Cait Conley Rocks Rockland County at ‘End Citizens United’ Town Hall

NANUET, NEW YORK – I’m heading east on NY Route 59, trying to keep it below 40 miles per hour. That isn’t much of a challenge, as the person driving the pickup truck in front of me can’t seem to stay in their lane. I let off the gas and put a couple of car lengths between us to maintain a safe distance. We’re both in the left lane. I’d been driving for almost two hours in rush-hour traffic. It’s a little after 5 p.m., and I’m finally approaching my destination: one of Cait Conley’s campaign offices in Rockland County.

As I prepare to turn onto College Avenue, there is a barrage of yard signs along the highway. A few support candidates for state and local office; most, however, are split between Conley and Mike Lawler, the Republican congressman she’s confident she’ll unseat on November 3.

Many of the Lawler signs seem like they were deliberately placed in front of Conley’s. When I make the turn, I see a large Conley yard sign with four small pro-Lawler ones blocking it. Two of them read “CAIT CONLEY for Congress: Data Centers for Everyone!” It’s a jab over Conley’s previous work consulting for AI companies, though she supports a federal data center moratorium and local control. Lawler claims to support local control, too. For her part, Conley has called “bullshit” on that claim, as he voted for an early version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have banned any local regulation of data centers for a decade.

The dueling yard signs were among several indicators of how contentious the race for New York’s 17th Congressional District has become. The others would soon emerge over the course of my evening in Rockland County.

Conley, a decorated combat veteran whose platform centers on affordability, immigration reform, and undoing the worst of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, hosted a town hall Tuesday alongside Tiffany Muller, president of the nonprofit PAC and advocacy group End Citizens United.

“When we win this thing,” Conley said, “we got to lower costs for families, and we got to root out the corruption, and that means we do have to get corporate money out of politics.”

Conley, a member of the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, counts herself among the roughly 300 congressional hopefuls running to unrig Washington. As Muller observed, these “unrig Washington” candidates have three core directives: reject corporate PAC money, ban stock trading in Congress, and end the pervasive influence of dark money in our elections.

Before Muller and Conley sat down moderator-style in front of an audience of at least 60 people, campaign staff had to set up more chairs to accommodate attendees who were still pouring in. In those fleeting moments, I struck up a conversation with some retirement-aged gentlemen. “Did you bring the refreshments?” one of them joked. The other, who said his name was Howard, told me: “I think everyone’s going to forget about Rockland County after Tuesday.” I couldn’t tell whether Howard was joking or not, but that sentiment spoke volumes about how closely watched this race has been, both in New York and nationally.

Republicans have cut big checks to help Lawler save his seat in the run-up to the general election. Much of that spending can be attributed to the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, which has spent nearly $9 million against Conley. According to her estimates, the total amount that Republicans and other groups have spent to defeat her is nearing $30 million, with the “majority” of it being dark money.

“I think we’re up to 11 super PACs that are spending [on] attack ads against me right now … They’re spending more attacking me than they are down in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, or in Georgia with Jon Ossoff,” Conley said. “They should be that scared. We’re coming for ’em, and change is coming.”

Republicans currently have a spending advantage of more than $7 million in the district. Moreover, as Conley pointed out: “We still have the record for the most amount of money that Republicans spent in a Democratic primary against a single candidate.” That money includes at least $1.5 million spent by a Republican-linked group in the waning days of primary season.

Following their initial reluctance to drop money on the race, Democratic PACs like the House Majority PAC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) have tried to close that spending gap ahead of the general election. Democratic heavyweights have also campaigned with Conley. These include House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who joined Conley at a rally to kick off early voting last weekend, and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Although Conley does not accept corporate PAC money, Democratic leadership committees do. Spotlight PA and NOTUS reported that almost half of the contributions Conley’s campaign has received from federal PACs came from committees that took corporate PAC money. For instance, the Jobs, Education and Families First—or JEFF—PAC and the New Democrat Coalition Action Fund each contributed $5,000 to Conley’s campaign. Both PACs have accepted contributions from defense contractors, including Honeywell International and Lockheed Martin.

Conley has walked a fine line between her ambitions to root out corruption in Washington and to establish herself within the Democratic Party. Forgoing contributions from Democratic leadership–linked PACs may be a nonstarter for her, but she has echoed the increasingly popular demand to impose term limits on Supreme Court justices. This is a significant shift from previous Blue Dogs. At the town hall, Conley applauded state-level initiatives to combat dark money in politics, namely ballot initiatives in Montana and Michigan that voters will decide next Tuesday.

“We need to make sure we have a Supreme Court that isn’t going to overturn whatever form of legislation has been put out,” Conley told the Prospect. “I think it is also empowering for states to go after this in the way that they are until the federal government can step up and do its job, but it goes back to a Congress that is going to take on things like Supreme Court term limits.”

Conley went on to emphasize that “we’ve got to stop making these things about partisan politics,” she said. “This is about having the right type of values and foundation for American government to make sure that the guardrails are there for the government to serve the people, and not corporate special interests.”

For her part, Muller spoke at length about the influence of super PACs with “innocuous-sounding names” in American politics. She argued that while overturning the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United is “a big hill to climb … there’s a ton we can do by just sending the right people to Congress that we could get passed with a simple majority vote in Congress, if we have the right leaders.” Muller also made the case for strengthening the Federal Election Commission “so we have a real cop on the beat enforcing the laws we actually have on the books again.”

All that said, the End Citizens United-Let America Vote Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization focused on reversing the Citizens United decision and ending “the unlimited and undisclosed money in politics,” was established by former DCCC operatives Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes in 2015. The prior year, Berlin and Starnes founded their consulting firm, Mothership Strategies. The firm is at the center of a tentacled political network that has measured success in elections won and short-term revenues, as opposed to voters reached and long-term donor relationships.

In a similar vein, among the super PACs that advocated for Conley over her more left-leaning primary challengers earlier this year was The Bench, which critics say has leaned into that single-minded mentality. What’s more, The Bench has ties to Precinct LLC, an opaque consulting firm serving as the hub for a billionaire-backed political influence network focused on boosting moderate Democrats at the expense of candidates who are further left. An FEC complaint filed in August by Putnam County Republican Party chair Andres Gil, who has backed Lawler, alleges that Conley’s campaign violated federal election law by coordinating with outside groups. Both her campaign and The Bench have forcefully rejected the allegations.

In any event, whatever problems Democratic consultants may have pale in comparison to the rampant flagrant corruption seen every day in the Trump administration, and Conley seems to be shifting with the political winds.

Speaking at the town hall to a room full of her supporters, Conley made clear to them that “we cannot take our foot off the gas,” calling the turnout she has seen for early voting “inspiring.”

“The way we win is by keeping this momentum and building it through Election Day,” Conley said. “We are so close. We are at the end of this, but we got to finish strong because that is the way we win.”

Even with “YMCA” by the Village People blaring outside from a red pickup truck, which had Lawler yard signs affixed to the sides and a “Democrats for Lawler” U-Haul-sized trailer hooked up to it, Conley and her supporters were unfazed.

“When we win this November,” she said, “we take back Congress, we take back our country, [and] we fix it.”