Central Brooklyn is a live political battleground where the Democratic Socialists of America have built a durable local presence, testing the hold of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and turning state and city races into a proxy fight between machine politics and an organized socialist insurgency.
The DSA is pressing deeper into Hakeem Jeffries’ backyard in Central Brooklyn, and the House Minority Leader has so far stayed on the sidelines in the race that matters most. State Sen. Jabari Brisport, a DSA member in office since 2020, now faces a primary challenge from Marlon Rice, a community organizer with Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Rice launched his bid from the stoop of his Clinton Hill brownstone and is running as the candidate of “old Black Brooklyn.”
The contest reads like more than a neighborhood fight: it is a clash between Jeffries’ coalition approach and a socialist wave energized at City Hall by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was Brisport’s former roommate and closest ally. Jeffries has not publicly weighed in on the Brisport-Rice matchup, even while cross-endorsing incumbents elsewhere and labeling democratic socialists as “virtue signalers on Twitter” and vowing never to “bend the knee” to socialism. Those comments clarify his stance but stop short of active intervention.
Demographics complicate any easy narrative. NYU Furman Center figures show Bedford-Stuyvesant went from roughly three-quarters Black and 2 percent white in 2000 to about 38 percent Black and 33 percent white by 2024, while median household incomes climbed and six-figure earners became the largest share. New York City overall has lost more than 200,000 Black residents since 2000, a shift that changes who votes and what messages land in these neighborhoods.
Rice frames his campaign around protecting longtime residents and cultural continuity, arguing that Black communities “are always the stage for tokenization and performative politics,” and charging that the DSA “doesn’t represent the tone of the community they serve. They represent the tone of the machine that they serve.” Brisport responds with a populist pitch grounded in his DSA membership and local roots.
“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. So I will always stand up to the political machine that has spent decades selling us out to the highest bidders.”
Mayor Mamdani’s backing has real teeth in Central Brooklyn. He won many Black neighborhoods with strong support from younger voters, has endorsed Brisport, and has been out canvassing with him alongside Council Member Chi Ossé and other DSA allies. That citywide apparatus gives the socialist slate a coordinated field operation that reaches into state Senate, Assembly, and council races.
“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. The proxy battles will be the battles for state Senate, state Assembly, City Council.”
The pattern is familiar to anyone who watches local politics. DSA-backed challengers have unseated Jeffries-backed incumbents before, and narrow near-wins have cropped up repeatedly. Margins keep shrinking as the DSA returns cycle after cycle, and the perception that Jeffries controls his own turf looks shakier with every contest.
Accusations of outsiderism feed local anxiety. A senior adviser to Jeffries branded the DSA “Team Gentrification” during the mayoral fight, a label that resonates where Black populations have been halved over two decades. That charge plays into longstanding frustration among older residents who feel priced out while activist newcomers set the political agenda.
“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. They’re always mindful of people coming into their communities and running experiments or thinking they know better, being paternalistic and condescending.”
Mamdani has offered a different tone, saying “We are at our best as a city when we don’t distinguish between who deserves to call themselves a New Yorker.” Critics say that answers the identity question in the abstract without addressing complaints that an activist base remakes a historically Black political community from the outside.
The contradiction is plain: much of the DSA’s neighborhood base grew out of the same gentrification that displaced longtime Black residents, and some of the movement’s economic framing has been criticized for downplaying racial realities. That tension underpins Rice’s appeal to cultural preservation and Brisport’s insistence on left-of-center economic priorities.
Jeffries has absorbed sharp attacks from the progressive left without retreating from his national pitch, but he has not made local interventions a priority. Observers now wonder whether his endorsements carry the same weight he once wielded inside his own district or whether the DSA’s ground game, powered by Mamdani’s operation and a legion of young canvassers, has simply outmatched traditional machine politics.
“Jeffries is right to focus on some version of moderation as a member of Congress. 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.”
The socialist effort in Brooklyn is coordinated rather than ad hoc, with multiple challengers running as a slate and the mayor’s infrastructure behind them. That strategy turns individual primaries into vectors for a broader realignment, and it raises the immediate question of who can still command loyalty in neighborhoods remade by demographic and economic change.
