As Dsa Gains Ground In Central Brooklyn, Will Hakeem Jeffries Push Back?

NEW YORK — A bitter state Senate race in the middle of Hakeem Jeffries’ House district is shaping up as a bellwether in the ongoing proxy war between moderate Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

State Sen. Jabari Brisport, a DSA member and former roommate of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is facing a Democratic primary challenge from Marlon Rice, a longtime community organizer campaigning to bring back “old Black Brooklyn.”

Brisport won his seat in 2020 and represents neighborhoods where the DSA has built a durable base — areas where the share of Black residents has fallen from about three-quarters to under 40 percent over the past two decades. The House minority leader has not yet endorsed in the race, but has made clear where his ideological leanings are — and they are much more squarely in line with Rice.

Jeffries has also made his opposition to the party’s left flank clear. While he endorsed Mamdani in late October, he did so late in the game — despite Mamdani holding the party’s nomination. A senior adviser to Jeffries dismissed the DSA as “Team Gentrification” during the mayoral race — reflecting a core critique that its rise is intertwined with central Brooklyn’s drastic demographic shifts.

The fight underscores an effort from establishment Democrats to remain competitive in parts of Central Brooklyn where the far left has moved away from insurgency and into office — and that shift has raised the stakes in a political fight that has been playing out years before Mamdani moved into Gracie Mansion.

“What we might be seeing is a cold war between insurgent socialists and the political machine being fought by avatars of these movements — Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries,” said Asad Dandia, a friend of the mayor and the newly appointed Brooklyn borough historian. “The proxy battles will be the battles for state Senate, state Assembly, City Council.”

Though Brisport and Rice are running on some of the same issues — deed theft, repairing public housing and affordability — one fault line lies in how they frame them.

Rice opened his campaign on the stoop of his Clinton Hill brownstone, evoking an older, tightly-knit, predominantly Black Central Brooklyn. Brisport has focused on class, pointing to his Bedford-Stuyvesant roots, his time as a public school teacher and his emphasis on union power.

The contrast reflects a divide the Democratic party has long struggled to bridge sharpened by the left’s rise. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mamdani have drawn criticism for framing inequality through an economic injustice lens that many see as largely ignoring race. Others, like Jeffries, have been less shy about leaning into racial identity.

The neighborhoods at the center of the contest between Brisport and Rice include Bedford Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene and Brownsville — places that have long occupied an outsized place in Black political and cultural life. Popular artists like The Notorious B.I.G. Jay-Z and Spike Lee all hail from Central Brooklyn. Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, launched her political career there — as did state Attorney General Letitia James and former Mayor Eric Adams. Jeffries, keenly aware of this, has quoted The Notorious B.I.G. on the House floor — a nod to an icon of his youth.

In those days, crime and policing were top concerns in Central Brooklyn. Today, in this race, the debate over demographic change and its impact on political power is front and center.

According to data from the NYU Furman Center, Bedford-Stuyvesant has undergone a dramatic shift over the past two decades: In 2000, the neighborhood was about three-quarters Black and just 2 percent white; by 2024, it was roughly 38 percent Black and 33 percent white. During that same period, the median household income rose sharply, with six-figure earners now making up the largest share of residents. The city overall has seen more than 200,000 Black residents leave since 2000.

The transformation has extended to the electorate, fueling a debate over how elected officials should balance the concerns of legacy Black homeowners and renters who’ve weathered decades of disinvestment, rampant crime and devastation from the crack and opioid epidemics with those of newer residents who are not Black.

Basil Smikle, former executive director of the state Democratic Party, said older Black voters view the party's establishment as flawed but familiar, while younger voters and newer residents often have less attachment to that history, making them more open to insurgent movements like the DSA.

“You can’t come in as an occupying force, and that’s what a lot of African American voters and certainly older African Americans are always mindful of,” Smikle said. “They’re always mindful of people coming into their communities and running experiments or thinking they know better — being paternalistic and condescending.”

Jeffries, it would appear, has been especially mindful of those voters. He has dismissed democratic socialists as “virtue signalers on Twitter” and vowed never to “bend the knee” to socialism. But while he has been quick to defend incumbents from DSA-backed challengers, he has been less consistent when going on offense to unseat them. The results have been mixed.

On Saturday, Jeffries cross endorsed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who's facing Mamdani-backed DSA challenger Darializa Avila Chevalier, and incumbent Assemblymember Jordan Wright who's facing a primary challenge from the DSA’s Conrad Blackburn, telling reporters he does not view such primaries as a threat to the future of the party.

In 2020, DSA-backed central Brooklyn Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest ousted a Jeffries-backed incumbent in the Assembly district Jeffries once represented, and she fended off another moderate challenger two years later.

Jeffries and James supported Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman over the DSA-backed challenger Eon Huntley in 2024. Zinerman won by six points, but Huntley is running again this year with the support of Brisport and Council Member Chi Ossé, who recently joined the DSA and represents part of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

That same coalition is now organizing across central Brooklyn, coordinating their canvassing efforts with Mamdani and Ossé who joined Brisport and Huntley last weekend.

Though Brisport himself has long been a target of moderates — Jeffries-aligned operatives signaled interest in backing a challenger in 2023 — he has maintained his seat.

Jeffries has also faced threats, a reality made clear last June when Ossé flirted with a run against him. In response, one senior adviser to Jeffries warned that a primary threat from the left would draw a “forceful and unrelenting” rejoinder.

Rice, who works as a director for the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, has leaned into the kind of messaging coming from Jeffries’ camp.

He’s focused on homeowners facing deed theft and residents who feel the politics of Central Brooklyn have shifted away from longstanding community concerns. His message is focused on preserving what he describes as the district’s cultural identity — rooted in longtime Black residents who built and sustained the neighborhood and now feel pushed out.

“Our communities are always the stage for tokenization and performative politics,” Rice said. “People always use Black spaces to do that work. The DSA doesn’t represent the tone of the community they serve. They represent the tone of the machine that they serve.”

For Brisport, the DSA’s agenda is rooted in the needs of working-class residents. He argues that the real disconnect lies with a Democratic establishment that has governed for decades without delivering.

“This is the community that raised me and, as both a DSA member and a longtime Black resident, I can say that it’s the establishment that doesn’t speak to the full range of voters in this district or their needs,” Brisport said. “So I will always stand up to the political machine that has spent decades selling us out to the highest bidders.”

In Albany, where he chairs the Children and Families Committee, Brisport has focused on protections for vulnerable young people while promoting proposals aimed at taxing the rich and protecting homeowners from deed theft. His coalition is made up of voters drawn to the DSA’s tax-the-rich agenda and those mobilized around Palestinian rights — a point of friction with Jeffries, who has been a supporter of Israel.

Brisport has also won the support of Mamdani, whose shadow looms over the race. Mamdani's performance in Central Brooklyn during last year's mayoral election challenged long-standing assumptions about the limits of the left’s appeal, particularly among Black voters, winning predominantly Black neighborhoods with over 60% of the vote, especially with younger voters. His coalition also overlapped with many of the constituencies that establishment Democrats have pointed to when arguing democratic socialists struggle with older, more moderate voters.

When asked about the description from more moderate Democrats that the DSA is largely made up of carpetbaggers, Mamdani told POLITICO: “We are at our best as a city when we don’t distinguish between who deserves to call themselves a New Yorker.”

But Mamdani has also applied a practical calculus to the area, given Jeffries’ influence in Congress. After Ossé briefly mounted a primary challenge against Jeffries, Mamdani urged Ossé to drop out — and he did.

Since then, the proxy war has shifted into lower-tier legislative races.

Whether voters side with Rice’s argument about preservation and representation or Brisport’s about affordability and political change, their skirmish reflects a district still negotiating who speaks for it as it evolves.

As Jeffries rises within the national party, the tensions reshaping his home base are only becoming harder to contain. What plays out here is less an isolated primary than a test of how, and whether, that divide can be managed.

“Jeffries is right to focus on some version of moderation as a member of Congress,” Smikle said. “But when it comes to local politics, there are a lot of changes going on around him that I don’t know if his endorsement of a non-DSA candidate would be able to hold effect.”