Robert "Bobby" Bartels Jr., business manager of the 150-year-old Steamfitters Local 638, told Fox News the DSA candidates winning New York congressional primaries are "communists" who have no business claiming to speak for working people.
The Democrats who built their party on union halls and job sites are watching that foundation crack. When Democratic Socialists of America candidates swept two New York City congressional primaries last week, beating a five-term incumbent and a Brooklyn borough president, the reaction from at least one corner of organized labor was not applause. It was a warning.
"The more building trades people you speak to, the more they're going away from the Democratic Party," Bartels told Fox News Digital. He called the DSA politicians "communists" and described Democrat leaders as "narcissists" who double down on progressive policies that fail working people rather than reckon with why their members are leaving. Steamfitters Local 638, which represents pipefitters, HVAC technicians, welders and steamfitters across New York City and has operated for 150 years, endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race. That alone was a signal. These comments are something more direct.
The June 24 results gave the DSA its clearest New York mandate yet. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old Afro-Latino organizer, ousted five-term Congressman Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in New York's 13th District. Claire Valdez, a former union organizer and state assemblywoman, defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the 7th District to claim the seat long held by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez. Both candidates ran with the backing of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose political operation is now the dominant force in New York City Democratic politics.
Bartels cited those results directly. The socialist politicians who won, he argued, do not represent the real working class. They want open borders, and open borders, in his view, drive down union wages. "They want to support the people who want to take from the working class," he said.
Brian Kearney, the union's president, singled out Mamdani specifically. Mamdani campaigned heavily on promises to use union labor for affordable housing construction. Kearney's complaint: the mayor has not delivered. Promises made to trade unions during a campaign have a way of dissolving after the votes are counted, and Kearney is watching that pattern play out again.
A realignment years in the making
The shift is not new, but it is accelerating. Political scientists and labor analysts have tracked blue-collar defections from the Democratic Party for more than a decade. What is changing in 2026 is that union leadership, not just rank-and-file members, is now saying it out loud and on the record. Bartels is not a disgruntled member grumbling at a job site. He is the business manager of a major New York local, going on Fox News to call the party's rising stars communists.
The building trades have always occupied a specific lane in Democratic coalition politics: pro-union on wages and workplace rules, but culturally closer to the working-class conservatism that the party's professional-class wing increasingly finds uncomfortable. Border enforcement, energy permitting, pipeline work, and skilled-trades hiring are not abstractions for steamfitters. They are the job. When the DSA platform collides with those realities, the collision tends to go only one direction.
Whether other building trades locals follow Local 638's lead publicly before November will be the test. The Chevalier and Valdez victories, combined with Brad Lander's 30-point win in the 10th District, have handed the Democratic Socialist wing of the party real institutional power in New York's congressional delegation. That gives union leaders in the trades a choice: accept it, stay quiet, or do what Bartels did. If the 2024 Trump endorsement was a shot across the bow, these comments are something the national party will have to answer for in a midterm year when Democrats are counting on every piece of their traditional coalition to hold.
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