Coming off the socialist wave in the Democratic primaries in June, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s candidates for Congress and the state legislature coasted to victory on election night.

Former City Comptroller Brad Lander, state Assemblymember Claire Valdez and grad student Darializa Avila Chevalier easily carried their heavily Democratic seats after Mamdani supported them for the party’s nomination three months ago. Lander, who will represent a largely upper-middle-class district spanning Brooklyn and Manhattan with a large Jewish population, defeated Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) earlier this year after relentlessly hammering the incumbent for his support for U.S. military aid to Israel and relationship with AIPAC.

But despite his campaign trail sorties against the Jewish state — which included a trip to the West Bank last month where he vouched support for a bill sanctioning Israeli settlements — Lander remains a self-described “progressive Zionist” who publicly broke with the Democratic Socialists of America after the group promoted a celebratory rally in Times Square one day after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. This stance has seen the former municipal official publicly snubbed not only by protesters but by the mayor’s wife.

On the other hand, Avila Chevalier — longtime paramour to Mamdani chief counsel Ramzi Kassem — is the most radical of the trio, as evidenced in her participation in the same pro-Hamas Times Square rally that Lander and even Mamdani denounced, and her history of promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories and Kremlin talking points online. Reacting to the news earlier on election day that President Donald Trump had struck a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end U.S. military aid to Israel by the end of the year, the now-congresswoman-elect asserted the measure was “not enough.”

“We need to end U.S. taxpayer funding for Israel’s war crimes, a full arms embargo, and the Palestinian right of return,” she wrote on X.

Mamdani’s last-minute endorsement of Avila Chevalier’s successful bid to oust Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) was his most audacious move of the primary cycle, and she won largely on the strength of her support in the part of the Manhattan-Bronx district that covers Columbia University, where she participated in the anti-Israel encampment movement.

She fared less well in lower-income parts of the district, as well as in the portion of Washington Heights encompassing Yeshiva University. 

Like Avila Chevalier, Valdez is a member of DSA with close ties to elements of the United Auto Workers union that have turned to organizing graduate students and administrative workers on a number of issues, including against Israel. She will succeed Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) in the so-called “commie corridor” — the increasingly upscale swath of Brooklyn and Queens that delivered Mamdani his strongest margins.

Her district also comprises a large swath of Satmar Hasidim, whom left-wing politicians have long courted, even as they vote increasingly Republican.

Avila Chevalier and Valdez are poised to join a series of newly elected far-left Democrats, largely aligned with the DSA, in the lower chamber, substantially growing the numbers of hardline anti-Israel House members — a larger group than the Squad elected in the 2018 midterms.

Others who won on Tuesday include Colorado’s Melat Kiros, New Jersey’s Adam Hamawy, Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb and Michigan’s Donovan McKinney.

The group, informally known as “the Bloc” has reportedly been seeking to work in a more organized and unified manner to move Democratic policy to the left than the Squad did previously.

Senior congressional correspondent Marc Rod contributed to this report.