During Claire Valdez’s campaign this year to represent New York’s District 7 in Congress, a slogan organically emerged: “Claire was there.” Repeated by labor organizers and campaign surrogates, the phrase referred to Valdez’s constant presence at worker actions in the city as a member of the State Assembly over the past several years—picket lines, union rallies, and fundraisers. Claire was there.
I was at one such event this past March, a benefit that raised money to send Amazon workers to an organizing conference sponsored by the magazine Labor Notes, where a Teamsters organizer used the phrase, possibly for the first time. As the crowd of delivery drivers and union members chanted, “Claire was there, Claire was there,” I thought back to scenes I had visited in my reporting on labor in New York City over the past few years. Indeed, Claire was there: at a freezing 2024 holiday-season picket line outside an Amazon warehouse in Queens; at a September 2025 rally over allegations of attempted union-busting at Brooklyn Defender Services, an organization of public defenders; and, earlier this year, at a strike by Long Island Rail Road workers outside Penn Station. Each time, Valdez was marching alongside workers, hyping up the crowd, and drawing media attention as one of the few elected officials—or perhaps the only one—present.
But as the slogan took off, Valdez was chagrined. “I hated the slogan when I first saw it,” she told me when we met at a coffee shop in her neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens, this summer. “It’s hard being a candidate when I really hate seeing my name in places.” Politicized in the era of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign slogan “Not Me, Us”—which she calls “probably the best political slogan that’s ever been created”—Valdez didn’t want the message of her own campaign to elevate her as an individual over the movements she came up through. “I was there because I was organized to be there. What’s so powerful about the labor movement is that it belongs to all of us,” she says. “In the moments that I have been brave, it’s because I wasn’t alone.” Now, she says, she’s come around to the slogan somewhat, but with her own addendum: “I wasn’t there by myself.”
Valdez won her primary in a wave of victories for left-wing candidates challenging the political establishment in New York City. Congressional primary wins this summer by a slate of candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani—Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander—seemed to signal a mandate for a working-class-focused policy agenda. But even among the other leftist candidates, Valdez is unique in her emphasis on the role of the labor movement in her political development and vision. “Joining my union was the first time I was a member of something,” she says. “That certainly shaped the way I thought about building collective power.” As a worker at Columbia University, Valdez was elected chair of her unit with the United Auto Workers and served on its bargaining committee. Two years ago, with the support of the UAW, she was elected to the State Assembly. Brandon Mancilla, the regional director for UAW Region 9A, which includes New York City, says Valdez had to be persuaded to jump into electoral politics. “She doesn’t come to this from a politician’s ambition,” he says. “She comes to this from ‘Where can I be most helpful to the movement?’—to the workers’ movement, to DSA, to her political homes.”
If the victories of Valdez, Avila Chevalier, and Lander can be seen as validating the mayor’s agenda, they also point to the growing political might of the UAW in New York City. In addition to the victories of the congressional candidates it endorsed, 15 of the union’s candidates for the State Assembly won their primaries along with all five of its State Senate candidates. In 10 of these races, the insurgent candidates unseated incumbents. According to the UAW, more than 500 members canvassed, rallied, and phone-banked to reach more than 50,000 voters.
“When our members decide to do something,” Mancilla says, “we throw down.”
The UAW’s growing, member-led political program is part of a national agenda to revitalize the union led by Shawn Fain, its president since a runoff election in 2023. Fain and a slate of leaders (including Mancilla, who’d been elected the previous year) were elected on the promise of creating a more transparent, democratic union. This vision extended beyond the bread-and-butter issues of bargaining to the political sphere. Members have been highly involved in the endorsement process, gathering in local Community Action Program (CAP) councils to interview candidates and deliberate over how the union should participate in races. “They want a union that reflects their values and is organizing to change our political conditions too, not just our workplace issues,” Mancilla says. The union seeks to elect candidates who not only champion its priorities but have come up through its political machine. “These candidates bring forth not just the platform…they bring the experience of having fought for those things,” Mancilla says. “They’ve bargained contracts, they’ve organized their workplace, they’ve organized their coworkers, they’ve been a part of or led strikes.”
The UAW has long had a political program, recognizing the relationship between “the ballot box and the bread box,” as its legendary president Walter Reuther declared. “What the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls,” he famously said. But prior to the UAW’s 2023 reform process, endorsements were decided by the leadership without substantial participation from the members. Fain and Mancilla took office on a platform of broad reform, including increased democratic participation and member-led organizing initiatives, after at least a decade of corrupt leadership that made backroom deals with the bosses. That led to mass actions like the 2023 Stand Up Strike at the Big Three automakers and progress in organizing auto plants in the South.
In New York, this more militant approach has often put the UAW on the opposite side of electoral fights involving other, sometimes larger unions. Valdez’s opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, was endorsed by influential unions like 32BJ SEIU, RWDSU, and the public-sector District Council 37. In last year’s mayoral primary, the UAW was the first union to endorse Mamdani, while his main opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, made his closing remarks at a rally in Union Square joined by the leaders of other local unions. Many unions, particularly New York’s large public-sector unions, which rely on relationships with elected officials for funding, tend to stick to endorsing incumbents.
Valdez’s race served as a test case for the union’s theory of building political power that it hopes will extend across the country. “If we just simply put our logo on a poster, that doesn’t do much,” Mancilla says. “If you’re endorsing people that your members are fully behind, if you have the pulse of your membership, then you can do a lot more with volunteers.” While Region 9A has been at the forefront of building the union’s electoral program in New York, the UAW is simultaneously flexing its political muscle in other regions where it has a large membership. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won his US Senate primary in August with the backing of the union’s political engine, despite a record $60 million in outside spending supporting his opponent, Haley Stevens. According to the union, nearly 800 UAW members knocked on 15,000 doors, made 145,000 phone calls, and organized worker-to-worker conversations that helped turn out 112,887 UAW voters during early voting.
Candidates like Valdez see the UAW’s political work as a critical tool to combat the exodus of working-class voters from the Democratic Party. “America is a hot shop right now,” she says, using a labor-movement term for a workplace that’s ripe for organizing. “The right is looking at the same thing we are, and they’re seeing the same opportunities to win people over. They’re going to beat us to it if we’re not actually transforming American society.”
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In the decade that legal aid attorney Hoda Mitwally has been a member of the UAW, she’s witnessed firsthand how members have become more engaged with the political work of the union. “I viewed the union as something positive, as a path to stability, but I never saw the union as being a political home,” she says. But since 2023, Mitwally has seen the union’s new agenda trickle down into its electoral work. “With reform-minded leadership coming to power…there is now a mechanism for members to be engaged with broader politics in a way that there just was not in the very recent past,” she says.
On summer evenings in 2024, the UAW’s New York City CAP Council began holding mass-membership meetings to discuss what role it should play in the upcoming mayoral race, before Cuomo announced his candidacy or then-Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges. The council compiled a 50-point questionnaire based on member submissions and hosted open candidate forums. The result of that process was the union’s initially unranked slate of Mamdani, Lander, and Jessica Ramos, all of whom had been consistent presences on the UAW’s picket lines in recent years. “There’s a direct connection between having that participation and transparency in our meetings and the success of our program,” says Jane Fox, chair of the New York City CAP Council. “Our members will move the needle on an election, because they’ll go out and knock doors.” Region 9A has grown its membership in academia, the cultural sector, legal aid, and more over the last five years, exposing young, energized members to contract bargaining and union elections for the first time. “American political life is vibrant within labor unions,” Fox says.
In May 2025, the UAW became the largest union in the city to endorse ranking Mamdani first, while he was polling nearly 20 points behind Cuomo. Members believed that Mamdani’s message about affordability would resonate if enough voters heard it, and they threw themselves into the campaign as if it were a union-organizing drive. The UAW held a kickoff canvass in the South Bronx, where Mamdani’s support was seen as weak and the fluency in Spanish of many of its members was an asset. Over the course of the campaign, members completed over 1,000 volunteer shifts.
In November 2025, weeks after Mamdani won the general election, New York Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez announced her retirement. Mancilla quickly reached out to Valdez. Other groups, including the DSA, also got in touch, encouraging her to run, but according to Valdez, it was the conversations with UAW leaders like Mancilla and Fain that made the biggest difference in convincing her. “There were plenty of people—progressives, even socialists—who could have run for this spot,” Mancilla says. “But no one was going to be able to articulate the connection between the progressive movement and the labor movement like she would, because she embodies it.” In addition to Valdez, the UAW supported a slate of member candidates who had come up through local shops. Avila Chevalier, a former investigator at Neighborhood Defender Service in Harlem and a graduate student at CUNY, generated momentum for her campaign within her UAW local. Former bargaining representative David Orkin and former UAW member Eli Northrup also won their primaries for the State Assembly.
Fox says that the New York City CAP Council is actively looking to recruit more members to run for political office. The union’s constitutional convention this summer passed a resolution that will create a program to develop members as political candidates. “Knowing how hard it is to go up against a boss like Columbia University—one of the largest private landowners in Manhattan, a billion-dollar endowment—Claire has bargained against them and won great contracts for our members there,” Fox says. “Members understand those are the same skills that are going to win us something in Washington or in Albany or the City Council.”
As the corporate media breathlessly tried to make sense of the upsurge in successful left-wing challengers, candidates like Valdez were looking back on the years of organizing that laid the groundwork for this moment. “Our role as organizers and democratic socialists and DSA is to be as ready as possible for the kind of historical forces that might change our political circumstances at any given moment,” Valdez says. “You have to be building durable structures and developing members as they come in and being ready to ride waves.” In strongholds like the so-called Commie Corridor that traverses Brooklyn and Queens, groups like the DSA and the UAW have built a well-oiled political machine, knocking on the same doors for years.
Mitwally canvassed for six days straight leading up to Election Day. At a campaign victory party that night, she reflected on the many wearying hours of organizing that had led to this moment. “It means that there was something permanent about the project that we had begun building,” she says. “We had built a real constituency around these politics unlike anything that I’d ever seen before in my lifetime…. Had you told me 10 years ago that the UAW would be part of creating this political change, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
As the UAW emerges as a scrappy kingmaker in New York, autoworkers in Michigan are fighting to reclaim the influence their union once wielded to advance working-class politics. “There was a time when the UAW put out our endorsement list, and there was no question people were voting for the UAW-endorsed candidate. Because when our standard of living came up, so did the whole country’s,” says Tielece Perry, who has worked at a Detroit plant now operated by Stellantis for 30 years and serves as chair of both her local and region’s CAP councils. Throughout the mid-century administration of Walter Reuther, the union fought for gains at the bargaining table that could further the broader political horizon of the working class. In its historic strike against General Motors in 1945, the union pushed for “wage increases without price increases” in alignment with President Harry Truman’s agenda to control auto prices and boost the working class’s purchasing power. With the Treaty of Detroit in 1950, the UAW won a massive expansion in healthcare and pensions from GM at the same time it was pushing for nationalized healthcare and social pensions. But its membership numbers—and with them, the union’s political might—have atrophied since the late 1970s, particularly in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, as waves of plant closures hollowed out hubs of union jobs like Flint, Michigan. “They used to say that when the economy catches cold, Flint gets pneumonia,” says Art Reyes II, an electrician at a truck-manufacturing plant and a 35-year UAW member.
Today, the UAW’s leadership in Michigan wants to bring its members more directly into the process and push for a more ambitious working-class agenda. The union maintains a significant footprint in the state’s electorate, representing 350,000 active and retired members, more than a third of its overall membership. During the 2024 presidential election, in which the UAW endorsed President Joe Biden and, later, Kamala Harris, the union reported reaching 100,000 of its members’ households in a single weekend. Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state was just 80,000 votes.
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This cycle, the UAW’s Michigan CAP held its first-ever public forums with candidates for the US Senate and governorship, which all members could submit questions to and attend. A February event marked the first time that the three Democratic candidates for Senate—El-Sayed, Stevens, and Mallory McMorrow—had shared a stage. The state CAP also interviewed each of the candidates in the International Executive Boardroom of its Detroit headquarters, peppering them with questions of concern to members: What kind of vehicle do they drive? Do they know how to read a VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) on a car? Do they know it’s possible to buy a “domestic” vehicle that’s actually manufactured entirely in China?
In early June, the state CAP board decided to endorse El-Sayed, citing his support for the union’s priorities, including Medicare for All. Universal healthcare would free up bargaining power for unions to fight for other needs, like raises and pensions. “I can’t tell you how much money is negotiated in contracts for healthcare from employers,” says AJ Freer, who has served as a bargaining representative for Local 600, the largest in the state. “If you took that cost out of there, it would be a different ball game.” And members who have long benefited from employer-provided health benefits want to see the same care extended to all Americans. “We are very fortunate,” Reyes says. “But unionized or not unionized, their children, their grandchildren, their neighbors may not have access to healthcare, and we believe healthcare is a right.” Members were also swayed by El-Sayed’s commitment not to accept corporate PAC money, while an AIPAC-backed super PAC and shadowy groups with ties to big business poured a record $60 million into supporting Stevens. “It’s the same corporations that are making these mega-donations that we sit across from at the table to negotiate wages and benefits and working conditions,” Reyes says. “And they tell us, ‘We’re broke, we don’t have any money.’”
The member-to-member organizing model can literally open doors. Reyes always wears his union gear when he canvasses in the Flint area. “We’ve been told by people at the doors, ‘The only reason I opened my door was because I saw the wheel,’” he says, referring to the UAW logo. Reyes and his brother have both served as presidents of their locals, and his father was also an elected representative with the union. “I know firsthand how difficult it is to go up to somebody and talk to them and tell them, ‘Hand me your problem. I will do what I can to help you with it,’” he says. “That, to me, is what unionism is.”
When El-Sayed clinched the Democratic nomination in August, Reyes was relieved. “It showed us that the blitz that we were doing in educating our membership on his stances—and their alignment with long-standing stances of the UAW—paid off,” he says. The union will now have to get its members out for what could be a bruising general-election cycle, during which more corporate dollars will likely flow into the state. Reyes gave himself just 24 hours to soak in the win before he started calling other members to ask them about volunteering.
The UAW’s engagement with national politics is a critical plank in its preparation for May Day 2028, when its contracts with the Big Three automakers expire. Fain has called on other unions to align their contract-expiration dates for a potential general strike, in which 150,000 workers at Michigan automakers would lead the charge off the shop floor and into the streets. Valdez says she had the date in mind when she made her decision to run. “There was this political muscle being formed within the region, but also a real necessity to have UAW members in Congress at this moment,” she says. “We need federal partners there.”
The union is gearing up for 2028 not just by advancing its candidates but by building up shop-floor leadership through the organizing process. “Campaigns are vehicles,” Valdez says. “They’re vehicles for organizing people, for developing new leaders.” As was the case with her, these organizing efforts could produce future candidates to grow the ranks of the UAW’s congressional bloc. “People are scared because they’re seeing this insurgent wave, this anti-incumbent wave,” Valdez says. “Some of them should be afraid.”
Valdez takes her mandate to deliver for working people seriously, because she knows what’s at stake for the movements she’s come up through. “When we win, we demonstrate that there’s a really broad constituency for socialism,” she says. “And then when we govern successfully, we show that it’s possible to do things…. We raise people’s expectations.” As Mancilla observed, Valdez’s candidacy made a unique proposition in marrying the socialist left and organized labor, two traditions that are sometimes in tension. But to Valdez and others, the only way forward for the left in the United States runs through the working class. “We’re not saying anything new, but we’ve built the organization that can successfully harness this political moment we find ourselves in, where working people just don’t have faith in Democratic Party leadership; they don’t have faith in Republican Party leadership; their lives are not getting better; wages are down,” Valdez says. “They want an alternative. And we have built that alternative.”
Ella FangerTwitterElla Fanger is a writer, researcher, and labor organizer based in Brooklyn.