(DCNF)—Young and college-educated voters in denser urban areas formed a core bloc for many candidates aligned with the socialist left over the past few months, an analysis of primary election data found.
In recent months, several self-described democratic socialists and candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won their primary races against centrist-leaning Democrats in cities on both coasts. Frequent patterns among precinct data showed that young voters in densely-populated and higher-income areas tended to support the more left-wing candidates, while lower-income and non-college educated voters typically supported their opponents.
All three candidates endorsed by Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, won their races in New York’s Seventh, Tenth and 13th Congressional Districts on June 23. Patterns showed the DSA candidates won among young, college-educated and higher-income demographics, while lower-income and non-college educated voters were more likely to vote for the non-DSA candidate.
In the 13th District, Mamdani-backed socialist challenger Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated five-term incumbent Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat 49.4% to 45.9%, after winning in higher-income areas. The Democratic Socialist held a 5.1 point advantage in higher income areas, while Espaillat won lower income areas by 9.1 points, The New York Times reported.
Chevalier, a DSA member, won college-educated and younger votes by significant margins, the Times’ data showed. Younger residents backed Avila Chevalier by a 24.5 point margin, and she won in college-educated areas by a 20-point margin.
Espaillat outperformed in precincts with majority Hispanic populations by 56%, particularly in precincts in the Morris Heights, Fordham and Kingsbridge neighborhoods, according to the Times’ results. Chevalier won 61% of plurality white precincts and 55% of plurality black precincts, while Espaillat won 52% of plurality Hispanic precincts, according to VoteHub.
The Morris Heights neighborhood is predominantly Hispanic and African American with a median household income of $34,619 per year, according to Niche. Fordham Heights was 71% Hispanic as of 2024 with a median household income of $41,840 per year, while Kingsbridge had a 66% Hispanic population and a $64,497 median household income.
Mamdani-endorsed Democratic New York assemblywoman and DSA member Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso 56.1% to 35.8% in New York’s Seventh District. Reynoso had the backing of retiring longtime Democratic New York Rep. Nydia Velázquez.
Valdez won support among higher-income earners, while Reynoso garnered more support in the lower-income communities, according to VoteHub. Reynoso won in lower-income areas by a 32.1-point margin, while Valdez won higher-income areas by a 33.7-point margin, according to The New York Times.
Valdez outperformed among white and Hispanic voters, winning majority Hispanic communities by 19.5 points. Orthodox Jewish voters in the South Williamsburg neighborhood overwhelmingly voted for Reynoso, according to the Times’ breakdown. Voters in the Orthodox and Hasidic areas overwhelmingly voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, according to data from Dave’s Redistricting App (DRA).
Younger residents and majority college-educated areas overwhelmingly supported Valdez. The socialist won among younger residents 64% to 32% and in college-educated areas by a 36.4-point margin, according to the Times.
An NBC poll found Hispanics viewed socialism negatively by a 24-point margin. An earlier survey from 2022 found 41% of Latino voters expressed negative views on socialism, while 23% viewed it positively. A majority of Orthodox Jews were affiliated with the Republican Party and three-quarters of Orthodox Jews supported Trump in 2024, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute.
Young voters were largely responsible for left-wing Democratic Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s November 2025 electoral win against incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. She won in urban and densely populated precincts by wide margins, according to Capitol Hill Seattle. Wilson campaigned on establishing transit benefits, rent control, social housing and environmental protections.
While she identifies as a socialist, the now-mayor’s run was not backed by the DSA.
Wilson stated in November she would not allow privately owned grocery stores to close and vowed that government-run grocery stores would be established. Her proposal emerged at a time when Mamdani promised to establish these stores throughout New York City.
Mamdani won mostly public transport commuters 62% to 32% against former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the November 2025 mayoral election, the Times’ mayoral race results reported. The socialist — running as the Democratic nominee — also won precincts with pluralities of black, Hispanic and Asian residents, while Cuomo — running on an independent ballot line — won white voters by a 13-point margin.
The New York mayor’s strongest support was among voters ages 18 to 34 years, non-religious voters and Asian Americans, according to Quinnipiac University. The Jewish community were Cuomo’s strongest supporters. Exit polls found 75% of youth voted for Mamdani.
Mamdani-backed candidate Brad Lander, a former New York City comptroller, defeated incumbent New York Rep. Dan Goldman in a 65.8% to 34.0% vote on June 23. Lander had never identified himself as a DSA member but nevertheless campaigned alongside Mamdani, Chevalier, Valdez and socialist Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Goldman won by large margins in the Borough Park neighborhood, a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where Trump received the most votes during the 2024 election, according to The New York Times. He won several precincts in that area with over 90% of the vote.
Borough Park had a 54% white population as of 2024 and a plurality of residents earned between $100,000 and $250,000 a year, according to the New York City Furman Center.
The incumbent congressman won in the Lower East Side, which is heavily Hispanic and Asian, according to DRA. However, Lander won in majority Hispanic precincts 67% to 33%, according to the Times.
Other precincts with majority white populations supported Lander, including the Park Slope neighborhood, where Lander secured 66% of the vote. White residents account for approximately 64% to 70% of the population, while a plurality of residents earned a master’s degree or higher, according to Niche. The median household income stood at $202,310 per year.
While Lander won among young, college-educated white voters, Goldman won in lower-income areas by a 13.8-point margin, according to the Times. Lander won in the higher-income areas by 40.6 points.
The trio of leftist wins in New York’s June 23 primaries may set the stage for other victories by socialist aligned candidates in hotly-contested Democratic primaries.
Democratic socialist Melat Kiros will run against Democratic Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette in Tuesday’s primary. DeGette, who has served in Congress since 1997 — the year Kiros was born, has trailed her leftist challenger in recent polling.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
