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Since being elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani has not been shy about weighing in on local political races, picking and choosing who should run in important primaries this June. He helped effectively muscle out his onetime friend Chi Ossé from challenging U.S. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, while also helping Brad Lander clear a path to a solo challenge against Congressmember Dan Goldman (a path that is now even clearer!). He also helped nab the Democratic nomination for his preferred candidate to replace him in the Assembly, while trying to install a fellow DSA member in a Jackson Heights Assembly seat against the wishes of local electeds there.
And while some might see this as a mayor trying to expand his coalition, working in tandem with his political base, the NYC branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, others (like The New York Times) have harped on the idea that Mamdani is overextending himself and perhaps should stick to governing.
Nowhere has this emerged more out in the open than in the race for New York's 7th Congressional District, where 33-year incumbent Nydia Velázquez announced her retirement late last year. The race to succeed her pits Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso against State Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a race that has already led to accusations of Valdez being a transplant who doesn't understand the district, as well as of Velázquez trying to bestow her seat on Reynoso to orchestrate her succession without a primary. The race has already laid bare the tenuousness of the left-liberal alliance that catapulted Mamdani past Andrew Cuomo in last year's mayor's race.
With five months to go before the election, we decided to check in with friend of Hell Gate and election whiz Michael Lange, who just dropped a new post on the race for NY-7 in his outstanding Substack, The Narrative Wars. (Want more Lange? Be sure to listen to this week's episode of the Hell Gate Podcast, coming out tomorrow.)
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Hell Gate: Did you expect the race for this seat to be so contentious?
Michael Lange: To put it bluntly, no. The degree to which it became contentious so quickly—we're five months away from election day. What's interesting is that both candidates have modeled "the friendly joust," "all part of the same movement" language. But the contours of the race beyond them, which are somewhat out of their control, have the potential to be pretty fraught.
There are real questions in terms of what it means to belong to a community and generally what is the community of this district. Ethnic, ideological, and cultural succession are a part of New York City politics, but you're really seeing some of those issues pushed to the forefront in a race where, on the surface, these candidates don't have too many policy differences.
Why did Mamdani get involved so early and so publicly in this race?
I think he knows Claire Valdez, and similarly to Nydia Velázquez saying she's known Antonio Reynoso for a long time, trusts him, and wants him to succeed her, Zohran Mamdani also knows and believes that Claire Valdez would make a great member of Congress.
People are asking why would he pick this fight, but is he really picking a fight? This is an open congressional seat. It's a seat that is in the heart of the Mamdani coalition. It's the district he did the best in, it's where NYC-DSA has its greatest concentration of membership. It's only natural that he and DSA and Claire would be interested in running for this seat.
These are open seats, and it's good for voters to have choices. Not deferring to a candidate who is leaving office is not picking a fight. Nydia Velásquez is going to be leaving this seat after 34 years. These are tantamount to lifetime appointments, and it shouldn't be the expectation that these are just handed off.
But this episode shows you why you often see politicians shy away from things like this, especially given how contentious it has gotten and the possibility of more conflict down the road.
And right now is kind of the height of Mamdani's political currency, before he's bogged down with all the shit that comes with governing and being the mayor. So if you're ever going to spend it…
Right, the beauty of politics is that the voters get to decide, and they'll really be the final arbiter here. The 7th District has changed so significantly over the past few years, and it doesn't quite match up with what people historically think of it as. People refer to it as "the Puerto Rican seat," and in 1992 that was absolutely true, but today there are more Dominicans than Puerto Ricans, and more white people than Hispanic people. We're seeing threads pulled of a possible strategy, saying that Valdez and Mamdani are some sort of interlopers. And I don't know if that will work. Mamdani is extremely popular in this district, and Valdez is extremely popular in DSA.
We're five months out—what's your prediction in this early going?
If I had to draw it out, the next three months people are going to coalesce around the idea that Reynoso will win because he'll have a bunch of institutional endorsements, he'll raise money, and there will be a sense of inevitability. And then closer to election day, it will even out. All that field work by DSA will begin adding up. And then in June, the fundamentals of the electorate, based on who votes and the age of those voters, they favor Claire Valdez. In the final couple of weeks, as everything is poured in, she'll pull it out. But that is a very January 22 vision of how the next few months will go. There will be a lot more twists and turns.
Updated (01/22/26, 7:20 p.m.): An earlier version of the introduction to this interview incorrectly attributed an endorsement. The text has been updated.