Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Former Rep. Mondaire Jones, Democratic candidate for New York’s 17th Congressional District, greets a supporter during the Spring Valley NAACP 69th Annual Freedom Fund Membership Gala in Pearl River, New York, October 18, 2024.
This story is part of the Prospect’s on-the-ground Election 2024 coverage. You can find all the other stories here.
BEDFORD, NEW YORK – At the heart of the New York Democratic Party’s disastrous showing in the 2022 midterms was the picturesque and class-diverse Hudson Valley, where Republicans were able to narrowly pick up two U.S. House seats (NY-17 and NY-19), and nearly win a third (NY-18). All three seats are up for grabs again in 2024, and could prove a national congressional bellwether. The question is whether Democrats have learned from what went wrong in the region in 2022, and whether they have applied workable lessons to avoid humiliation once more.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney’s 2022 loss to Mike Lawler in NY-17 was one of the most infamous for Democrats, not just in New York state but nationwide. The race was a mess from the start, as Maloney faced allegations that he had left the district he represented for the supposedly more advantageous NY-17, and kicked out sitting Rep. Mondaire Jones in the process. Recent revelations have complicated this perception, as reporting by City & State New York earlier this year revealed that Maloney in fact offered to hand off NY-17 to Jones in May 2022.
Maloney’s general-election campaign was marred by what Alexander Sammon, writing for Slate, described as a nonexistent ground game and distant, even hostile relationships with important grassroots organizations in the district. Sammon reported, for instance, that it wasn’t until 12 days before Election Day that the Maloney campaign had any contact with the powerful Working Families Party, “and that was only in response to an email.”
Republican Mike Lawler essentially ran the quintessential “moderate” Republican campaign in the Trump era, focusing on inflation, crime, energy, immigration, and education, while distancing himself from January 6th and MAGA election denialism. He also shied away from abortion, making no mention of it on his campaign website (this time, though, he has an entire page dedicated to the issue). That was enough to win.
After moving to a New York City–area district and losing, Mondaire Jones is this time the Democratic nominee against Lawler. Jones was elected in 2020 after winning a crowded Democratic Party primary in NY-17’s previous, bluer iteration. He ran as a left-wing progressive and earned the endorsements of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julián Castro, and others.
But Jones has in the ensuing years emerged as a controversial figure. Over the summer, he endorsed AIPAC-backed George Latimer against progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the NY-16 Democratic primary. (Latimer successfully ousted Bowman, thanks in part to lots of outside money.) As a result, City & State’s Austin Jefferson noted, “the Congressional Progressive Caucus rescinded its endorsement and the New York Working Families Party … announced that it would no longer assist Jones’ campaign.” So for the second consecutive national electoral cycle, the Democratic Party nominee in NY-17 has strained relations with critical grassroots organizers.
Dorothy Venditto, an educator who lives in the Westchester County portion of the district, expressed frustration and anxiety about the campaign Jones is running this year. “I sense no urgency in this campaign’s messaging,” she said. “It’s as if his potential constituents are watching a house burn down while Jones is sitting on the sidelines watching.”
In line with his endorsement of Latimer, Jones has made his support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza central to his political persona. His website states that he has “stood up to the Squad to support Israel,” and he wrote an editorial in early October that condemned “the far left” and pro-Gaza protesters while deriding any kind of “equivocation in support for Israel’s right to self-defense.”
Venditto feels that Jones’s pro-Israel positioning comes across as “pandering” in Westchester County, “one of the largest Jewish populations in the area,” and that this focus is coming at the expense of focusing on issues specifically affecting day-to-day life in the district.
“Lawler comes across as the more experienced and serious candidate,” she lamented. “And I don’t want Lawler to win.”
Venditto said that Lawler is making smart decisions tailored to the district, including pushing for repealing the cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, and fighting congestion pricing in New York City. Both issues, while destructive in their own ways, cater to wealthy suburbanites.
“[Lawler] has also vowed to never vote for a nationwide ban on abortion,” she added. “While I don’t believe him, I imagine this messaging is landing with other voters.”
Brittainy Newman/AP Photo
Mondaire Jones and Rep. Mike Lawler (D-NY) take part in a debate earlier this month.
THE 18TH DISTRICT IS REPRESENTED BY A DEMOCRAT, Pat Ryan, who won first in 2022 in a special election and then turned around and won again in November. Ryan is best known for being one of the first congressmembers to call on Joe Biden to leave the 2024 presidential race, after the CNN debate in June.
Ryan’s opponent is Alison Esposito, a former NYPD officer who unsuccessfully ran on Lee Zeldin’s ticket as New York lieutenant governor in 2022. Esposito has embraced Donald Trump and welcomed his support, tweeting that his endorsement was a “significant milestone” for her campaign. During a televised debate against Ryan on October 9th, Esposito further tied herself to Trump on topics like the SALT cap repeal and mass deportation, and suggested that the former president’s various indictments were “political prosecutions.” She even blamed declining recruiting numbers at the West Point military academy on “woke policies.”
Some Democrats are hopeful that Esposito’s Trumpism will cost her in the polls, but Donovan Borger, a writer who has spent most of his life in the region, helped explain why Esposito has felt so comfortable running a MAGA-style campaign.
“Trump has resonance there with the conservative locals,” said Borger of the rural communities of Dutchess County. “My dad is ecstatic at the chance to vote for him again.”
Borger’s descriptions match much of what one has heard over the last decade about hard-hit areas where Trump has most resonated in rural Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Borger, who worked on a hay farm in Stanfordville, New York, as a teenager, cited numerous friends and acquaintances from the area who had died from opioid overdoses, including high school companions and family members of close friends.
“A lot of sadness and alienation and drugs,” he summarized the struggle with addiction and depression. “I don’t talk to anyone I went to high school with because the people I was close to who stayed or went back after college are conservative,” he added.
Borger, who now lives in Philadelphia, went on to explain that Trump resonates with a lot of people in his hometown because “many of them do have a boiling anger at a lack of resources to improve their lives, and nonsensical anger babble is the closest thing to that, so they listen and want to hear more.”
NY-18 is a fascinating district because it contains rural areas similar to those described by Borger, but also wealthy New York City suburbs and exurbs; college towns; small, trendy cities like Kingston; and less trendy ones like Poughkeepsie. These disparate communities sit slightly uncomfortably within minutes of each other.
Where Esposito’s messaging seems specifically targeted toward NY-18’s rural communities, Ryan appears to be running a campaign more indicative of the district’s mid–Hudson Valley geographic mishmash. Ryan has boasted of standing up to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on congestion pricing, and has been especially critical of Biden on immigration and his administration’s FEMA response to Orange County flooding in 2023. But Ryan has also embraced Bidenomics, if not in name, and speaks of expanding the Child Tax Credit and “of making the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.”
Ryan is also of course centering abortion rights in his platform. He was something of a trailblazer for successfully running on the issue in 2022. His special-election victory signaled to Democrats that abortion was a winning issue in the post-Roe context. He has continued this strategy two years later.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo
Republican House candidate Alison Esposito in October 2022
THE RACE IN NY-19, A FARM-HEAVY DISTRICT that spans west along the Catskills, is understood to be the most expensive in the country. It’s a rematch of 2022’s razor-thin election between Rep. Marc Molinaro and Josh Riley, a lawyer who worked as former Sen. Al Franken’s general counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Molinaro distanced himself from Trump in 2022 (“I am woefully aware that he’s the duly elected president of the United States,” he said) but has more closely associated with him this time. Like many Republicans around the country, Molinaro has embraced the MAGA brand on immigration and crime. Molinaro parroted the racist “Haitians eating pets” conspiracy theories and has run ads and sent campaign emails attacking “Riley for doing legal work in opposition to Mr. Trump’s Muslim ban and on behalf of the young immigrants known as Dreamers,” as reported by The New York Times.
Saying Molinaro has gone “full Trump” is an overstatement, however, while claims of “bafflement” at his taking on standard positions in the Republican Party of 2024 seem a little hysterical and politically naïve. Molinaro is a standard Northeastern GOP politician, and voted as one in Congress; qualms about recent rhetoric and campaign appearances with far-right Reps. Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) say more about the Republican Party than they do about Molinaro.
Yet the policy page on Molinaro’s campaign website is unchanged from 2022. At that time, he ran on opposing a national abortion ban, supporting “comprehensive background checks” for gun ownership, and attacking both Democrats and Republicans in Congress for a culture of insider trading. He also hit standard GOP talking points related to inflation and crime, and prevailed by less than a percentage point over Riley. Molinaro is saying a lot of these same things in 2024.
Riley is running, as he did in 2022, as a fifth-generation “Upstate New York native.” But he has come under fire then and now from Molinaro for only recently moving to Ithaca after working in Washington, D.C., for several years. Riley often attempts to portray an anti-establishment, working-class-friendly image as a candidate, but however genuine these convictions may be, the image is undermined by his associations with D.C. and BigLaw. Riley’s 2022 cash advantage over Molinaro was chalked up to contributions from “former colleagues” from law firms Riley worked at.
Said Molinaro in a TV debate earlier this month, in response to Riley touting green manufacturing in upstate New York, “It’s your law firm that represented Chevron and it is the work you did for the very corporations that have been stealing jobs from upstate New Yorkers.”
Later, Molinaro offered, “[Riley] has taken in $1 million from corporate interests … tens of thousands from the very corporations he worked for … and 12,000 donations with no information at all.”
Riley has countered by accusing Molinaro of being a do-nothing “30-year career politician,” comfortable taking money from lobbyists. He’s also run a notable ad talking about his father being laid off from IBM, his work as a lawyer taking on “greedy corporations,” and his vow to “stand up to the drug companies and utility monopolies to lower costs.”
Similar barbs were traded in 2022, and it is unclear whether voters are swayed much by the rhetorical crossfire. The two candidates may cancel each other out in that sense.
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) on Capitol Hill, September 18, 2024
A POTENTIAL WILD CARD IN ALL OF THE CLOSE RACES is Prop 1, a statewide ballot measure that would expand New York’s constitutional Equal Protection Clause to include protections on the basis of “ethnicity, national origin, age, and disability” and “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.” Prop 1’s inclusion on the New York state ballot is the culmination of a two-year effort in Albany in the wake of the Dobbs decision.
New York Democrats had likely hoped that Prop 1 would help the party and boost turnout, as other reproductive rights initiatives have in other states over the last two years. But the campaign has been hindered by confusion about the language and expansiveness of the ballot measure, and proponents have struggled to raise anywhere near the money they believed they would bring in. Opponents have sought to further muddy things up by framing it as something that would, God forbid, empower trans youth and hinder the decision-making abilities of parents.
Billboards advocating both for and against Prop 1 blanket US-9 in Dutchess and Ulster Counties. Those in favor vaguely highlight abortion and reproductive rights, while those opposed call for respecting “parental rights” and for “protecting girls sports.” Low-information voters are certain to be confused, and there is a chance that the whole thing backfires on the Democrats.
As Benjamin Oreskes wrote earlier this month in The New York Times, “strategists from both parties say the manner in which the proposition was written—without abortion explicitly mentioned—has given opponents a window to try to redefine and perhaps defeat it.”
Mondaire Jones has hardly mentioned Prop 1 at all, nor has Josh Riley. Both of their campaign websites instead make allusions to codifying abortion rights nationally and to federal legislation like the Women’s Health Protection Act and the Equality Act. Pat Ryan did hold a Prop 1 rally with state Attorney General Letitia James in Poughkeepsie in late September. On the whole, the candidates have not associated too closely with the measure.
Then, of course, there’s Kathy Hochul. Since becoming governor, Hochul has seen her personal favorability and approval ratings drop below 40 percent. The Republicans in the Hudson Valley races have relished tying their opponents to her, and the candidates, especially Pat Ryan, have made sure to distance themselves. As the Times noted in September, “not a single House swing seat candidate lists Ms. Hochul’s endorsement on their website.”
Hochul is likely aware of the potentially terminal damage to her career if her party badly underperforms in New York state once again. She has launched with the New York Democratic Party what The Buffalo News called a “$5 million coordinated campaign that boasts 40 field offices and 100 staffers statewide.” The effort will target the seven House districts seen “as the most competitive” in New York. Much of the money has been spent on get-out-the-vote campaigns, as well as supposedly bolstering Democratic messaging on crime and immigration.
Donovan Borger is highly skeptical, not just of the strategy but of the whole idea. “I don’t believe Hochul or other Democrats will use that money in ways that could actually alleviate suffering or boost communities, no,” he said.
Despite the Hochul-led effort, it is difficult to find significant strategic shifts by the Democrats from 2022 in the three battleground House districts in the Hudson Valley. One gets the sense that they are banking on favorable presidential-year turnout (though Kamala Harris may be underperforming Joe Biden in the state) and the sway of the abortion issue to make the kind of marginal difference needed for victory, rather than taking big swings to buck conventional wisdom and appeal to working-class voters. The risk is substantial, and a 2022-level performance would be bad news for Democrats, not just in New York state but nationally.
