A healthy challenge

Polls open this coming sleepy summer Tuesday just for congressional primaries. Turnout, at least in the city’s safe Democratic districts, will be abysmal, and that’s just fine with the powers that be.

So hand it to a crop of young challengers for rousing comfortable incumbents to show voters why they merit another two years of service.

Hotel owner Suraj Patel wants to give Manhattan’s Carolyn Maloney the heave-ho. In Queens, activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez challenges Joe Crowley.

In Brooklyn, community service professional Adem Bunkeddeko says it’s time to toss Yvette Clarke, who just skated through two cycles with no primary challenger.

Clarke and Crowley did themselves no favors by initially dodging debates. In the campaigns’ final days, all three incumbents had to give up if nothing else their air of entitlement to their seats.

In this case, the challengers’ value to voters ends at their good influence on three reasonably capable incumbents. Patel’s too-clever campaigning — he’s hitting on users of the Tinder dating app — shows bizarre judgment in a town where a congressman lost his seat and now sits in prison for sexting strangers.

Ocasio-Cortez is too steeped in the Sanders school of agitation. Bunkeddeko, with an MBA, offers some innovative ideas on affordable housing and economic empowerment but still wants for sophistication.

We endorse the solid and experienced Clarke, Crowley and Maloney for reelection with a warning: Use the power the people have granted you with energy and courage, or be prepared to lose it.