BY NICOLAS STERGIOU
Producer, Social Media Manager, Labor Organizer, and Unofficial “Astoria Street Spectator”
nicolas.stergiou@gmail.com
Chuck Park was never supposed to get 43 percent of the vote. Polymarket put him at just 1.8% the day before the election.
That’s what makes his campaign one of the most fascinating political stories to come out of NYC this year.
On paper, this shouldn’t have been much of a race. Chuck Park was a first-time challenger, taking on seven-term incumbent Grace Meng without the backing of major progressive organizations like the Working Families Party or DSA. Even after 94 percent of WFP members voted to endorse him, the party’s leadership declined to make an endorsement. He wasn’t surrounded by prominent elected officials or a well-funded political operation. By most traditional measures, he looked like a long shot.
Yet when the votes were counted, Park earned 13,674 votes—42.9 percent against seven-term incumbent Grace Meng’s 56.8 percent.
Whether you supported Park or Meng isn’t the point.
The point is that something is changing in the Democratic Party—and it’s happening in Queens.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem like an Astoria story. NY-6 covers neighborhoods like Forest Hills, Woodside, and Flushing, not Astoria or Long Island City. But politically, it’s difficult to separate what happened there from what we’ve watched unfold on our front porch.
Over the past several years, Astoria has quietly become a hub for modern grassroots organizing. Campaigns powered largely by volunteers have shown that elections can be won by knocking on doors while also using creative social media strategies to reach younger voters where they already are.
Park’s campaign focused on issues like protecting immigrants, opposing the proposed Metropolitan Park casino near Citi Field, and refusing money from political action committees. While Grace Meng entered the race with more than $1 million in campaign funds and support from a wide range of PACs, Park raised roughly $400,000 almost entirely from individual donors. Without the resources of an incumbent, he leaned into what he did have: volunteers willing to knock on doors, make phone calls, and spend weekends talking to their neighbors.
A high-profile endorsement from figures like Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders might have energized some voters, but it also could have pushed moderate Democrats in that district towards Meng. And although Park’s campaign lacked the DSA endorsement, something about it felt familiar. The emphasis on volunteers, door knocking, and neighborhood organizing was very much in the same spirit. In fact, a handful of volunteers who had canvassed for Zohran Mamdani later found their way to Park’s campaign.
The more surprising “non-endorsement” came from the Working Families Party. According to City & State, roughly 94 percent of WFP members in Queens voted to endorse Park, yet the party’s state leadership ultimately declined to endorse either candidate.
Whether or not WFP leadership made the right decision, many supporters felt Park had been overlooked despite the enthusiasm his campaign was generating. Ironically, the controversy seemed to energize volunteers even more. It’s certainly what first caught my attention.
I’d never canvassed door to door for a political campaign before. Walking up to strangers with flyers sounded terrifying. But I was inspired by Chuck Park after going to one of his Town Halls in Bayside. So I did it.
I canvassed in Woodside, and I was able to have positive conversations with residents about Chuck Park. For me, it was also a reminder to people that politics isn’t just television ads and fundraising emails. Sometimes democracy looks like someone giving up a Saturday afternoon to walk around their neighborhood introducing themselves.
Election Night for Park’s campaign ended in an upstairs room at a Tibetan/Nepali restaurant in Elmhurst after a big day of last minute canvassing in the rain. By the time I arrived, the race had already been called.
Chuck Park walked into the room shortly after, but there wasn’t much disappointment. There wasn’t any cynicism. There was gratitude, cheers, and applause. He spent more time thanking volunteers and talking about how small this group started and how it was a story of Queens residents coming together and challenging a system, with no initial backing or support. During his speech, he reflected on how the campaign had started from frustration over the direction of the country and googling “how to run for congress” and having his upstairs neighbor create his campaign website. He mentioned how his team wasn’t a team of “operatives”, “public affairs strategists”, or “political consultants”—it was a HOME TOWN team from QUEENS. The room erupted in applause.
Looking around the room, I could tell most of the people there hadn’t known each other just a few weeks or months earlier. Now they were swapping stories from the campaign trail, making plans to stay involved, and talking about the next election. Chuck Park hadn’t inherited a political machine or a massive fundraising operation. He had built a campaign from the ground up, and in the process, built a community.
I can’t help but think what Park might have accomplished with the kind of resources many campaigns take for granted. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t really the story. The real story was the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who had become involved in politics for the first time here in an overlooked congressional district of Queens. Elections end. Volunteers don’t. Those people will knock on doors again, help another campaign, or maybe even run for office themselves. That’s how it starts.
For years, many establishment campaigns have relied heavily on consultants, mailers, endorsements, and fundraising. Those things still matter. But there also seems to be a growing appetite for something more personal—candidates who show up, answer questions, and spend time in the community rather than simply appearing in a mailbox every election cycle. Park’s campaign showed that people are still willing to rally behind a candidate who asks them to be part of the campaign instead of just voting for it. It’s a little ironic that the most old-school way of campaigning—knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, and earning support one conversation at a time—now feels like the freshest idea in politics.
Ironically, one of the clearest signs Park’s campaign was breaking through came from his opponent. As the race tightened, Meng’s campaign began attacking Park over his previous work as a U.S. diplomat during the Trump administration. One campaign mailer prominently featured a quote suggesting Park had boasted about preventing a 13-year-old Dreamer from entering the country. Park called the mailer “100% false,” “shameful,” and “desperate,” arguing that the quote had been taken out of context. He said he had no authority over deportation policy as a diplomat and ultimately resigned in protest of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Whether those attacks changed votes is impossible to know. What is clear is that incumbents rarely spend valuable campaign resources targeting candidates they don’t consider legitimate threats.
Grace Meng won reelection, and she earned another term representing NY-6. But Chuck Park proved something that may last much longer.
