Progressive candidates in deep-blue New York districts are increasingly testing tougher anti-Israel positions to appeal to left-leaning primary voters and activists. The trend was accelerated by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani‘s victory, which is testing the limits of the Democratic coalition.
Mamdani’s win emboldened challengers to take harder lines against Israel and forced several Democratic incumbents to prepare for primary fights in once-safe districts.
“If Zohran Mamdani had not prevailed, I would wager that most of these anti-Israel candidates would not be running at all,” Democratic strategist Jon Reinish told the Washington Examiner. “That victory changed the incentives.”
Reinish said candidates betting heavily on Israel as a single-issue campaign risk misreading Democratic primary voters, pointing to healthcare, affordability, and opposition to President Donald Trump as more durable drivers of turnout.
Across several congressional districts, progressive challengers are also increasingly pointing to Mamdani’s rise as evidence of possible vulnerabilities for incumbents who have accepted backing from pro-Israel groups or supported U.S. military aid to Israel. In districts Mamdani carried, challengers argued the results showed that blunt criticism can energize Democratic primary voters. Even in districts he lost, the debate has intensified over whether Israel has effectively become a litmus test in Democratic primaries.
In New York’s 6th Congressional District, Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) is facing a primary challenge from Chuck Park, a former City Council aide and Foreign Service officer who launched his campaign in late November 2025. Park has criticized Meng’s fundraising ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and corporate donors, casting them as emblematic of what he argues is entrenched influence within the city’s Democratic delegation.
Meanwhile, in New York’s 10th Congressional District, Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), a Jewish Democrat whose district spans parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, is facing a primary challenge from City Comptroller Brad Lander, a frequent critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The challenges we face can’t be solved with strongly worded letters or high-dollar fundraisers, and not by doing AIPAC’s bidding,” Lander said in a video announcement released in early December. “While the oligarchy drives an affordability crisis, they shouldn’t be able to buy a seat in Congress.”
Goldman earned support from the liberal pro-Israel group J Street and has criticized Netanyahu while maintaining firm support for Israel’s security. He has also accepted contributions from AIPAC and received the group’s endorsement.
Reinish said Israel may not even be the central dividing line in that race, pointing instead to lingering tensions from the mayoral primary, when Goldman declined to endorse Mamdani.
“It’s not Israel and Gaza in that district,” he said. “It’s do you endorse Zohran Mamdani or not?”
In New York’s 12th Congressional District, a crowded Democratic primary has formed to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY). The field includes Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy; Micah Lasher, a former senior aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and current state assemblyman; Alex Bores, a technology entrepreneur and state assemblyman; Jami Floyd, a former television journalist and attorney; Laura Dunn, a civil rights lawyer known for her work on sexual violence cases; and George Conway, a conservative lawyer and prominent Trump critic. Also running is Cameron Kasky, a 25-year-old Jewish activist and survivor of the Parkland school shooting, who has centered his campaign on sharp criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a campaign launch video released in November, Kasky said, “We need leaders who aren’t going to coddle their billionaire donors, who won’t support a genocide and who aren’t going to settle for flaccid incrementalism.”
Kasky drew attention recently after traveling to Israel. In a statement to the Washington Examiner, he said the visit was integral to his campaign message.
“As someone who has survived mass violence myself, living with what the human beings in the West Bank experience every moment of their lives shook me to my core,” Kasky said. “But it’s important that American politicians understand the human consequences of our foreign policy decisions.”
Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) is confronting a primary challenge in New York’s 13th Congressional District from Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia University protest organizer who has criticized him for supporting arms sales to Israel and for accepting campaign contributions linked to AIPAC.
A similar dynamic is unfolding in New York’s 15th Congressional District. There, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), one of Congress’s most outspoken defenders of Israel, is facing a primary bid from former state Assemblyman Michael Blake. Announcing his campaign, Blake drew a blunt contrast between the two.
“I will invest in the community,” he said. “Ritchie invests in bombs.”
Torres is also being challenged by Dalourny Nemorin, an attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The district-by-district contests show where Mamdani’s message gained traction, and where it did not.
Mamdani carried New York’s 10th, 13th, and 15th congressional districts, winning more than 60% of the vote in the districts represented by Goldman and Espaillat and just over 52% of the vote in Torres’s Bronx-based seat. He did not carry New York’s 12th or 6th districts, both of which have large and politically active Jewish populations.
The shift has unsettled some Democrats, particularly those who view Israel as a core issue for a party with a large and historically reliable Jewish voting base.
“These Democratic primaries are increasingly turning on one disturbing question: should the country that is home to the world’s largest Jewish population be allowed to exist at all?” a Democratic House staffer familiar with several of the races said. “Asking whether Jews are entitled to safety and self-determination in their ancestral homeland is a sick loyalty test.”
The staffer rejected portrayals of AIPAC as a shadowy influence operation.
“AIPAC is a grassroots organization made up of individual donors, not a shadowy Jewish cabal,” they said, calling such characterizations a recycling of antisemitic tropes.
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Beyond the immediate primaries, the New York contests are increasingly being watched as an early test of how Democrats navigate Israeli politics heading into 2028. Strategists say the risk is that positions tailored to energize progressive voters in the party’s safest districts could complicate efforts to hold centrist, Jewish-heavy suburbs and swing states in future national elections.
“What giveth in the city can take it away in the suburbs,” Reinish said. “The more Democrats become the anti-Israel party, the more you’re going to shed Jewish voters.”