Jeffries and Mamdani are on a New York collision course

The divide over the Democratic Party’s future runs through two New York City primaries on Tuesday — and the widening gap between the man who wants to be House speaker and the mayor who wants to rewrite his party’s playbook.

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is backing the party’s incumbents, including Rep. Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th District and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, less than a year removed from a victory that changed Democratic politics, is trying to beat them. He supports Brad Lander in the 10th District and Darializa Avila Chevalier in the 13th.

The races are high-profile tests for both Jeffries and Mamdani, even as their names do not appear on the ballot.

“It would be absolutely humiliating if [Jeffries] loses two incumbents in his backyard,” a high-ranking House Republican strategist said. “It would highlight how weak and impotent the Washington establishment’s support is among Dem primary voters right now.” 

For Mamdani, the races are a significant test of whether the coalition he built running for mayor holds up when he is not on the ballot. 

“Mamdani accumulated a lot of political capital when he won last year and throughout his first year, where he’s remained pretty popular, which is hard to do in New York City,” said famed Democratic strategist Lis Smith. “So he clearly feels like it’s time to spend it. Some of these bets, I think, will pay off more than others.”

Goldman is at serious risk of losing his seat to Lander, who is well established in city politics. That contest has the throughlines of the Democratic infighting that has roiled intraparty feuds across the country — including worries about big money in campaigns and the divide over Israel’s actions in Gaza even with the broader Jewish community. 

Mamdani’s support for Chevalier — which contains an element of generational change, as she is nearly four decades younger than the 71-year-old Espaillat — appears to be a real risk. 

“He may have thrown his support behind someone who was a little too out there, a little too untested, and by throwing his support behind her so early, he brought a lot of scrutiny to her campaign — and scrutiny that she wasn’t able to handle,” Smith said. 

While neither race is expected to be competitive in the November general election, they are weathervanes for what kind of Democratic Party will be in Washington for the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. 

“People often ask me what I think of the state of the Democratic Party. This slate here today is our answer: [for] the Democratic Party must change,” Mamdani said at a rally last week where Lander and Chevalier were among the Mamdani-supported candidates who appeared.  

But young, far-left voters — key to Mamdani’s winning coalition — were slow to mobilize during early voting, prompting the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America to hold two emergency meetings last week, said Gustavo Gordillo, the group co-chair.

“The early voting data showed that younger voters — voters under 50, voters under 45 — were not turning out to vote in the numbers that we had seen last year,” he told MS NOW of youth vote turnout through Wednesday. “It was nowhere close to where we wanted to be,” he continued, adding that those numbers rose over the weekend and casting youth turnout as “a core part of our strategy.”

Democratic voters have emphasized they want to see a party that fights more, is more nimble and younger, frankly, than the establishment that has tried to resist and counter Trump over the past decade with mixed results. 

While that kind of framing can animate Democratic primaries in reliably blue districts, it carries deep risks in the more moderate parts of the country that make or break national majorities.