Steven Raga, the first Filipino American elected to the New York State Legislature, searches his jacket for a card to hand a supporter, days before the primary that ended his Senate bid. Some campaigns are measured in votes. Others are measured in gestures like this one repeated over years | Photo by Troi Santos
When Steven Raga lost the New York State Senate primary in Queens, it wasn’t just a candidate who was defeated. It was a community’s first foothold in the chamber where New York decides — and a sobering reminder that representation doesn’t protect itself.
There is a particular cruelty in losing a race you had no business winning in the first place — and then winning it and then losing it again to someone more fashionable than you. Steven Raga never quite fit the heroic arc that American political mythology demands of its trailblazers. He wasn’t charismatic in the performed, telegenic way that modern campaigns reward. He didn’t have a famous mayor endorsing him or a senator flying in from Vermont to stand at his shoulder.
What he had was something rarer and, it turned out, far less durable: he had done the work. He had studied the bills. He had shown up, unglamorously, in committee rooms and constituent offices and community board meetings in Woodside and Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, translating the dense machinery of state governance into something the families of Assembly District 30 — Filipino Americans, Bangladeshi Americans, Nepali immigrants, Latin American working families — could actually use.
In 2022, when Raga was elected to the New York State Assembly, he became the first Filipino American — and the first Southeast Asian American — ever elected to the New York State Legislature. That sentence should require a moment of stillness. Not because firsts are inherently sufficient, but because the silence around that milestone reveals something uncomfortable about where Filipino Americans have long existed in the political imagination: nowhere. The Philippines sent more immigrants to the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century than almost any other country. Filipino Americans built California’s agricultural labor movement alongside César Chávez. Filipino nurses staffed American hospitals through Vietnam, through AIDS, through COVID. Filipino Americans constitute the second-largest Asian American group in the country, numbering nearly four million. And yet, until Steven Raga walked into the Assembly chamber in Albany in January 2023, not one of them had ever sat in the New York State Legislature.
He sat there for four years. Then, on June 23, 2026, he lost a Democratic primary for State Senate District 12 — the open seat vacated by the long-serving Michael Gianaris — to Aber Kawas, a Democratic Socialist of America candidate backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Senator Bernie Sanders, and a formidable organizing apparatus that had already, that same evening, swept several other Queens races. Raga earned 39.4 percent of the vote. The result was reported as part of a broader DSA wave, a triumph of the left’s new infrastructure. Which it was. But the telling of that story has mostly left out the particular shape of what was lost, and why it matters beyond the district, beyond Queens, beyond this election cycle.
The argument that will be made — and has already been made, implicitly, in the way the night’s results have been framed — is that this was not a loss for representation, because Aber Kawas is herself a historic figure: the first Palestinian American, the first Muslim woman elected to New York State office. That is genuinely significant, and it would be wrong to diminish it. Queens is not short on communities that have waited too long for a seat of their own. But the logic that one historic first cancels out another, or that the displacement of a Filipino American by a Palestinian American is a zero-sum trade among equally underrepresented groups, is precisely the kind of scarcity thinking that keeps those communities from accumulating the durable political power they both deserve.
What was lost on June 23rd is not reducible to identity. It is reducible to something more structural and therefore more difficult to see: the loss of embedded, district-rooted, community-accountable representation at a moment when the Filipino American community in Queens had only just begun to understand what it felt like to have it.
Representation of the kind Raga was building is not glamorous work. It is the slow accumulation of relationships, favors, knowledge, seniority, and institutional trust that turns an elected official into a power center — someone whose calls get returned, whose amendments get attached to bills, whose constituents find that their problems have a shortcut through the state bureaucracy. Raga was four years into that accumulation. He sat on the Assembly’s Aging Committee, which mattered enormously to the Filipino American community, which skews older and which relies heavily on family caregiving structures that interact with state elder-care policy in consequential ways. He was embedded in the immigrant-services network in a borough where immigration status, language access, and worker rights intersect daily with questions of housing, health, and labor.
“But the effect of what they did — mobilizing outside resources to defeat the first Filipino American legislator in New York history in his first attempt at a higher office — is a harm that deserves to be named, even if the intention was not malicious and the winner is herself a person of conscience.”
None of that gets rebuilt quickly. You don’t replace it the following cycle by running another first-generation Filipino American who hasn’t spent four years in the building. The seat Raga was trying to win — the State Senate, a body with substantially more authority than the Assembly — would have represented a generational upgrade in the community’s power. A senator can move legislation. A senator has staff. A senator sits on the Finance Committee and negotiates the budget in the back rooms that determine whether immigrant community organizations get funded. The loss of that Senate seat is not the loss of a symbol. It is the loss of a specific kind of lever, at a specific moment, when the Filipino American community in New York needed that lever most.
There is something worth naming about the structure of the race that Raga lost — not to assign blame, because both candidates ran honorably, but because the structural conditions that produced the result will reproduce themselves unless they are understood.
Aber Kawas, for all her genuine qualities, did not grow from the soil of District 12’s Filipino American, South Asian, and Latin American neighborhoods the way Raga did. She was recruited, organized, and elevated by a political infrastructure — the DSA and its mayoral patron — that is sophisticated, well-funded, and exceptionally effective at winning primaries in low-turnout urban races. That infrastructure is not rooted in the specific communities of Woodside and Elmhurst; it is portable, deployable, ideologically coherent, and national in its ambitions. There is nothing wrong with that. But there is something worth observing about what happens when a highly organized external political force drops into a district and displaces the organic political development of a community that has been building, painstakingly, toward its first real foothold in state power.
The comparison that comes to mind is not comfortable, but it is accurate: the dynamics that produced Tuesday’s result are not entirely unlike the dynamics that have historically displaced working-class communities and communities of color from their own neighborhoods — the rapid, well-resourced entry of a force that is, by its own lights, doing good, but whose timing and ambition override the slower rhythms of indigenous political development. The DSA did not set out to harm Filipino American representation. But the effect of what they did — mobilizing outside resources to defeat the first Filipino American legislator in New York history in his first attempt at a higher office — is a harm that deserves to be named, even if the intention was not malicious and the winner is herself a person of conscience.
The Filipino American community in the United States has long occupied a peculiar position in the nation’s racial imagination — too numerous to be invisible, not visible enough to be legible. Filipino Americans tend not to be seen as a monolith in the way that other Asian American communities sometimes are, partly because Filipino migration patterns are so diffuse, partly because Filipino culture in America is so heterogeneous in its regional, religious, and generational expressions, and partly because Filipino Americans have often chosen assimilation over assertion, integration over coalition. The political consequence of that orientation has been a kind of civic generosity that rarely redounds to Filipino Americans themselves: they vote, they organize, they show up for other communities’ candidates, and they are often the last community whose own candidates receive the same reciprocity.
Steven Raga understood this dynamic with unusual clarity. His decision to run for the Senate was not only a personal ambition; it was a deliberate act of community institution-building. He knew, as every immigrant community eventually learns, that there is no substitute for presence in the room — that policy is made not by the communities that are most deserving of attention but by the communities that are most capable of demanding it. He was trying to build that capacity. He was trying to teach his community, through his own career, that the machinery of state government was not irreversibly closed to them.
What happens now? Raga still holds his Assembly seat through January 2027, and there is every reason to believe he will not disappear from public life. But the window he was trying to climb through — an open seat in a heavily Democratic district, an opponent who had not yet consolidated the labor and immigrant-services alliances that Raga spent years building — that window does not reopen easily. Districts settle. New incumbents accumulate their own loyalties. The baseline from which the next Filipino American candidate must begin will be lower, not higher.
None of this is meant to argue that a Filipino American senator is categorically more valuable than a Palestinian American senator, or that representation must be distributed according to some perfectly proportional demographic formula. Both propositions would be absurd. What it is meant to argue is that the accumulation of political power by communities that have been systematically excluded from it is a long, slow, fragile process — and that its interruption, even by well-meaning actors pursuing legitimate progressive goals, has costs that are real and lasting, not symbolic and temporary.
American progressivism has an occasional blind spot here. It is very good at articulating the value of representation in the abstract and less attentive to the specific, granular, district-level conditions that make representation sustainable rather than merely symbolic. A candidate who wins a historic first is celebrated; the structural work required to ensure that first becomes a permanent presence rather than a one-cycle anomaly receives far less attention. Steven Raga’s career was, in its unglamorous way, that structural work. He was not a symbol. He was a builder.
He was building something in Woodside and Elmhurst that four million Filipino Americans in this country, and a much larger cohort of Southeast Asian immigrants who have been invisible in American political life for generations, needed him to keep building. On June 23rd, that building stopped. The interruption may be temporary; I hope it is. But hope, as the communities that produced Steven Raga well know, is not a substitute for presence in the room.
The room, at the moment, is smaller for their absence.
