Democrats in New York City and beyond remain wary and far from sold on a trio of far-left candidates who swept city primaries last week, two of whom knocked out establishment Democratic incumbents.
The New York State Democratic Party chair distanced himself from the insurgents—specifically from perhaps the most radical of the troika, Darializa Avila Chevalier—in comments to the Washington Free Beacon. And Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) told the Free Beacon that nominee Claire Valdez “will perfectly fit with the pro-Hamas caucus.”
Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York State Democratic Party, said he had not called any of the triumphant insurgents nearly a week after the primary earthquake, telling the Free Beacon, “I’ve been very busy on personal issues this week.”
When pressed on whether he would be endorsing Chevalier, a virulently anti-Israel socialist City University of New York Ph.D. student who has criticized interracial relationships and bragged about using the American flag as a washrag, Jacobs demurred.
“What I’m going to say to you is that I’m willing to work with her, okay, and whether I endorse her or not, we haven’t had that conversation and frankly she hasn’t asked for my endorsement,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs took pains to insist that Chevalier was not representative of the whole Democratic Party.
“To use a broad brush and say that the Democratic Party has moved far to the left because of the results in a couple of very progressive districts, which are distinguished from other competitive districts, I think this is inaccurate,” he said. “What I would say is that in those districts we tend to have, as in all primaries, a lower turnout. It favors activists, the activists tend to be more progressive.”
The chair said he thought Chevalier’s past posts on social media were “reprehensible.”
“Apparently, she does too, because she’s removed them,” he added.
Another elder Big Apple Democrat who spoke anonymously to the Free Beacon was even blunter, calling the elections of Chevalier and other insurgents a “wake-up call” and “very frightening.”
Last week Chevalier ousted Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a Democratic warhorse and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in an upset primary victory in the state’s 13th district, which includes Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx. Further south, former city comptroller Brad Lander knocked out Rep. Dan Goldman in the primary for state’s 10th district. And Valdez, a socialist assemblywoman, snatched an open House seat covering hipster-friendly neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, defeating Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso, the establishment favorite.
In all three races, successful progressive challengers leaned hard into anti-Israel rhetoric now animating the party’s activist base.
“This is not a ‘big tent’ party issue. This would be embracing individuals who are irredeemably, ideologically broken,” Fetterman told the Free Beacon. He called out Lander for doing whatever it took to get the support of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) and his Israel-hating wife.
“Lander simped his way into Congress to someone who believes Israel doesn’t have the right to exist as a Jewish state—with a spouse who ‘liked’ multiple posts of the 10/8 celebration of the 10/7 massacre. I don’t know how he reconciles that,” Fetterman said. “Valdez will perfectly fit with the pro-Hamas caucus.”
The famously ill-dressed senator has taken to calling Chevalier “Crazypants.”
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) has attempted to put the bravest face on the situation.
“Congratulations to our newest members of the NYC congressional delegation,” he offered in a social media post after the upsets. “From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different but the work is the same.”
Jeffries narrowly averted facing a socialist challenger of his own after Mamdani pulled the plug on a potential run by city councilman Chi Ossé. Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.), who represents a swing district in next-door Westchester County, said the day after primary day that “Jeffries effectively cut a deal with Mamdani to avoid a primary of his own yesterday but pretty much threw everybody else under the bus as sacrificial lambs.”
On election night, as Jeffries appeared on television, jubilant democratic socialists at their victory party were filmed chanting, “You’re next.”
Though the elections in New York City are functionally over, with the Democratic primary serving as the real contest in the deep-blue metropolis, a stream of Chevalier news continues to trickle out, creating an increasingly uncomfortable situation for mainstream Democrats.
On Monday, CNN unearthed still more deleted social media posts in which the presumptive congresswoman shared praise for communist leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, and offered sympathetic assessments of Marxist ideology.
In 2020 she retweeted a quote from Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther and cop-killer who spent most of her life on the run from the law in Cuba.
“I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but I ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff,” the original quote read. “They were two white dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too great to be ignored.”
While Chevalier insists she is “not a communist,” she suggested she is an expert in communist theory.
Her openly communist leanings have run into pop culture as well. She condemned the 1997 children’s film Anastasia as an “explicitly anti-USSR kid’s movie” and claimed Sheryl Crow’s song “Soak Up the Sun” was “bootstrap capitalist propaganda.”
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