Democrats Are Duking It Out in Brooklyn

BY JOSHUA CHAFFIN

NEW YORK CITY—On a recent Saturday morning, Susan Metz, a retired public school teacher, shouted amid a throng of protesters at the “No Kings” march along Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza. The focus of her ire, though, wasn’t President Trump.

It was two sons of central Brooklyn: Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader.

When Jeffries finally backed Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race on Friday, it felt to many less like an endorsement than a capitulation in a fight for the future of the Democratic Party. That struggle has unfolded in unusually close quarters in Brooklyn, where two of the party’s most powerful figures have strained to cope with a rising progressive movement, embodied by Mamdani.

Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, lives in Queens. Yet many of his strongest bastions of support lie in central Brooklyn, according to voting and donation records.

Brooklyn is hardly a template for America. Still, it is a kind of compressed collection of key Democratic Party constituencies— the college-educated, recent immigrants, minorities and working-class Black voters.

By dint of geography and personalities, Brooklyn is now central to a contest former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a chief Mamdani opponent, portrayed in existential terms during a campaign stop there.

“This election is not just about different people. It’s not even about different parties,” he said. “It’s about different philosophies and the direction of the Democratic Party.”

By flipping just a few seats in next year’s midterms, Democrats would regain control of the House, allowing them to block Trump’s agenda. Jeffries would become the House’s first Black Speaker. The fear is that Mamdani and other leftwingers could upend that by tarnishing the party’s brand nationwide.

Yet by keeping them at arm’s length, Schumer and Jeffries have stoked anger in their own backyard. Before Jeffries relented on Mamdani Friday, talk of a primary challenge against him circulated. The longer Schumer holds out without endorsing him, the louder the whispers will grow that he plans to retire when his term ends.

And so, both men are wedged between their party and their neighborhood; between an establishment trying to survive and a younger generation restless to seize power.

“I don’t envy them the task,” said Ken Fisher, 72, a land-use lawyer and former city-council member. “Now I know how my parents felt when they woke up and George McGovern was the Democratic candidate for president and not Hubert Humphrey,” he said, likening Mamdani’s shock primary victory to the political upheaval in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

If Mamdani was a new face, Fisher argued, his success reflected a long-established New York dynamic: a relentless churn that remakes the city time and again.

Many current New Yorkers didn’t even live there on 9/11— let alone when murders topped a thousand a year. Brooklyn, in particular, has been remade by shifts in immigration.

“What that does is it creates openings for the exercise of political power,” said Fisher, “which has been the pattern in New York since the British kicked the Dutch out.”

Lake Buckley, 35, a white creative director from the San Francisco Bay Area who now lives in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, struggles to even watch a Cuomo advertisement.

“It kills me how out of touch Cuomo is,” she said. Buckley confessed doubts about some Mamdani policies— and is no socialist herself— but seemed willing to take a chance.

“Mamdani and his team,” she said, “have a brilliant sense of how the culture of attention is shifting.”

In some other places, Mamdani stirs anguish—as in the home of Schumer’s synagogue: Congregation Beth Elohim.

Its rabbi, Rachel Timoner, has been a longtime critic of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet the congregation has been torn over Mamdani. A pro-Palestine activist since his student days, he has refused to disavow the phrase “globalize the Intifada” (while saying that isn’t language he uses) and has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide.”

“We’ve basically been holding our breath for two years,” Timoner said of the community’s distress since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led slaughter of Israelis—and then Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza. A short walk from the synagogue lies the Brooklyn Museum, whose Jewish director, Anne Pasternak, found her home smeared with red paint and graffiti last year.

“As it gets more dire out there, there’s more incentive to try to make it work,” Timoner said.

One recent Sunday, Mamdani visited for a town-hall meeting. Schumer wasn’t in attendance. But more than 350 congregants signed up to attend, submitting 82 questions.

Timoner lauded Mamdani for showing “deep humility” and appearing to listen. Still, some of his answers were unsatisfying to many. “Some said, ‘There’s no chance I’m voting for him, but I’m glad we did this,’ ” Timoner said. Cuomo is visiting this week. She rejected criticism from some Jews that her synagogue was helping “normalize” Mamdani. “If we don’t talk,” she said, “how can we be understood?”