The Brooklyn district represented by retiring Rep. Major Owens includes the Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Boro Park, and the thoroughly gentrified neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, where brownstones sell for millions of dollars to bankers and lawyers who commute to jobs on Wall Street.

Prime turf for a centrist Democrat or a Republican seeking to break into Congress? Not if the Democratic primary in the race to replace Mr. Owens in New York’s 11th congressional district is any indication. Each of the five Democrats running has signaled support, to varying degrees, for impeaching President Bush, rolling back his tax cuts, and legalizing same-sex marriage.

“I think in that district you have to be in favor of mandatory gay marriage,” Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat representing a nearby congressional district that includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, said. “The electorate is rewarding extreme positions right now” because partisan redistricting has created “overwhelmingly Democratic and overwhelmingly Republican districts,” he said.

Senator Kerry beat Mr. Bush in the district in 2004, roughly 80% to 20%. Mr. Kerry did better in the 11th than he did in the city as a whole. Observers say that the gentrification of the district may have had the effect of making it more politically liberal.

“This isn’t the old Shirley Chisholm seat,” political consultant Joseph Mercurio said, referring to Mr. Owens’s predecessor, the first black woman ever elected to Congress. She retired in 1982, the year Mr. Owens was first elected. Today, the district includes bigger portions of Park Slope than when Mr. Owens first took office, and grew to include Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.

“Now, it’s all New York City people, the yuppies came,” Stephen Raiola of Brownstone Real Estate, LLC said. “Twenty years ago they were giving them away. Now, you can’t touch anything for less than a million five, a million six for a brownstone.”

Those new, well-financed residents “are standard-issue Upper West Siders,” a history professor at Cooper Union, Fred Siegel, said. “People who want to stay in New York come to Brooklyn and bring with them the same attitudes they had in Manhattan. The idea that the district would get more gentrified and more left-wing at the same time is perfectly plausible.”

“Sure, the old blue-collar Irish, Italian working class that lived in those neighborhoods 35 years ago were much more to the right,” a political consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, who is not affiliated with any of the candidates, said.

The candidates are state Senator Carl Andrews, City Council members David Yassky and Yvette Clarke, state Assemblyman Nick Perry, and Chris Owens, Rep. Major Owens’s son.

“I think on at least 80% of the issues we agree,” Mr. Andrews said.

The biggest difference so far is over gay marriage, which Mr. Perry said he personally opposes but may vote to legalize. While Mr. Perry was trying to explain his position at a candidate’s forum last month in Park Slope, one man in the audience simply raised both hands and pointed Mr. Perry to the door.

The other candidates have said they support gay marriage, and all five said they do not support the president’s tax cuts.

There is just as much unanimity for impeaching Mr. Bush, a notion that is not popular among even House Democrats. A resolution in the House of Representatives that accuses the president of “manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture” and “retaliating against critics” has only 31 co-sponsors, including Mr. Owens.

Mr. Owens said his son is the only candidate calling for impeachment, and that the other candidates are “taking a very cautious approach” and “they’re not representing the people in the district” with such a position.

“Through his own admissions, how ever, President Bush has really challenged us, in actuality dared us, to define his actions as ‘high crimes or misdemeanors’ and to impeach him,” Chris Owens wrote on his campaign Web site. “How can we believe in the rule of law and not respond?”

“I think it is appropriate to look at whether or not impeachment is the proper action to take,” Mr. Perry said in a recent interview. During a rally on the City Hall steps denouncing cutbacks in federal aid for housing programs in the city, Mr. Yassky said an investigation into the president’s action should take place.

“Whatever procedure can take place should take place … before you get to impeachment, censureship should be the first step,” Mr. Andrews said.

“I definitely believe impeachment hearings are in order,” Ms. Clarke, who ran again Mr. Owens in 2004 and whose mother, Una, ran against him in 2000, said.

“The whole issue of wiretapping Americans, you know, without going to the courts, is another reason we see power gone amok at the executive level,” Ms. Clarke said while walking Tuesday afternoon from a City Hall rally to a City Council hearing across the street before heading to Washington, D.C., for a fund-raiser that night.

Her campaign Web site calls for “ending the war in Iraq and bringing our soldiers home immediately,” saying, “Our security is not strengthened by irrational demonstrations of military might.”

Mr. Owens’s Web site says he supports constitutional amendments for “quality and affordable health care, education, housing, and the right to vote – amongst other things.”