Some interesting numbers: New York's 13th Congressional District, covering northern Manhattan and part of the Bronx, is 52% Hispanic, 23% Black and only 14% white. Yet in June's Democratic primary, voters dumped five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, for Democratic Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, a ditzy 32-year-old grad student at Columbia University.

Here's the wild part. Mostly Hispanic areas went for Espaillat by about 15 points. Mostly Black areas went for him, too, by 2 points. So how did he lose?

Two ways:

No. 1: The DSA turned out its base of young, college-educated voters, many of them white newcomers gentrifying this traditionally Hispanic and Black district.

No. 2: New York's Democratic primaries are closed to independent voters in a city where about a quarter of registered Latinos are independents. Avila Chevalier won by 2,300 votes in a district where some 67,000 active voters are registered with no party at all.

Closed primaries have become an anti-democratic tool that empowers far-left voters by freezing out a huge number of independents, whether white, Black, Asian or Hispanic.

That helps explain how socialist Zohran Mamdani roped in the Democratic nomination with the support of only 11% of the city's registered voters. Even then, he won the general election with barely half the vote, though the name on the Democratic line normally runs away with it.

Asked about calls to open the city's primaries, Mamdani said, "I am quite content with the system of primaries that we have." Wouldn't he just.

Bernie Sanders has said nothing in support of that. But in 2016, when he was running for president and couldn't be on the state party ballot because he was not a registered Democrat, he boiled over.

"Three million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary," he fulminated. "That's wrong!"

Independents were the real story of the 2026 midterms. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico flipped a Senate seat with 63% of the unaffiliated vote. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton won a Senate seat with 59% independent support. They helped Democrat Pia Dandiya take Florida's 22nd Congressional District even after Republicans redrew it.

The DSA's whiteness has not been lost on prominent Black politicians. Hakeem Jeffries, the even-tempered Brooklyn Democrat, is in line to become the first Black speaker of the House. When his picture was flashed at a recent DSA victory party in Brooklyn, the crowd chanted, "You're next."

Jeffries responded, "It was very interesting to me, as observed by others, that there was almost zero diversity in that crowd." There almost never is.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, himself a Black under siege by the far left, commented, "To be shouting 'you're next' — a majority white audience to a Black man — just harkens back to some dark times in history." By his own count, the DSA's New York City chapter is 60% white in a city that's about one-third white.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is warning the left against any effort to sink Jeffries. "For those who live in his district and are so drunk off power to think that they're going to run against this man," she said, "you've got to get past this neighborhood and Tish James."

Closed primaries are bad for the Democratic Party. The Democratic caucus is now burdened with nutbag Avila Chevalier, whose now-deleted posts called for abolishing the police, the border and prisons. She called Joe Biden a rapist.

The DSA is a white-dominated political movement. It would be nowhere without the ability to game primaries that shut out so many voters, Latinos especially.

Nowhere is where they belong.

Follow Froma Harrop on X @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at [email protected]. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Cristina Glebova at Unsplash