By: Jordan Baker
A Democratic Socialists of America–backed challenger hoping to knock off one of former Mayor Eric Adams’ closest allies in Albany is marketing himself as a champion of the working class — while quietly downplaying a background critics say is anything but blue collar, as the New York Post first reported.
David Orkin, a 34-year-old lawyer affiliated with the George Soros-backed immigrant advocacy group Make the Road New York, is running in the June Democratic primary against Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar in Queens’ 38th Assembly District. Orkin has pitched himself as a grassroots, working-class alternative who would advance Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist agenda in Albany, the New York Post reported.
But that carefully crafted image leaves out some key biographical details.
As the New York Post reported, Orkin grew up not in a struggling New York household, but in Rockville, Maryland — a wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb — and is the son of Dr. Bruce Orkin, a prominent colorectal surgeon whose career reads more like an elite résumé than a working-class struggle story.
Dr. Orkin’s professional background includes a long tenure at George Washington University Medical Center, where his LinkedIn profile boasts of treating “patients from the White House, Congress, Supreme Court and many embassies,” according to records cited by the Post. He is now a clinical professor and residency program director at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.
Property records reviewed by the New York Post show Dr. Orkin and his wife own a Chicago condo valued at nearly $1 million, along with a second condo in Kissimmee, Florida, worth close to $400,000.
Despite that upbringing, David Orkin has leaned heavily into progressive identity politics on the campaign trail. While launching his run, he described himself as the “proud son of a Mexican immigrant mother whose Jewish grandparents fled pogroms,” framing his candidacy around heritage and activism rather than his own socioeconomic reality, as the New York Post reported.
His academic path also raises eyebrows among critics of the DSA playbook. Orkin earned his undergraduate degree from Vassar College — one of the country’s most expensive and ideologically left-leaning schools — before graduating from CUNY Law School in 2022. While at Vassar, Orkin wrote a senior thesis focused on “whiteness” at a Poughkeepsie farmers market, an exercise critics mock as textbook ivory-tower activism disconnected from everyday concerns, the New York Post reported.
Rajkumar’s seat has become a prime target for the DSA, which has been aggressively recruiting challengers to unseat moderate Democrats across New York. Rajkumar, the first Indian-American elected to state office in New York, has frequently clashed with far-left lawmakers and was closely aligned with Adams during his mayoralty — a relationship that earned her the nickname “the Lady in Red,” as the New York Post reported.
Community leaders say Orkin fits a familiar pattern: affluent, highly educated activists parachuting into diverse districts while claiming to speak for working families.
