Claire Valdez, Democratic candidate for Congress: ‘We have to plan for life after the Trump administration’

She was seen in her round glasses near the DBK4 warehouse in the quiet Queens neighborhood of Maspeth, alongside Amazon workers frustrated with the multinational that dominates e-commerce in the United States. She was seen at a popular Starbucks in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with baristas disappointed by the world’s largest coffee chain. She was also seen at a strike in Harlem alongside members of the Neighborhood Defender Service union. On each of those occasions, working people were asking for the same thing workers throughout history have demanded from their bosses: decent working conditions and a livable wage.

Claire Valdez can relate. She herself has worked at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and the supermarket chain Trader Joe’s and, should she win a seat in Congress, she hopes to achieve two essential goals: making it easier for workers to unionize and ensuring that the federal minimum wage in the United States is no longer stuck at $7.25 an hour, where it has remained since 2009, when it was increased by 75 cents.

Valdez is a politician today because she was first, and for a long time, a worker. She has been employed since the age of 14 and is someone who, as she puts it, has had to “clock in and do oftentimes difficult or exhausting labor.” But her understanding of the country around her first took shape in Lubbock, a conservative enclave in West Texas, where she grew up with Democratic parents in a world that already followed a different order. “I’m a millennial, so I grew up in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the beginning of the war on terror, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Witnessing our country murder a million people overseas in the name of safety for the United States was something that really radicalized me at a very early age.”

By the age of 25, in 2015, she had become a visual artist and moved to New York to work at a small museum in Queens. “The work was rewarding, but really very hard. I worked a lot, at night and on weekends; there was a lot of unpaid overtime,” she says. It was also difficult to develop her own artistic practice at the same time, so she left the position and took another one in Columbia University’s visual arts department. That job changed the course of her life. At the time, she had no idea that, a few years later, as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), she would win the Democratic primary to represent New York’s 7th Congressional District.

Joining Columbia’s UAW Local 2110, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the country’s most important labor unions, proved decisive. Valdez became increasingly involved, and the fight for workers gradually eclipsed her artistic practice. Even so, when she thinks about it, there is much in common between being an artist and being a politician. “You have to rely on other people; you have to be creative, problem-solve. You’re building something collaboratively with others. The union gave me the same joy and purpose that art did.” Among the priorities she plans to pursue in Congress is advancing the PRO Act, legislation designed to make it easier to form unions, hold employers accountable and restore dignity to workers.

Question. Championing workers’ rights is something that set you apart from the other candidates in New York’s Democratic primary. Why has it been such a central part of your political life?

Answer. Organizing with my co-workers was really important because being part of the union gave me a living wage, time off the job, and a sense of purpose that I’d never had before. I always expected that hours would be long, wages would be low, protections would be few and far between. The union changed my relationship to not just my bosses and my work, but to my co-workers. It taught me to see them also as very politically powerful people who deserve excellent working conditions and good wages. We’ve all had shitty jobs and we’ve all had bad bosses, but very few people have had the experience of being transformed by their union. What’s so important to me about being in Congress, and earlier in the State Assembly, is getting as many people as possible to be able to organize, change their lives and recognize their power.

Q. You in particular, and the DSA more broadly, speak about empowering the working class, which has sparked a debate about where the working class begins and ends in the United States. What is your view?

A. I believe the working class is defined by control. Do you have control over what you do at your job? Do you have control over your schedule? Your hours and your wages? For most people, the answer is no. That can include janitors, clerical workers like I was at Columbia University, and even software engineers. I think the category can be very broad because what we’re talking about is how much power you have to dictate the conditions of your workplace and your life. The working class needs to be as broad a category as possible because it’s going to take millions and millions of people organizing together to win the world that we deserve. The more that we can relate to one another across these differences that have been imposed on us by bosses, the more power that we’ll have.

Q. Socialists have recently won some major electoral victories in the United States, though they also draw strong opposition from other sectors. What is your vision for making this a better country?

A. For me, democratic socialism is about expanding democracy — making sure people can organize in their workplaces, their neighborhoods and their apartment buildings, and be political actors in their own lives. It’s about universal programs like universal childcare, free public education and higher education, universal healthcare, expanding rent stabilization and rent control, and making sure people can afford to live their lives and have real dignity.

Our goal, and certainly my goal as someone going to Congress as a democratic socialist, is to prove we can govern effectively and deliver for the working class. Every time we win a race, we’re demonstrating that there is a constituency for democratic socialism. Polling nationally shows that people are moving on this subject; they’re more willing to identify as democratic socialists and less afraid of the term. I think that’s partly due to the work Mayor Zohran Mamdani has done to successfully run the city for the past eight and a half months,

Q. This resurgence of the left has also come as a response to the political system and the administration. But if a campaign and an election like Zohran Mamdani’s had not happened, would we still have seen this surge?

A. It’s hard to imagine this political moment without last year’s successes. Zohran’s victory was really momentous for the movement. It gave us a roadmap for 2026, when we were deciding where to run, which districts might be good places to challenge incumbents or where open seats might be advantageous for us. He’s done a pretty good job as mayor, effectively communicating and rolling out very popular programs early in his tenure. His bus network improvements to make buses faster, universal childcare… those things are incredibly popular and show people that Democratic Socialists can govern well. So I think his success has paved the way for us to take bigger swings to take on bigger challenges.

Q. You were arrested at 26 Federal Plaza, the immigration court building where so many migrants have been detained recently, and one of your battles is to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). How do you plan to make that possible?

A. With news of a new federal investment in electric shock gloves that ICE agents will be deployed with, it’s clear that until we end this agency, it will just continue to be expanded, to be militarized, to be funded, and there will be no accountability until it’s done away with. Knowing that our taxes are funding this agency instead of universal healthcare or public infrastructure investment is really despicable. There are things we can do to create more oversight and accountability for this agency, but ultimately it just shouldn’t exist.

Q. So if the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, do you think there will be a real opportunity to make progress on your priorities, such as ICE and workers’ rights?

A. I don’t think ICE will be abolished under this administration, but we have to plan for what life is going to look like after the Trump administration is done in a couple of years and be ready to do as much as we can to transform America’s life. That also includes passing the PRO Act to make it easier for people to organize in their workplaces and raising the minimum wage. In the grand scheme of defending our democracy against rising fascism and authoritarianism, making sure that we have a really thriving labor movement is paramount. We must push for a humane, welcoming immigration policy. If we are going to address the root causes of migration, we need to start by understanding our foreign policy and the things we’ve done for many years to destabilize other countries.

Q. That was clear in your campaign and in those of many other socialists when you called for an end to the genocide in Gaza, an issue many avoid discussing or distance themselves from, but one that you turned into a major front in your campaigns...

A. Palestine was an important part of our campaign because it repeatedly came up when we were door-knocking. When we spoke with people at their homes, they wanted to talk about Palestine. Nearly three years of genocide is hard to reconcile, and it’s painful to know our taxes are funding the bombing of refugee camps and upholding an apartheid state. Since this genocide began and unfolded under a Democratic president, Joe Biden, the Democrats missed an opportunity to stop the worst of this atrocity while in power. We want to see that change. I also think people want to see real moral leadership. We saw a lot of that during Mamdani’s mayoral race. Palestine wasn’t the central issue — affordability was — but people who had been disengaged from politics or hadn’t voted in 2024 and were outraged by the genocide in Gaza saw his consistency on this issue and came back into politics. We saw the highest voter turnout the city has seen in decades, and I think that’s what people are hungry for right now.

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