DSAs primary triumph exposes the movements limits for now

The celebrants at a candidate’s election-night party typically provide a snapshot of their core constituency.On Tuesday night, overwhelmingly white, young, college-educated New York City transplants gathered in East Williamsburg and Harlem to cheer the Democratic primary victories of Democratic Socialists of America members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier.Those crowds tell an important story: What appears to be a broad leftist insurgency is, in reality, a more limited political movement — one powered by a narrow demographic base that only exists in meaningful numbers in a handful of neighborhoods across a few of America’s largest cities.The precinct returns from these races reveal the restricted conditions under which the DSA can currently succeed.In Manhattan’s District 13, Avila Chevalier performed strongest in precincts with younger residents, higher incomes and larger shares of college-educated voters.In District 7, Valdez’s largest margins came from East Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Ridgewood, a rapidly gentrifying area increasingly filled with young NYC newcomers.Despite presenting itself as a revolutionary movement of the urban working class, the DSA’s latest electoral victories expose it as mainly a political vehicle for college-educated urban transplants to repackage their own material anxieties into a narrative of broader social and class struggle.Valdez and Avila Chevalier personally embody the DSA constituency.Both candidates share remarkably similar biographies: suburban-raised and college-educated, arriving in New York in their late teens and early 20s to pursue elite-coded education and professions.In the case of Valdez, her ambition was to become a professional artist; in the case of Avila Chevalier, a college professor.For both candidates, the waning of those original career ambitions in their late 20s appears to have coincided with their deeper involvement in left-wing activism — and ultimately their recruitment as politic...