News of the mayor’s appearance spread through all the local cafes and novelty grocery stores on a rainy Saturday. Down the street, he was taking photos in front of a storm drain—mid-unclogging by city workers—grinning broadly next to the owner of Tony’s Pizzeria (443 Knickerbocker Ave.).

He advanced toward Maria Hernandez Park, where the Claire Valdez campaign was assembling volunteers to canvass the neighborhood. This was the largest crowd that the canvassing operation had gathered so far in Valdez’s campaign for New York’s 7th congressional district, which has become a proxy war between the mayor and establishment Democrats after congresswoman Nydia Velazquez chose to retire.

“There was one elected official on the day that I launched my campaign for mayor,” Mamdani said, adding, for emphasis: “There was one.” A central mantra of the Valdez campaign is “She Was There,” and she has been: Valdez had established herself as a top surrogate for the Mamdani campaign and opened for Zohran and AOC at their “A City We Can Win” rally at Terminal 5.

“We need to have a leader who doesn’t put their finger to see which way the wind is blowing,” Zohran told canvassers, a slight perhaps at Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who is competing against Valdez on a platform so identical to hers that his campaign voicemails imply an endorsement from Mamdani that went to Valdez. “Will Claire be leading the fight to abolish ICE?” Mamdani asked. “We know she will.” 

Polls show Valdez ahead of Reynoso in the latest polls, though over 40% of voters surveyed remain undecided. “I’m sure everybody saw the poll that came out,” Zohran told the crowd. His former communications director Andrew Epstein, among those running Valdez’s campaign, said that “It’s all about canvassing now.”

Zohran’s charm as a politician is that he appears to have been there at those protests we were all collectively at. He speaks about the slog of canvassing and persisting even when “you’re ten consecutive not-homes deep.”

In addition to the hundred or so canvassers, there were photographers for the campaign, filming the scene to cut it up into social media clips. Also there was a New Yorker reporter, writing a column about the NY-07 race and the race for Jerry Nadler’s seat in NY-12, where Zohran has curiously not made an endorsement (and neither has the DSA, as someone in the crowd butted in to tell us). I felt humbled to be accosted beside my journalistic superior, and was too easily wowed by his Blunt Metro umbrella ($119).

A group of activists, partially there to wear masks, drew attention to protest efforts against Crye Precision, a tactical apparel and body armor company headquartered in the city-owned Brooklyn Navy Yard. A 2024 Drop Site News report claimed the company sold camouflage to the Israeli military, while another site, Prism Reports, claimed the company supplied cold-weather jackets and pants to ICE before the agency launched a crackdown in Maine this last winter.

Mamdani has not delivered an official position on Crye Precision’s longtime lease on city property, though shortly after taking office, he quietly convinced the Navy Yard’s board to not renew a lease to Easy Aerial, a drone manufacturer also located at the yard and targeted by a similar campaign. 

“You’re a landlord of a large manufacturer of ICE supplies,” one of the mask-wearing activists yelled at Zohran after he introduced Valdez.

The crowd of Valdezapatistas began chanting “Claire Was There” to drown them out, but with a wave of his hand, Zohran quieted them.

“Hold on for one second. I want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for standing up for this,” he told them, his voice calm, level and sincere. It reminded me of something that an unemployed man in an Astoria McDonald’s once told me about Zohran: “He represents everybody else.” That great other. Here we all were.

“Thank you very much. I’ll be right there,” he told them and he was, driving away. But Valdez was still here.