All three of Mayor Mamdani’s endorsed House candidates won their races tonight — two of them ousting longtime incumbents to win.
Several days ago, news spread of a woman who was caught on camera during the New York Knicks victory parade: brazenly seizing a Knicks-themed trash can off the city street, upending its full contents onto the ground in full sight of pedestrians, and marching away with it as a souvenir. We discovered earlier today that she is named Angie Baez, and was — up until that moment at least — a JPMorganChase executive director of DEI with an activist resume a mile long, likely pulling down north of $300,000 per year given her level of seniority. In that one brief moment, my blood began to boil with something akin to the unfiltered class resentment of a staunch Zohran Mamdani supporter.
I mention this because I’m pretty certain this woman was a staunch Mamdani supporter as well. And in fact, it’s staunch Mamdani supporters who live (and largely vote) in New York City, and they feel differently than I do. So several hundred thousand of them fanned out across the city tonight — think of it as an entire social movement of Angie Baezes — and voted to send New York’s congressional delegation careening well past the mere “left” and into outright insanity. For the proprietor of the Carnival of Fools, that means that business is good tonight — these remain boom times for those whose job it is to sift America’s politics for lunatics, like a ’49er panning for gold.
For those of you who voted in New York City today, though? Oh, you’re gonna get it come next January, good and hard. In what can only be characterized as a flex of Zohran Mamdani’s popularity among NYC Democratic base voters, all three of his endorsed House candidates won their races tonight — two of them ousting longtime incumbents to win.
To dispense with the sad news first: Alas, there will be no Kennedy resurgence in the Democratic Party, at least not this year. Jack Kennedy Schlossberg — he insisted it be printed that way on the ballot — was predictably dismissed by the absurdly rich voters of Manhattan’s twelfth district, who put down their monocles and cocktail glasses for a moment to vote for Micah Lasher. (Lasher’s biggest qualification, near as I can tell, is having at least once had a job.)
This, of course, means that Republicans are stuck with the only remaining Kennedy in any proximity to federal power. That unfortunately also means that by the laws of comic transference, the entire Kennedy legacy is our problem now, not theirs. (I can’t answer for RFK’s vaccine policy; I’m willing to defend the whale head.) But Schlossberg has been retired, back to whatever schloss his trust fund pays for him to live in. Fare thee well, Simple Jack: You might have been a legendary D.C. disaster, but we’ll probably never know.
Veteran Democrat Dan Goldman is gone in New York’s tenth district, replaced in his congressional seat by pliable stooge Brad Lander. (Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, last seen clicking “thumbs up” on various pro-10/7 posts, pointedly declined to endorse Lander this morning, despite naming Mamdani’s other big-ticket endorsees.) Meanwhile, Democratic Socialists of America candidate Claire Valdez had little problem dispatching Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in New York’s open seventh district, despite having little in the way of New York credentials or experience. (What she had was the power of Mamdani’s endorsement.)
But in the best news of the night, the resplendently named Darializa Avila Chevalier has shocked the city by narrowly knocking off powerful veteran lawmaker (and head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus) Adriano Espaillat. She speaks smoothly and presents well, which means she will immediately take a star seat next January as the single craziest member of Congress, a progressive maniac and prison abolitionist who authentically believes murderers should not be behind bars (her logic, apparently, is that murder doesn’t exist in her Democratic Socialist Demolition Man future).
She also insists that Hamas Did Nothing Wrong, and she is near-religious on this particular political prong with a remarkable DSA-inflected spin about the problem in Gaza: It’s those darn capitalists’ fault. Here, watch this debate clip of Chevalier calling the situation in the West Bank “a system of apartheid” in one breath . . . then comparing it with the American housing market:
I saw so many connections between what was happening to Palestinians there in Palestine and what was happening to so many communities across the U.S., particularly black and Latino communities, who have been priced out and pushed out of our homes. When we talk about displacement in the West Bank and Gaza, it is a very similar — visually similar — situation, where people who have been in a place for generations are being displaced because of corporate interests.
Does that line of rhetoric make sense to anyone? Clearly it does, because dear young Darializa is now headed to Washington, D.C. I pity New York voters and sane Democrats alike, but a man’s got to put food on the table, and New York City just singlehandedly restocked the Carnival of Fools tonight.