Assembly candidate Aber Kawas says she didn’t move into wrong district

Did Assembly candidate Aber Kawas accidentally move into the wrong district? That’s the rumor currently flying around progressive circles – but City & State found that it is almost certainly false, an exaggeration of concerns about her decision to run in a district that she only moved to recently.

At least five people have told City & State that they have heard a variation of the following rumor: the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America originally recruited Kawas to move to Queens so she could succeed Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who represented Assembly District 36, which covers most of Astoria), only for Kawas to accidentally move a few blocks outside the district’s border, forcing her to instead run for the seat held by Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas (who represents Assembly District 34, which covers eastern Astoria and Jackson Heights).

It would be entertaining if true, but Kawas and the DSA members who recruited her to run for office are now going on the record to debunk it. Kawas told City & State that she was not intending to run for office when she moved to Queens, and the DSA said it only broached the idea of running for office with Aber after Mamdani won the mayoral primary in June 2025, at which point she had already been living in her current apartment for nearly a year.

“When I moved to Queens, I was never planning to run for office,” Kawas said. “I moved to start a new job at CLEAR (a civil rights program at the CUNY School of Law), and I spent most of the year organizing Know Your Rights workshops for local activist groups and fighting for the release of our clients who were illegally detained by ICE and the Trump administration for their advocacy for Palestinian rights.”

Kawas was born and raised in southern Brooklyn and spent time in South Africa for a master’s degree program beginning in 2019 before moving to western Queens in 2024. Documents reviewed by City & State show that Kawas moved to her current apartment – which is located in Astoria, a few blocks into Assembly District 34 – on Aug. 9, 2024. (State law requires that a state legislator live in New York for the five years preceding their election, but Kawas’ campaign said multiple election attorneys assured her that she’s eligible to run since she maintained her legal residency in New York.)

“I moved to Astoria with my partner in the summer of 2024 because it felt like the right place for us to build a family together,” Kawas said. “We have many close friends who live nearby, and I have close ties to our local mosque. … We also wanted to move somewhere where we could both easily commute to our workplaces using public transit. Basically, we moved here because it feels like home.”

On Oct. 23, 2024, nearly two months after Kawas moved to Queens, Mamdani launched his long-shot mayoral campaign. Eight months later, Mamdani unexpectedly won the mayoral primary. Around the same time, González-Rojas announced her plan to primary state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who had alienated many progressive supporters by backing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary. Suddenly, there was a real possibility that both Assembly Districts 34 and 36 would become vacant, and the DSA needed to find candidates who could run for those seats.

The job of finding those candidates fell to the co-chairs of candidate recruitment for NYC-DSA’s Electoral Working Group: Emily Lemmerman, who had once worked for Mamdani in the Assembly, and Cihan Tekay Liu. Lemmerman decided to reach out to Kawas, a longtime DSA member who played a key role in the socialist group’s campaign for the Not on Our Dime Act that Mamdani had sponsored in the Assembly. That bill would give the state attorney general the authority to dissolve nonprofit organizations that use tax-deductible donations to support organizations aiding Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

“I’ve known Aber for years from organizing together in DSA and working to introduce the Not On Our Dime Act,” Lemmerman told City & State. “The first time we ever discussed Aber potentially running for office was in July 2025. I was thinking through people I knew around the city who would be good fits for being a DSA elected and she came to mind.”

On July 12, 2025, Lemmerman and Liu sat down with Kawas and her partner at the Court Square Diner in Long Island City to discuss potentially running for office. “We talked about the basics of running a grassroots electoral campaign, and why Aber’s organizing skills made her the right fit for Albany,” Lemmerman said.

Originally, Kawas was not interested. But her comrades in the DSA begged her to reconsider. One of those people was Stylianos Karolidis, the co-host of the socialist podcast “Left on Red.” Karolidis had also been asked to run for office by the DSA, though he ultimately declined and instead supported Kawas. “I met Aber in July 2025 when we were each approached by DSA to consider running for office,” he told City & State. “She was hesitant at first, and did not make the decision lightly, and I am thrilled she’s now our endorsed candidate.” Karolidis is now serving as an informal adviser to Kawas.

Eventually, Kawas agreed to run. “It took me several months of careful consideration, but the current climate of rising fascism coupled with a historic opening for the left led me to reevaluate,” she said. “This is an important time to build our movement, run for office and do it in a way that will bring a new approach to electoral politics.”

Then the DSA had to figure out where she should run. After double-checking the district lines, it realized she was actually in Assembly District 34, which was represented by González-Rojas, rather than Assembly District 36, represented by Mamdani. So that’s where she ran.

This may be the origin of the rumor; it’s true that the DSA originally recruited Kawas to run for the Assembly, but not specifically for Assembly District 34, though the district selection question has been significantly exaggerated in subsequent tellings.

The two districts have different demographic makeups; Assembly District 36 is only about 25% Latino, while Assembly District 34 is 50% Latino, according to 2023 data. Kawas is Palestinian and not Latino. But the DSA didn’t consider that a significant issue. For the socialist organization, the priority is ensuring that a candidate has the right politics and is willing to support socialist policies in Albany.

“DSA values candidates with a strong organizing track record because we need socialist organizers in Albany if we’re going to win our agenda,” said NYC-DSA co-Chair Grace Mausser, who previously helped lead the socialist group’s candidate recruitment.

But the DSA’s somewhat cavalier approach to district ties may backfire. Kawas is not the only candidate in the race to succeed González-Rojas in Assembly District 34. She faces Brian Romero, a fellow DSA member whom González-Rojas has endorsed as her preferred successor.

Romero, who is Latino, grew up in the district (though he later moved to Mamdani’s neighboring district and only recently moved back), worked for many years as González-Rojas’ chief of staff and has close ties to many local organizations and community leaders. He has extensive experience and connections in Albany, and he has racked up impressive endorsements from Rep. Nydia Veláquez, the New York Working Families Party, Make the Road Action, Churches United for Fair Housing Action and Citizen Action of New York. In many ways, he seems the natural choice to represent the district.

“I am really thrilled that he’s decided to run to represent the community,” González-Rojas told City & State when Romero launched his Assembly campaign in October. “He grew up here. He served this district with love and care and compassion and dedication and tirelessness.”

Paradoxically, though, the very qualities that make Romero a compelling candidate in general make him an unattractive choice to the DSA. The socialist organization doesn’t want an experienced politico who knows how to play the Albany game and has loyalties to various organizations and local power players. They want a cadre DSA member – someone who believes in the DSA’s political project, is accountable primarily to the DSA’s own membership and is willing to sacrifice some of their own individual power to vote as a bloc with the rest of the DSA’s state lawmakers.

“As someone who has lived here my entire life, I’ve seen lots of politicians come and go while organizing with DSA,” Karolidis said. “I find the ones who use their political establishment ties to overemphasize their alleged connections to the district are often out of touch. Aber is someone who comes from our working-class struggle, whose father was detained by ICE and has been an organizer in New York City her entire life. She’s here to stay, and understands the importance of DSA’s socialists in office model for bringing grassroots power into Albany.”

Both Kawas and Romero applied for NYC-DSA’s endorsement; in the end, the organization’s Queens branch members voted 64%-29% in favor of endorsing Kawas and she was officially endorsed by NYC-DSA on Dec. 23.

Romero’s supporters have criticized Kawas for running to represent the district despite only living there for a year and a half. The line of attack against Kawas parallels Velázquez’s recent criticism of Assembly Member Claire Valdez, who is running for the 7th Congressional District against Velázquez’s preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Valdez grew up in Texas and moved to Queens as an adult, while Reynoso was born and raised in Brooklyn. Although both Valdez and Reynoso applied for NYC-DSA’s endorsement, the organization’s preference was clear; Valdez got more than 90% support in multiple internal votes of NYC-DSA members and was officially endorsed on Jan. 23.

In both cases, DSA has been accused of effectively “parachuting” candidates into districts where they have no community ties in order to run against less ideologically driven but more experienced progressives with stronger local connections. In an interview with The New York Times, Velázquez even suggested that Valdez – who has lived in the Queens part of the congressional district for over a decade – might not know her way around the entirety of the 7th Congressional District. It’s a potent narrative, and it’s easy to see why people who buy into it could also imagine that a DSA candidate could be so careless as to accidentally move into the wrong district after being recruited to run.

Kawas is not letting such concerns dissuade her from running. On Jan. 31, she is holding a campaign launch party at Sunrise Karahi House – a restaurant located in Assembly District 30, just one block away from the district she’s running to represent.