoman, who secured the Democratic nomination for an open congressional seat on Tuesday, prevailing over a better-known opponent who carried the backing of the district’s outgoing representative.
Three days earlier, she had put in time on the after-dark campaign trail.
The swath of Brooklyn and Queens that Ms. Valdez is seeking to represent is home to some of the country’s youngest and most progressive voters, the type up long past dusk during a warm summer weekend.
It’s not clear whether it pays off at the polls. Ms. Valdez suggested that her late nights must have helped, if only a little.
“Statistically speaking,” she said in her club tour video during the final weekend before Primary Day, “at least one person went from the Nowadays 24-hour party straight to the early voting booth.”
The same genre of 1 a.m. canvassing was a hallmark in the late stages of Mr. Mamdani’s campaign. The 34-year-old mayor swung by Elsewhere, a Bushwick utopia for young ravers, and Damballa, a listening bar on the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant that spins R&B, hip-hop and Afrobeats to stylish crowds in their 20s and 30s.
Three months after Mr. Mamdani took his campaign to the club, James Talarico, a Texas State representative, showed up at a spacious nightclub in San Marcos, Texas, that has hosted Waka Flocka Flame and the D.J.s Diplo and Steve Aoki.
The atmosphere on those nights was far different — Mr. Talarico came for a daytime town hall — but this event was clearly targeted to the same demographic.
A comment on the Instagram page for the venue, The Marc, asked: “Are students allowed to bring our backpacks? Since some of us might be coming straight from class, just wondering!”
And during the town hall, a state representative pointed out that when Mr. Talarico first won election in 2018, he took office as Texas’s youngest state legislator at the time. He leaned on that bio, too.
“I was told the race was unwinnable,” said Mr. Talarico, 37, who won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate weeks later. “I was told I was too young.”
It hasn’t always been a winning playbook.
Saikat Chakrabarti, 40, the former chief of staff for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, was looking to occupy the San Francisco congressional seat being vacated by Nancy Pelosi. One night last month, he filled a nightclub in the city’s popular SoMa neighborhood with young progressives and the 34-year-old Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
He failed to advance to the general election, finishing third in this month’s primary.
The recent club appearances by politicians came amid a midterm election cycle, which young voters, like most voters, traditionally sit out. Many young voters have expressed dissatisfaction with both parties and are ever more likely to identify as independent, polling shows.
But politicking where you party has not been universally welcomed.
Some find the play for young voters to be cringe worthy. Others lament the days when the dance floor was for dancing, dropping hints to people they like, doing questionable things — really anything but hyping up a democratic socialist.
“N.Y.C. nightlife used to be cool,” Vickie Paladino, a Republican city councilwoman from Queens known for her incendiary online posts, wrote on social media in response to Ms. Valdez, decrying the “commie dorks” who ruined it.
Ms. Paladino reminisced about two titans of the Manhattan club scene.
“This crap never would’ve happened at Tunnel or Studio 54,” she said.
Even before that golden age of New York City nightlife, at least one high-profile campaign turned to a nighttime epicenter — creating what was known as “America’s first political nightclub.”
The Perona Room at El Morocco, the fabled exclusive club on Second Avenue, was reimagined as what sponsors branded the “Discotheque for L.B.J.” when Lyndon B. Johnson was running for president in 1964.
In the final month of the campaign, his supporters packed a tiny dance floor doing the twist while music blared from a record player. The suggested entry fee? A $5 contribution to the Johnson campaign fund, according to a New York Times dispatch.
Today, the pulse of late-night New York has shifted toward Brooklyn. Nowhere encapsulates that more than the Seventh District, home to cryptic sounding mononymous venues like Paragon and Purgatory and the nondescript warehouse where Charli XCX launched her Brat Summer two years ago.
Even suit-and-tie forums have taken note.
“Bushwick is home to a thriving nightlife scene,” Courtney Gross, an investigative reporter for Spectrum News NY1, said at a candidate debate this month. “When was the last time you went to a club or an EDM concert in the district?”
Antonio Reynoso, 43, the Brooklyn borough president who was defeated in the Seventh District primary last week, took the first stab, looking both amused and bewildered. “I have two boys,” he said. “I have never been to an EDM party in my life.”
Then his rival, Ms. Valdez, conceded: “I think it’s been — I think it’s been too long.”
Seventeen nights later, she made her amends in the Nowadays backyard.
The post What’s the Hottest Spot in New York for Campaigning? The Club. appeared first on New York Times.
