NY-7 · House

The district, in brief

New York's 7th is based in Brooklyn and Queens, including Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Woodhaven, Maspeth, Sunnyside and Long Island City. The lines are the map first used in 2024 and the district was not redrawn for this cycle. The facts record a 2024 presidential two-party margin of 47.2 for the Democrat on the current lines.

The seat is open: Democrat Nydia Velázquez, elected with 78.1% of the vote in 2024 and in office since 1993, announced her retirement in November 2025. The Democratic nominee is Claire Valdez, a first-term state assemblymember from the 37th district, whom Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the NYC-DSA selected as their candidate; Velázquez and the Working Families Party backed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and the text describes the race as a proxy conflict between the two organisations. Valdez won with 56.2% to Reynoso's 35.6%, Julie Won's 6.3% and Vichal Kumar's 1.7%, a margin the text says surprised observers. Primary polls had shown a closer race: Emerson College/WPIX (May 16–17, 2026) Valdez 23%, Reynoso 21%, undecided 43%; Data for Progress (January 15–19, 2026) Reynoso 28%, Valdez 24%, undecided 46%. The Republican listed is Melvin Rivera, an activist and tenant organizer who withdrew from the Democratic primary to run as a Republican; an independent, Priscilla Ghaznavi, is also on the ballot. As of June 30, 2026 Valdez had raised $1,693,312 with $206,842 on hand; the text gives no figures for Rivera.

Every rater listed calls the seat D: Decision Desk HQ (July 14, 2026), the Cook Political Report (February 6, 2025), Inside Elections (March 7, 2025) and Sabato's Crystal Ball (September 18, 2025). The text records no general-election polls.

A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.

The facts, each beside its sentence

Not in the source: The Republican primary section lists Rivera under 'Candidates' rather than 'Nominee'; only the infobox names him as nominee.; No fundraising figures for Melvin Rivera are given.; The only polls in the text are Democratic primary polls; there are no general-election polls, and the model's basis says no district polls.; The text gives no presidential results for the district; the only presidential number is the facts' 2024 two-party baseline.; Ratings are given only as D, with no Lean/Likely/Safe gradation.; The endorsement blocks are not labelled by candidate; attributions above rest on the narrative (Velázquez and WFP for Reynoso, Mamdani and NYC-DSA for Valdez).

Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as cfb3d3b04173; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.

Who holds the seat now

Nydia M. Velázquez (Democrat), in this chamber since 1993, 17 terms. Committees: House Committee on Financial Services; House Committee on Small Business (Ranking Member).

From the congress-legislators dataset (CC0), archived as ae8cb9477c48. For a Senate race this lists both of the state's senators; the one whose term ends in the election year holds the seat on the ballot. For a House district redrawn for 2026 it is the member elected under the old lines with this number, who may be running elsewhere; the dossier above names who is running here.

How it has voted for president

A shift of 24.9 points toward the Republicans from 2016 to 2024. county returns placed on the current lines by 2020 block population; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.

Who are the voters?

Of about 526,158 adults 25 and over. In 2020 the district voted 80.6% Democratic (two-party) for president. With the same preferences and a 2022-style midterm turnout, it would vote 80.4% Democratic: the midterm electorate alone moves the margin 0.5 points toward Republicans. Group shares are estimated from how results vary across the state's census tracts (ecological inference, anchored to Pew's 2020 validated-voter figures) and calibrated to this district's actual 2020 vote; turnout is the Census survey's state rate by race and national rate by education, whose state samples carry margins of several points.

Not answered here: how each group will vote in 2026. These are 2020 preferences; this profile is description, not yet an input to the forecast.

The money

FEC bulk candidate summaries through June 30, 2026; $2,244,260 of independent expenditures for or against these candidates this cycle (FEC Schedule E, types 24E and 24A), which is the parties' and outside groups' own revealed view of whether this seat is in play.

The district in numbers

ACS 5-year 2023, the Census Bureau's own tabulation of this district (118th Congress lines). Unemployment is the BLS county series placed on the district by block population, not seasonally adjusted, so changes are same-month comparisons. Income, transfers and jobs are BEA county accounts placed the same way, compared with the average district. Every other figure is a named column of a named table in the Bureau's summary file, archived before it was read. This is what a reader knows about a district before looking at a poll; the model does not yet use it, and whether it should is a registered question.

Who is favoured, and by how much?

The 90% interval runs from +48.3 to +78.3 points, D-R. It is wide because this district has never been polled.

What is this built on?

A model trained on every contested House race 2012-2024 predicts this district's lean from its own record: presidential and House results on the current lines, incumbency, both candidates' prior offices, outside and party money before 1 October, demographics and public-assistance shares from the Census release before the election, local unemployment and income, and religious tradition. The national margin comes from presidential approval, the economy, the midterm penalty and the generic ballot corrected for its measured lean. Draws share national and state errors, so the seat total and this district come from the same simulation.

Not answered here: district polls, which are not yet folded in.

Why does the model say this?

Each figure is how far this district's predicted lean moves when that one feature is set to the typical value across 2026 districts, everything else held: 2024 presidential lean (D+48.7): 46.0 pts toward the Democrat; 2024 House lean (D+58.9): 14.4 pts toward the Democrat; experience gap (+2 levels, D minus R): 12.1 pts toward the Democrat; PAC money balance: 8.2 pts toward the Democrat; social security share (19.9%): 3.5 pts toward the Democrat.

How sure is it, and of what?

Total sd 9.08 points, made of the seat's own volatility 91%, correlated polling error 9%. The decomposition is stored with the forecast rather than reconstructed, so a probability whose dominant input is a placeholder is visibly that.

Not answered here: a nowcast. 'If ballots were cast today' needs something that observes today, and for a House district nothing does. Publishing the election-day figure under both labels would make one forecast look like two.

How was this number made?

Run 6f211e6f-2bdc-4dda-8f72-81fc628dab0b, house_district_prior/0.2.0, as of 2026-10-02. Promoted by a pre-registered gate: on 2016-2022 its Brier score was 0.036 against 0.049 for the previous method, and on a single 2024 run 0.023 against 0.032 (experiments/district_gate_result.md, with an independent review).