You have probably heard the news: The Democratic primary elections in New York City went very well for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, leveraged his popularity and star power to propel three of his best friends to victory over more establishment figures, two of them incumbents. The winners are all but guaranteed to advance to Congress: Brad Ladner—whose ouster of incumbent Rep. Daniel Goldman (D–N.Y.) was a proxy battle over the Israel issue—Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier.
Avila Chevalier, the most overtly radical of the three, is an interesting figure because she represents a stunning triumph for modern campus progressive activism; she will be the first person elected to Congress who comes directly from that world. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) is a democratic socialist and a progressive activist, but she was not a central figure in those movements until well after she graduated from Boston University. Avila Chevalier, on the other hand, was a prominent far-left activist at Columbia University throughout the 2010s and remained involved with the pro-Palestinian campus protests there in 2023 following Israel's attacks on Hamas in Gaza.
