India Walton stuns longtime incumbent in Buffalo mayoral primary.
A progressive challenger running her first campaign beat Buffalo’s four-term Democratic mayor in a primary upset on Tuesday that could upend the political landscape in New York’s second-biggest city and signal the strength of the party’s left wing.
The challenger, India B. Walton, is a nurse and community activist who ran with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party. When The Associated Press called the race Wednesday morning, Ms. Walton was leading Byron Brown, a longtime member of the Democratic establishment, by 7 percentage points, or about 1,500 votes, with all of the in-person ballots counted.
Should Ms. Walton, 38, triumph in the general election in November — a likely result in heavily Democratic Buffalo — she would be the first female mayor in Buffalo’s history and the first socialist mayor of a major American city since 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor.
Her victory came decades after the country’s most prominent democratic socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders, served as mayor of Burlington, Vt. Mr. Sanders was mayor for eight years before he was elected to Congress and has run for president twice as a Democrat.
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