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The union’s endorsements of insurgent candidates led to big wins this summer. It’s all part of a strategy to remake American politics for the working class.

The UAW Wave Has Hit Our Shores

The union’s endorsements of insurgent candidates led to big wins this summer. It’s all part of a strategy to remake American politics for the working class.

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........

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