Nicholas Fandos

And what follows is this really fascinating race that drives a kind of geographic line through the district and through Mamdani's coalition, where on one side you have young, very left, maybe DSA-inclined voters who are more often white and college-educated than their neighbors, who have moved into this district over the last 10 years.

And on the other side, you had Reynoso and Velazquez, who represented and were appealing to kind of the old guard of the neighborhood, the

The large Puerto Rican and Dominican populations that grew there, the working class black populations, the other immigrant populations in neighborhoods that have not gentrified in quite the same way.

Right.

And so Mamdani is jeopardizing the very coalition that he worked so hard to build.

And it might have stopped there, actually, in another year.

But he kept going.

Because as the spring progressed, he had his eye on another district.

This one was in upper Manhattan in parts of the Bronx.

It's a heavily Latino district.

It's got a big black population.

But similarly to the race we were just talking about,

a gentrifying white community that's coming in and changing parts of that district.

Now, the interesting wrinkle here is that initially Mamdani stayed out of this race because he had actually promised the incumbent congressman, Adriano Espaillat, that he would be with him.

Espaillat had given Mamdani a key endorsement during the mayoral race, brought along Latino support that he needed at the time.

And in private, we've reported, they had a handshake deal.

The mayor said, I'll return the favor if you ever need it.

And so even though his allies on the left were lining up behind a challenger to Espaillat, a woman named Daria Liza Avila Chevalier,

Mamdani initially stayed on the sidelines.

But as the spring progresses and Avila Chevalier is picking up momentum, as the DSA endorses her, he starts thinking to himself, I can't stay on the sidelines of this.