The June 23 Democratic primary elections matter a lot here in New York City, where Republicans face slim odds in most districts. Here are the local races we’re watching, and what you need to know about each candidate.
BY COLE SINANIAN & JACK DELANEY
news@queensledger.com
ASSEMBLY DISTRICT 37: “Musical Chairs”
In her interview with the Queens Ledger back in February, dietician and Queens Community Board 2 member Pia Rahman described the seat for New York State Assembly District 37 — which covers parts of Ridgewood, Maspeth, Sunnyside, and Long Island City — as a “musical chair.” Rahman, who’s running for the seat alongside DSA-backed tenant organizer Samantha Kattan and former Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce President Melissa Orlando, was referring to the seat’s high turnover in recent years. Current rep and socialist labor organizer Claire Valdez is vacating the seat for her congressional bid after just one year in office. Before that, Juan Ardila held it from 2023-2024 before losing reelection to Valdez after sexual assault allegations against him went public.
While Kattan, Rahman, and Orlando are all progressives dedicated to boosting public infrastructure, fighting for affordability for working people, and protecting the immigrant-heavy district from ICE, their campaigns’ focuses differ slightly. Rahman, who would be the first Bangladeshi American to serve in the Assembly if elected, vowed to bring stability to the district and serve both urban and rural New Yorkers alike. “It’s important to understand the lay of the land,” Rahman said. ““New York State has a big rural population that we forget. Whether it’s a cab driver in Queens or a dairy farmer in New York, we are still viable, we are still able to succeed.”
The DSA hopes to maintain control of the seat in Kattan, who sat for a Queens Ledger roundtable interview in February. A new mom and Austin, Texas native with a background in urban planning, Kattan’s politics are shaped by her work organizing tenants in Brownsville and East New York, and are rooted in shifting the balance of political power away from the wealthy to into the hands of working people. During her interview, she spoke of alternative housing structures like limited-equity co-ops and land trusts as potential solutions to the housing crisis.
“There’s more tenants than landlords,” Kattan said. “We need to question why we believe that housing needs to be so profitable. It’s rooted in the idea that housing should be extremely profitable for a small number of people.”
Orlando, meanwhile — a Sunnyside native and mother who founded local transit-focused groups Access Queens and 7 Train Blues — has brought her advocacy for better public transportation to the race. She’s also called for better accounting of the city’s rent-stabilized housing units, many of which she’s said are kept off the market by landlords seeking to collect free tax benefits.
“If we had a reliable way to track it, we could go back to the landlord and say, you’re getting tax breaks from this program, but you’re holding these apartments offline during a housing crisis,” she told the Queens Ledger at a candidate forum in Ridgewood last month.
ASSEMBLY DISTRICT 38: DSA Duels the “Lady in Red”
Incumbent Jenifer Rajkumar — the “Lady in Red” — is facing a potentially tight contest with DSA-backed attorney David Orkin in Assembly District 38, which covers parts of Woodhaven, Richmond Hill, Ozone Park, and Ridgewood.
The race flared into controversy on April 16, when Orkin filed a lawsuit alleging at least nine cases of falsified signatures and asking the court to disqualify his opponent for what he argued “might be the biggest case of petitioning fraud in New York City’s history.”
Among the most glaring examples was a supposed signature by a member of Orkin’s own team, Cary Tilton. “Signing this petition would fly in the face of every action and decision I’ve made in years and is an impossibility,” Tilton said at the time.
Yet the case was tossed on April 30, when a judge ruled that Orkin’s campaign had failed to properly submit documents.
“Love will always win over hate,” Rajkumar said, once the news had broken. “This was an ugly attempt by the Democratic Socialists of America to disenfranchise Queens voters, especially minority voters, and to bully a team of young South Asian and minority canvassers who represent the future of our state.”
With the claims of fraud in the rear-view, the race has crystallized into a central tension that’s also playing out in several other districts across the city: Will voters choose a moderate Democrat or a DSA progressive?
AM Rajkumar, currently serving her third term, stepped into the citywide spotlight during the Eric Adams administration, accompanying the former mayor at prominent press conferences even as he came under fire for allegations of corruption.
One of Rajkumar’s proudest achievements in recent years is the “Put a Lid On It” bill, which requires pollutants transported by rail to be covered. Since at least the 2000s, residents living near the tracks complained of toxic odors wafting into their homes; at Christ the King High School, some students found it difficult to concentrate due to headaches and nausea. Rajkumar says the new legislation, passed in 2023 in collaboration with state Senator Joseph Addabbo, addresses those concerns.
For his part, Orkin has promised to use his experience as an immigration attorney with Make the Road NY to champion workers’ rights. “There are people [in the district] who are working 16 hours a day driving Uber and Lyft,” Orkin said. “And there isn’t a single person in the state legislature, let alone our representative, who says you should not have to work 16 hours a day to make a living.”
Rajkumar is endorsed by Addabbo, ex-Councilmember Bob Holden, AM Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, Speaker Carl Heastie, and others.
Orkin has high-profile endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and boasts the DSA’s full support. But he notably had not received Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement as of press time.
SENATE DISTRICT 13: “Battle of the Jessicas”
The fallout from State Senator Jessica Ramos’ unexpected endorsement of Andrew Cuomo in the mayor’s race last year continues to haunt the three-term Senator, who’s represented Jackson Heights, Corona, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst and parts of Woodside in Senate District 13 since 2019. After a failed mayoral bid, the self-proclaimed progressive endorsed Cuomo despite having previously condemned both the former governor’s mental acuity and sexual harassment accusations, in a move that alienated her from many of her progressive and left-leaning colleagues. Chief among them is third-term Assemblymember Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, who represents the overlapping Assembly District 34 and described Ramos’ move last year as “disappointing.” Sensing Ramos’ vulnerability, Gonzalez-Rojas is now looking to upgrade from the Assembly to the more powerful Senate by taking Ramos’ job.
Gonzalez-Rojas — known to some as “JGR” — is backed by slew of local and not-so-local progressives including AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nydia Velazquez, Claire Valdez, and Borough President Donovan Richards, as well as organizations like the Working Families Party, Make the Road Action and labor unions 1199SEIU and DC37. Although she is a dues-paying member of the DSA, she did not seek the organization’s endorsement and is not counted among its official slate.
With a scandal-ridden opponent like Ramos, Gonzalez-Rojas’ script seems, on the surface at least, to write itself:
“I’m running against Jessica Ramos because she sold our neighborhoods out,” said Gonzalez-Rojas in a recent campaign video on Instagram with Chi Osse, during which the Brooklyn City councilmember and fellow DSA member refers to Gonzalez-Rojas as “the good one” of the two Jessicas. “For years she looked women of the city in the eye and said she believed them,” Gonzalez-Rojas continued. “Then her own run for mayor fell apart, and she needed a way out.”
But Ramos has a secret weapon. While she backtracked on her condemnation of Cuomo, Ramos has remained steadfast in her opposition to billionaire Steve Cohen’s Metropolitan Park Casino, whose required park land alienation bill cleared the State Legislature late last year with the help of Gonzalez-Rojas, who voted in favor of the bill in the Assembly. Ramos has criticized the casino as an attempt by the state and the billionaire class to sell out the neighborhood for profits that the community will never see.
“Billionaire Steven Cohen thought he could buy off every elected official in Queens for his casino project, but not me,” Ramos said in a campaign launch video this winter. “This isn’t gonna make any of us richer, it will sow addiction, it will prey on our seniors and working people. It’s gonna destroy our families.”
At a candidate forum earlier this month, the Jessicas — along with Hiram Monserrate, a former State Senator who was expelled from the Senate in 2010 for domestic violence charges and has now decided to reenter politics — sparred over each’s alleged betrayal of their community. Gonzalez-Rojas accused Ramos of playing hookie and allegedly missing 941 votes throughout her time in office, while Ramos accused JGR of publicly condemning the billionaire class while privately acting on its behalf. Gonzalez-Rojas, for her part, has described her Metropolitan Park vote as an endorsement of not the casino, but the estimated $1 billion in community benefit attached to the project.
“I did my job,” Gonzalez-Rojas told the Queens Ledger in a March interview. “I spoke to neighbors across the district and went to the town halls. I met with the project team. I met with people who opposed it. I met with people who supported it. I didn’t vote on a casino. I voted on the land use bill.”
Monserrate, meanwhile, has cast himself as the conservative in the race, campaigning on public safety, better education and more police. Monserrate has yet to secure major endorsements, while Ramos has been endorsed by unions like the Teamsters, Transport Workers’ Union, the New York State Public Employees Federation, and Local 79, among others.
SENATE DISTRICT 12: Socialist Against Socialist?
Only in Western Queens will you find two socialist second-generation immigrants fighting for the same Senate seat. In this case it’s Mamdani and DSA-backed Palestinian-American organizer Aber Kawas vs Filipino-American Assembly District 30 incumbent and former Woodside on the Move Director Steven Raga, who’s nabbed endorsements from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, City councilmember Shekar Krishnan, and several labor unions. The seat in question is Senate District 12, a sprawling, oblong district that includes the neighborhoods of Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, Long Island City, Ridgewood, Maspeth, Elmhurst, Glendale, and Jackson Heights, and whose incumbent Senator, Michael Gianaris, announced in February he would not run for reelection.
As far as who best represents the Queens working-class immigrant experience, Raga and Kawas could trade punches all day. Raga, the first Filipino-American elected to the State Legislature, grew up in Woodside and was raised by his mother after his father died when Raga was 7, in a tragedy Raga said was partially due to his lack of adequate healthcare. Kawas, meanwhile, grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn to Palestinian immigrant parents. Her father was deported when Kawas was a teenager.
During Raga’s two terms in the Assembly, he’s sponsored bills such as reducing the legal work week to 33 hours over the course of three years and a “sweatshop-free college apparel act” to ensure the state’s higher education system is invested in ethical labor practices, while securing hundreds millions of dollars in funding for local schools, hospitals and infrastructure. He’s been a vocal advocate for the long-stalled New York Health Act, which would create universal, single-payer healthcare, and said that it was his feeling that he’d have more power to move legislation forward in the Senate than the Assembly that lead him to run for the seat.
“We really need a representative, that knows the district and knows… the key priorities that our neighborhoods are fighting against or trying to protect themselves from,” Raga told the Ledger.
While Raga told the Ledger last week that he’s been a dues-paying DSA member for years (although he did say he’s too busy to attend regular meetings), he did not seek the organization’s endorsement, which officially went to Kawas.
Though lacking experience in office, Kawas honed her organizing skills working for the Arab American Association of New York and the City Council campaign of Palestinian pastor Khader El-Yateem, where she met a young Zohran Mamdani. Later, she helped Mamdani draft his “Not On Our Dime” bill to prohibit local nonprofits from funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Raga, though officially Kawas’ opponent, co-sponsored the “Not On Our Dime” act, and was photographed with Kawas in support of the legislation she helped draft at a press conference in May. In her Queens Ledger interview, Kawas vowed to bring a major shake-up to state government, which she characterized as slow and out-of-touch. Her campaign platform resembles those of other Western Queens progressives, promising to advocate in the Senate for fast and free buses, building public renewable energy sources, taxing the rich to fund social welfare programs and public infrastructure, and passing legal protections for immigrants vulnerable to ICE raids.
“New York State is such a stagnant entity,” Kawas told the Queens Ledger in April. “I just think it really needs to be shaken up.”
