Notes From a Scribe
On the night of June 23, Adriano Espaillat conceded a primary he was supposed to win. He had five terms in the House, the gavel of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the endorsement of the Democratic leader. He had been the first Dominican American elected to Congress. The woman who beat him, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is thirty-two and had never held office. She organized in her neighborhood. That was most of her resume.
She was not alone. In a Manhattan and Brooklyn seat, Brad Lander, the former city comptroller, beat the two-term incumbent Dan Goldman. In a Brooklyn and Queens district that Nydia Velazquez is leaving, Claire Valdez won outright over the successor Velazquez had hand-picked. Three races, two sitting members of Congress gone, and a third seat the establishment could not hold. Zohran Mamdani had endorsed all three of the winners. The Democratic Socialists of America had organized for two of them. Five days earlier, Bernie Sanders had stood on the stage at the Kings Theatre with their hands raised over their heads.
Washington read the night fast. Hakeem Jeffries, who had campaigned for the people who lost, told reporters that he and Mamdani had “agreed to strongly disagree,” and reminded everyone that the House Democratic caucus has 215 members and that a few primaries in a single state would not change who they are.
The comedian Neal Brennan, a liberal who makes his living needling his own side, has a bit about this reflex. A Republican walks into a room of Republicans, says he is a Republican, and they wave him in. A liberal walks into a room of liberals, says he is a liberal, and the room says, “We’ll see.” There is never quite enough liberal in a liberal to clear the bar. He told it as a joke about the left scolding the left. Watch the leadership greet three winners with a shrug and a head count, and you are watching the same audit, run from the top, on the people who just proved the math works.
Democratic socialism is not the curse the people who deploy the word need it to be. Avila Chevalier and Valdez ran as democratic socialists. They did not run as a third party and they did not play spoiler. They ran in Democratic primaries and they won them. There was a time, and I am old enough to remember it, when a left with any real seat at the table was treated as a fantasy, something for Europe or for a campus quad, never for a ballot that sends a person to Congress. That fantasy is now the mayor of the largest city in the country and three nominees for the House. The thing everyone agreed was impossible came down to a turnout operation and a plain message about rent and groceries and the price of seeing a doctor. There is nothing in that to be afraid of, unless you have spent a career betting it could not happen.
It would be easy, and wrong, to lay the New York results over every district like a stencil. Avila Chevalier and Valdez won safe blue seats where November is a formality. I live in Ventura County, California, where I am a brown minority among mostly white, affluent, conservative neighbors. Some of them are the people you find lined along the freeway overpass waving flags for the current administration, running oversized flags from the beds of their V8 trucks, rolling coal on the people demonstrating peacefully in the one quad our community sets aside for it. This is not a safe blue seat. Julia Brownley has held the twenty-sixth for seven terms and never by the kind of margin that makes a seat safe. Jacqui Irwin, who won our primary in June, faces a Republican who can take the seat if the night goes badly. What works in upper Manhattan does not automatically work here, and I am not pretending it does. The part that travels is that people come out to vote for something specific, and they stay home when the offer is mostly a reassurance about what a candidate is not.
This November is not a normal midterm, and the people I am writing know it better than I do. A year and a half into this administration, the news out of California alone, masked agents, detention beds, citizens stopped and asked to prove they belong, is not an argument about norms in a seminar. Control of the House runs through a few dozen seats, and ours is one of the ones genuinely in play. That is precisely the moment my party reaches for its oldest habit. Democrats have earned the joke told at their expense, the one about bringing an essay to a knife fight, about treating their own most motivated voters as an embarrassment to be handled until the numbers improve. Handed a movement that had just shown it can win, the reflex in Washington was to explain why it did not count. In a year like this one, that reflex is how you lose a seat you could have held.
t from June is a permission slip. It says the move everyone swore would cost you everything can be made in daylight, with your name on it, and survive.
Our state and federal representatives will spend the next four months being told that the energy on their own side is a liability to be managed. It is the only asset in the room that money cannot buy.
Democrats already own the reputation for flinching the moment it finally has the votes. June proved it could be retired. Espaillat had five terms, a committee gavel, and the leader’s blessing. Chevalier had a neighborhood and a sentence she could say without first checking the room. Before November, our representatives must decide which of the two they would rather stand next to.
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