What’s Behind Avila Chevalier Stunning Victory over Espaillat in C.D. 13

In the stunning upset to represent upper Manhattan in congress, the torch wasn’t so much passed to a new generation of Dominican New Yorker as it was torn from Representative Adriano Espaillat, now 71 but once a young insurgent himself, and seized by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old activist and doctoral student.

Standing next to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who propelled her campaign by abandoning a commitment to Espaillat and endorsing her, Avila Chevalier declared “a new dawn” for the uptown congressional district, which covers a slice of the Bronx and all of Manhattan north from Manhattan Valley on the west side and East 98^th street on the East Side.

“Every single one of us has a story about being let down by our government,” she told a cheering campaign victory gathering. “By our Representative—our former representative—who wouldn’t pick up the phone. Doing nothing about the affordability crisis and looking the other way while the real estate corporations that funded his campaign raised our rents and priced us out of the community that we loved.”

In a district that once was the heart of the Black Democratic machine, Espaillat’s rise had represented a classic ethnic transition. As the district filled with Dominicans, Espaillat, who came with his family when he was seven, challenged Rep Charlie Rangel. He lost, but then won the district when Rangel retired.

But the district kept changing. Dominicans remain the largest single population group and half the population is Hispanic. But recent years have brought an influx of students and young professionals, many white. Indeed, nearly a third of the district is between 20 and 39, well above the citywide average.

City College is in the district as is Avila Chevalier’s alma mater, Columbia University, where she majored in Middle East Studies and returned more recently to help organize pro-Palestinian protests.

This influx of young people helped gentrify the district but also seeded it with the kind of restless young voters who are the lifeblood of the Democratic Socialists of America, which supported Avila Chevalier.

Avila Chevalier was one of three insurgent democrats Mayor Mamdani propelled into congressional victories, but as the least known of the three and running against the most entrenched incumbent her victory was the most dramatic.

“We have been told that cynicism was the best that we can get,” Avila Chevalier told her election night rally. “As if the cutoff for ambition for a better life ended at 96^th street....No longer will uptown and the Bronx be neglected, forgotten or overlooked.”

While the district has evolved, ethnic politics, this being New York, remains vital and occasionally vicious.

In the closing days of the campaign Espaillat supporters began a whispering campaign that Avila Chevalier, born in Florida of Dominican parents, was not really Dominican. The crux of this appeared to be that she had spoken in defense of Haitian migrants and against measures the Dominican Republic had taken against them.

She said this was why she did not put a Dominican flag in her biography on social media. When a local Spanish language radio station sought to question her about this on election day, she walked out.

“We saw just how low they were willing to go,” she said of her opponents. “Just because they knew that they couldn’t beat us if they fought fair. So, they attacked me. Why? Because I am a proud Afro-Latina Dominican. Because I believe in the freedom and dignity of all people including our Haitian neighbors. My opponent and his supporters spread vicious lies about me and my family everywhere they could. This kind of hate cannot be allowed to stand. It has no place in our politics ever.”

Another emotional issue that powered her supporters was the war between Hamas and Israel. Avila Chevalier repeatedly attacked Espaillat for taking campaign contributions from the American Israel Political Action Committee.

Among her prominent supporters was the former Columbia Graduate Student, Mahmoud Khalil, who the Trump administration is seeking to deport for his pro-Palestinain activism. He campaigned for her and was at her election night gathering among the supporters who at one point interrupted her victory speech with chants of, “free, free Palestine.”

“Over the past eight months all of you in this room know how much the Democratic machine has tried to count us out,” she said. “How at every term they have underestimated us. Those of you in this room know just how scared, how scared, we made AIPAC, crypto and all of the corporate pacs funding my opponent’s campaign.

“And over the last few weeks we’ve seen the lengths they will go to protect their power.

Because the corporate landlords and lobbyists who powered our opponent’s campaign did so because they know that he didn’t represent us in this district. He didn’t fight for us. He represented them and he fought for them and when they saw how our movement was gaining momentum, they realized that they were in trouble. They knew that they couldn’t out organize us. So, they had to outspend us.”

She said Espaillat and his backers had spent more than $7million against her.

All told, about $9.5 million was spent in the campaign, by the two candidates, an extraordinary amount of money for a primary election, although far less than the spending in the Manhattan district just to the south, where Micah Lasher, an assembly member, defeated fellow Assembly member Alex Borse several other opponents to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler, who is retiring.