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.

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. 

And just as Republicans seized on Mamdani’s victory as a national line of attack — especially after moderate Democrats in New York had expressed clear concerns about him — his new endorsees could pull the House Democrats to the left while endangering moderates’ ability to win in more centrist parts of the country.

Chevalier’s past social media activity, uncovered by CNN, includes her posting an expletive about then-Vice President Kamala Harris and championing defunding and abolishing police, among other posts that have also become a potent liability for a candidate trying to defeat a tenured incumbent. 

Some voters in the district were hesitant to back Chevalier — even those open to a candidate besides Espaillat. Roger Parris, 81, said Chevalier’s posts, especially the one critical of Harris, made her a nonstarter.

“That turned me completely against her, and I was open in the beginning to listening to her platform and what she’s promising and running on,” Parris told MS NOW after exiting an early voting location in East Harlem.

Across the street, 54-year-old Adah Carrion blasted Chevalier for not showing up enough in the neighborhood.

“She wants us to vote for you, but who are you? At least Espaillat, we know the bullcrap already. We already know what he’s capable of doing, what he’s not capable of doing. We already know him. We already tasted that sauce,” said Carrion. 

In an interview Sunday with MS NOW, Chevalier said she regretted her tweets and said Espaillat should also come under scrutiny for his record in office.

“It matters that we send Democrats to Washington,” Chevalier said. “We must win the House back, and if we’re going to do that, we have to present a Democratic Party that people feel empowered by, that people identify with.”

This all comes as House Democratic leadership absorbs a pair of embarrassing defeats. The party’s campaign arm made a much-criticized intervention in a series of House primaries in key battleground congressional districts, and two of its preferred candidates, in Maine and California, lost. 

Last week, Mamdani rallied in New York City to support his candidates, ranging from Lander and Claire Valdez, running for an open congressional seat in the city, along with Chevalier. Both Valdez and Chevalier, like Mamdani, are backed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America. 

A more risk-averse politician may have tried to localize the stakes of Tuesday’s primaries, given the implications they carry. Mamdani has gone a different route: The millennial mayor has raised the stakes to a national level. And in doing so, he has put himself and his political power front and center. 

“For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people. It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot, instead of showing how we can and that old way of thinking will lose on Tuesday,” Mamdani said at the rally. “And frankly, it will lose in South Carolina and New Hampshire, it will fall short of 270 electoral votes. Because the party of the past will not be what leads us into the future, for we need a Democratic Party with backbone.”

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From MS Now.