Reynoso wants to reintroduce himself to Queens voters
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Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso rallied in Brooklyn over the weekend as he launched his bid for Congress. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
By Ryan Schwach
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso hasn’t represented Queens since he left the City Council in 2021. Even then, he only represented a small sliver of the World’s Borough.
But now that the progressive 42-year-old is running for Congress, he’ll need to reintroduce himself to some Queens voters, and introduce himself to many for the first time.
“I couldn't be happier to be coming back to Queens,” Reynoso told the Eagle after a campaign rally in Brooklyn.
Reynoso is running for the 7th Congressional District, seeking to fill the shoes of retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez, and is doing so with her blessing. He is running against a Queens candidate – Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who is running with the support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America.
The race is being billed as the first heavy-weight battle between the mainstream progressive movement versus the DSA and Mamdani, its most prominent and powerful member.
In the Council, Reynoso represented a small part of Ridgewood in a district now represented by Councilmember Jennifer Gutiérrez. He left the borough entirely when he was elected Brooklyn borough president in 2021.
NY7 has a significantly larger portion of Queens than Reynoso’s former Council district, including major sections of Long Island City, Astoria, Sunnyside, Maspeth and Woodhaven.
Reynoso will need to introduce himself to those voters who are unlikely to be familiar with the borough executive.
“I'm excited to go back to Queens, the most diverse borough in the city of New York, where a lot of my Dominican family is,” Reynoso said. “I'm excited to get back there and represent them in a way that they feel that they're being represented, that they're being seen, and that their voice is heard.”
Velázquez told the Eagle that Reynoso will need to listen to Queens voters, and that he has the bonafides to do so.
“He has to meet people where they are,” she said. “Talk about his record, because many of the legislative issues that he dealt with while he was a member of the City Council have an impact, a positive impact, in those communities.”
“He is going to be meeting people while they are explaining his vision for the district, and to listen, because it's important to listen to the community,” she added.
At the federal level, Reynoso argued that many of the issues across the borough border are the same, centered around affordability and pressures from the Trump administration in Washington.
“It doesn't matter if I'm in Astoria and LIC in Queens, or I'm out here in Cypress Hills or East New York and Brooklyn, I think we're dealing with the same issues,” he said. “We need to make sure we're taking care of people.”
