It was the morning after a string of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America scored primary victories across New York City, and Esmeralda Simmons, a Brooklyn lawyer, took stock of the political fallout.
Decades ago, Ms. Simmons helped spearhead lawsuits to allow for the creation of minority voting districts in New York.
Now, after the wins by democratic socialists in gentrifying neighborhoods across the city, including Bedford-Stuyvesant where she lives, Ms. Simmons, who is Black, worried that her work to empower Black and Latino voters to pick who represents them was being erased.
“It was like watching a tsunami approach from the ocean,” said Ms. Simmons, who helped found the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. The D.S.A., she added, seemed to be papering over “the opinions and the self-governance of the citizens in the areas that they are sweeping over.”
The angst speaks to a concern from some longstanding residents in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods where democratic socialism is gaining a foothold that is being driven by a mostly white young movement that supports the Palestinian cause against Israel.
And as traditional Black and Latino power in New York City seems to be eroding, leaders fear that their constituents’ bread-and-butter issues may get overlooked.
Just five years ago, Eric Adams’s victory in a hotly contested Democratic mayoral primary seemed to signal a high-water mark for Black political power. Mr. Adams would become only the city’s second Black mayor; Alvin Bragg was to become the Manhattan district attorney; Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn congressman, was on a path to become the House minority leader.
But by 2025, the political winds had shifted. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the Democratic primary for mayor without the support of a majority of Black voters, once thought to be a requisite in New York. Now, a similar feeling of existential crisis is brewing after Mr. Mamdani helped three like-minded candidates capture House primaries and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America successfully backed several primary challengers in historically Black and Latino neighborhoods.
The tension is not centered on the ethnicity or race of the candidates supported by the D.S.A. — many are Black and Latino. It is more about the group itself: A 2021 national survey of D.S.A. members found that the group was 85 percent white, a decrease from 2013 when 96 percent of members were white. About a third of the group identified as teachers, academics, white-collar workers or tech workers.
The democratic socialists’ success in New York prompted some immediate political soul-searching among veteran Black and Latino elected officials. Jasmine Gripper, the director of the New York Working Families Party, said she spent the morning after the primary talking to leaders like Jumaane Williams, the public advocate and city’s highest-ranking Black elected official, to determine what went wrong and what to do about it.
The war in Gaza, Mr. Williams said in an interview, was of less concern to someone in Harlem, Washington Heights or Bedford-Stuyvesant worried about being evicted. But he acknowledged that the issue did “empower a base of folks for whom this was their No. 1 issue.”
Mr. Williams said that Black and Latino leaders too often stuck to the “the institutional way of doing things,” and overlooked gentrification trends.
The left’s advance also extended to the most basic levels of the city’s Democratic machinery. The Vanguard Independent Democratic Association, one of Brooklyn’s most influential political clubs and a center of Black political power for decades, saw several of its chosen candidates lose their races.
Tiffanie Burt, a millennial who moved to Bed-Stuy from Ohio in 2018 after living in Harlem, is the head of the Vanguard Independent Democratic Association. She said she was devastated and moved to tears by the D.S.A.’s victories.
The next day, she began reaching out to people outside her group to try and build a coalition “rooted in protecting the legacy of Black and Latino voters.”
“When I think about D.S.A., it goes back to: Who are you really helping?” Ms. Burt said. “Do you really care about what’s happening locally?”
Black and Latinos residents make up just over 50 percent of the city’s population and suffer from disproportionately higher rates of poverty and a massive wealth gap compared with white New Yorkers.
Inherent in the divide is the definition of working-class. Left-leaning groups like the Working Families Party describe the working class as teachers and nurses who may be in a union but are struggling to afford living in the city. D.S.A. leaders have said that the working class can include tech workers earning high salaries who are struggling to thrive in the city.
While Black and Latino leaders in New York have typically promoted the importance of public housing or homeownership, Mr. Mamdani pushed for freezing the rent for rent-stabilized apartments. He made a campaign promise to deliver free buses for all; the City Council instead forced an expansion of Fair Fares, a program that provides half-price trips for the working poor.
“I’m not dismissive of free buses,” said David Jones, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member and head of an anti-poverty nonprofit. But expanding Fair Fares, which would include the subway, “is in many ways much more vital to working people.”
Patrick Jenkins, a lobbyist and former aide to the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, said it felt to him as if “nobody’s promoting the Black or Latino agenda.”
Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for Mr. Mamdani, cited the administration’s expansion of 2-K in predominantly minority neighborhoods, a plan to speed up buses and plans to build affordable housing across the city.
“Mayor Mamdani is focused on the cost-of-living crisis that has pushed hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino New Yorkers out of the city over the last decade,” Mr. Edwards said in a statement.
Grace Mausser, the co-chairwoman of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, also contended that pushing socialist policies on housing and transportation, ending the use of U.S. tax dollars to fund foreign wars and funneling that money back into communities are inherently beneficial to Black and Latino New Yorkers — “even if you don’t necessarily say or always front-load the racial aspect.”
Ms. Mausser acknowledged that the districts “we tend to run in” have “political histories that are grounded in powerful racial politics.” The organization is working to increase diversity, she said, noting the growth of the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus.
For Latino politicians who have long been in New York, the results in two congressional primaries have prompted the recent concern. In Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent who became the first formerly undocumented person elected to Congress and then the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist almost 40 years his junior.
And in a district covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens that is sometimes referred to as the “commie corridor,” Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist who had served in the Assembly for one year, defeated Antonio Reynoso, the borough president of Brooklyn who had the backing of the incumbent, Nydia Velázquez, the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress.
In both those races, Mr. Mamdani broke alliances to support insurgent candidates.
Ms. Avila Chevalier, a little-known organizer and doctoral student, performed well in the Manhattan neighborhoods of Inwood, Hamilton Heights and Morningside Heights, which have seen more gentrification than other parts of the district and where Mr. Mamdani did well last year, according to a New York Times analysis. Mr. Espaillat performed well in the part of the district in the Bronx, an area with older voters and majority Hispanic districts.
“The danger for Latino representation comes when there’s a plausible path to victory where you can cut out Latinos and not really worry about actively campaigning for that vote,” said Shaun Abreu, the majority leader of the City Council and an Espaillat ally. That, he added, will “inevitably affect how you govern.”
Ms. Valdez won majority Latino districts by almost 20 percentage points and higher-income areas by 34 percentage points. Mr. Reynoso won majority-Black areas by just over 50 percentage points and lower-income areas such as Cypress Hills.
“The way to beat good organizing is with better organizing,” Mr. Reynoso said in an interview where he credited D.S.A.’s ability to get their supporters to the polls. “The future of Black and brown politics in New York is dependent on how good Black and brown people are at organizing.”
The demographic shifts that fueled the D.S.A.’s rise were years in the making. In Ms. Valdez’s district, the white population increased by more than 9 percentage points from 2014 to 2024, while the Hispanic population declined by 7 percentage points.
In Bedford Stuyvesant, where the democratic socialist Eon Huntley defeated Assemblywoman Stefani Zinerman, the white population jumped to 20 percent in 2024 from 7 percent in 2014. The Black population declined by almost 20 percentage points over the same time period.
Ms. Zinerman received endorsements from Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, and Letitia James, the state attorney general, but they didn’t help.
L. Joy Williams, the head of the New York State NAACP, said the signaling of D.S.A.’s ambition was unmistakable. “The undercurrent is that they’re targeting communities that have historically and primarily been Black and Latino,” she said.
As if to underscore that point, when Mr. Jeffries appeared on television at Ms. Valdez’s victory party, people chanted “You’re next” at the screen.
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