Primary Day Results

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Well, if the question was how much Mayor Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America showed their political muscle in the New York primary, the answer we now know is a lot. The three candidates Mamdani endorsed all won. You probably heard that much by now, but listen to this, Claire Valdez and the race to succeed Nidia Velazquez in Congress won by 20 points, including by 10 points in Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn borough president, Antonio Reynoso from the numbers I saw. Nobody predicted that. Darieliza Avila Chevalier beat incumbent Adriano Espeyat in Upper Manhattan and the nearby Bronx. Hardly anyone ever heard of her a year ago. That one is being compared to AOCs against Queen's power broker Joe Crowley who remembers him anymore, but he was high up there in the Democratic hierarchy in Congress.
That was back in 2018
DSA candidates, also a little below the radar, but I think really important in New York, DSA candidates won seven of the eight New York State assembly seats they campaigned for. That should increase the DSA head count in the assembly from nine to 14 is the number I saw. We've invited some congressional winners to come by briefly this morning. We'll see if they're awake. I think we have at least one confirmed with us. First, our own Brigid Bergin, WNYC senior political correspondent, and Michael Lange, a New York City-based writer, researcher, strategist, and political organizer who, if you know his work, he does New York City political analysis, including electoral analysis, literally block by block. And he had a piece on a sub-stack the other day that predicted the outcome block by block. I know Michael will be transparent and humble about things he got right and things he got wrong. So, hey, Brigid and Michael, welcome back to WNYC.

**Brigid Bergin** (2:17)
Good morning, Brian. Great to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:20)
Good morning, Brigid.

**Michael Lange** (2:20)
Great to hear from you.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:23)
So, Brigid, just first a little color from you, because you were out reporting last night. Where were you? What was it looking like there as the results came in?

**Brigid Bergin** (2:33)
Sure. I was in Bushwick at the Victory Party for Claire Valdez, where I will note that Mayor Mamdani name-checked Michael Lange for all the great work he does looking at election turnout. Wait, wait, wait.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:48)
We have that clip. Let's just play that clip and then we will pick it up from there. Here we go.

**Zohran Mamdani** (2:54)
A year ago, it was not the end of a political movement. It was the beginning.
And I want to thank you, because in this room, I see those who believed, no matter what tweet they read from Michael Lange.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:17)
No matter what they read from Michael Lange. Okay, Michael, you get the right of first response to that one.

**Michael Lange** (3:24)
Pretty surreal. I mean, again, as someone who has had the good fortune of knowing Zohran Mamdani and Claire Valdez for many years predating this, to kind of see this all unfold is pretty remarkable, but not like terribly surprising as well. So no, that was funny. And I mean, again, Claire, I thought she'd eke it out the whole time and she won by 20 points. I mean, just utter destruction. She was getting Mamdani-esque margins against not Andrew Cuomo, but Antonio Reynoso in places like Bushwick and Ridgewood. I mean, again, I think there was a lot of optimism about DSA winning most or a very good percentage of these races, but just the margins at which they were able to do so.
Even the DSA candidates that Mamdani did not endorse, won in landslides over incumbents who had represented some of these districts for a long time.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:23)
Those were assembly races?

**Michael Lange** (4:26)
Yeah, it wasn't just like 10,000 feet Mamdani versus Cuomo, Cuomo not having like building a base or turning out voters in the district. I think it's incredible to be able to win at the macro scale, but when you can really win at the block level, it's remarkable. I think this was a validation of Zohran's victory last year, but also the validation of a greater political movement that orbs him.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:53)
So your prediction in your substack, Monday was Valdez 48%, Reynoso 46%, as it turned out, she won by 10 times that amount, by 20 points instead of 2 points. It may be too early for you to have looked block by block, but as granularly as you can, what happened where?

**Michael Lange** (5:14)
You know, I think, okay, to give myself a tiny bit of credit, I think if you look at the map that I posted, it was decently close to what it came out, but what was remarkable though was just the margin at which Claire Valdez won these other neighborhoods. And again, to just foreground all of this, the Satmar Hasidim in South Williamsburg and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, they were close to around 10% of the entire electorate, and they were voting for Reynoso 97%, 98%, 99%.