As The Indypendent reported this spring, pro-Israel donors sought to unseat Brooklyn councilwomen Alexa Avilés, a DSA member, and Shahana Hanif, a progressive Muslim. 

On June 24, voters in adjoining districts — with Avilés representing Red Hook, Sunset Park, and Bensonhurst; and Hanif covering the southern half of Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington — overwhelmingly reelected the two incumbents, with each amassing roughly 70% support. 

Solidarity PAC (a local edition of AIPAC) helped fund and promote the unsuccessful challengers to both Avilés and Hanif, and it also encouraged voters to rank Andrew Cuomo as their first choice for mayor, followed by any combination of Whitney Tilson, Scott Stringer, Zellnor Myrie, and Jessica Ramos.

“If Cuomo is not your choice, please consider ranking him #2,” urged the PAC’s website. “Do not rank Zohran Mamdani,” the group pleaded. 

Attorney Maya Kornberg, who lost to Hanif, and Ling Ye, a staffer for Rep. Dan Goldman who challenged Avilés, were thus not the only losers backed by Solidarity PAC. The group also endorsed Eric Adams’ ally Jennifer Rajkumar, whose bid to unseat Public Advocate Jumaane Williams was likewise crushed. 

Mamdani easily won Avilés’ district and also hauled in large numbers of votes in Kensington, where he did a campaign stop on the Sunday before the primary. Hanif helped rally her fellow Bangladeshi voters in support of Mamdani. Brad Lander’s best returns came from Park Slope, which he had represented in the council before passing the torch to Hanif, his former staffer.

Prominent pro-Israel billionaires Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb also gave large contributions to an outside spending outfit innocuously named New Yorkers for a Better Future 2025. Ackman’s $250K and Loeb’s $50k helped the group collect nearly $2 million. 

“Better Future” spent over $80k smearing Avilés. On the Sunday before the primary, Avilés displayed a stack of attack mailers to a group of over 100 volunteers (ready to knock on doors for both Avilés and Mamdani), with the councilwoman ridiculing the garbage lit. 

At the same rally, Avilés’ fellow DSA ally Assemblywoman Marcela Mitaynes told The Indypendent that they fully expected to win two days later — but now wanted to run up the score. The initial primary vote total in Mitaynes’ Assembly District was a whopping 7900-2250 in favor of Avilés. 

Ye did better in the Brooklyn Chinatown portions of Avilés’s council district, which straddles the D train line from Sunset Park through Bensonhurst. But the incumbent held her own, with the initial returns showing the challenger up by only 76 votes in Bensonhurst. The Asian activist group CAAAV sent many Chinese-speaking canvassers into the field for both Avilés and Mamdani, who also did well in an area with many tenants. 

When the Indy first wrote about the slimy effort against Hanif in March, activist Seth Pollack, a canvasser for the progressive incumbent, told me that he strongly doubted that the Solidarity PAC attacks would work in “a high-information voter district” home to many Jewish and Muslim voters critical of Israel.  

In early June, labor lawyer Paul Sonn, who campaigned for Hanif at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket and elsewhere in the greater Slope, told The Indypendent that he was seeing overwhelming support for the Bangladeshi American incumbent.

The forecasts of Pollack and Sonn were indeed quite accurate. Lo and behold, it appears that people on the ground know their neighborhoods just a little bit better than Manhattan billionaires whose main concern is protecting a rogue nation 5,700 miles away.

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