You wouldn’t expect that the battle road to recapturing the House of Representatives would run through a tiny Mexican restaurant next to a desolate Hudson Valley highway in an area Donald Trump won by double digits in 2020. But here’s Mondaire Jones anyway, tall and in a herringbone blazer, trying to get a regiment of voters to go out and recruit their neighbors to vote for Democrats.
“Have you seen what the former guy is now saying he’s going to do if he returns to the White House?”
“Booooooooo!” says a woman sitting at the bar, sipping a Tito’s and juice at 11 a.m.
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“Can you imagine not having a Democratic Congress?”
“No! Noooooooo!”
Yes. Perhaps it was a lack of imagination that caused the New York Dems to fall down on the job in 2022, when a handful of surprising losses helped Republicans to barely take control of the House despite being thwarted elsewhere. The much-hyped red wave that materialized almost nowhere else in the country did come ashore in New York. New York! A state that hasn’t gone red since Ronald Reagan. Sean Patrick Maloney, then chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, lost to Republican Michael Lawler in New York’s 17th District in the Lower Hudson Valley. In the 3rd District on Long Island’s western edge, Democrats failed to defend a seat from George Santos. In all, Democrats lost four congressional seats in districts that Biden won by double digits in 2020.
New York. If you can blow it there, you can blow it anywhere.
“Hell, the f---ing leader of the Democrats in both chambers of Congress are from New York,” says Jones, a former congressman who is vying to unseat Lawler, referring to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “It’s embarrassing what happened in this state in 2022.”
This year, the party is looking to redeem itself.
They have already clawed back one of those four Republican districts, with Rep. Tom Suozzi winning a special election in the 3rd after Washington gave Santos the boot. Three other GOP midterm wins — the 4th, 17th and 19th districts — are on the priority list for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and party officials may also take aim at seats that Republicans held before 2022. But first, they have to get through the June 25 primary.
During the Trump era, the election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives nationwide inaugurated an era of political ascendancy for the left that remained powerful through the racial justice uprisings of 2020. But afterward — amid the economic reverberations of the coronavirus pandemic, an uptick in crime and an influx of migrants from the southern border — parts of the state appeared to redden. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul came within six points of losing the governorship to Lee Zeldin, a Trump ally who had voted against the certification of Joe Biden’s election as a member of Congress. Voters in the five boroughs chose as their mayor Eric Adams (D), a former officer who’s against the defund-the-police movement and who last year said the flow of migrants “will destroy New York City.”
During Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan last month, the former president held a rally in Crotona Park, in the heavily Black and Latino South Bronx, where he delivered essentially the same message: that citizens are “losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose” because of the newcomers.
“We have allowed Republicans and their right-wing media allies to define those issues in ways that are favorable to Republicans,” says Mark Levine, the Democratic Manhattan borough president. “You look at Trump’s speech in the Bronx and these are, like, the three biggest issues he talked about, were crime, homelessness and immigration. I mean, he knows what he’s doing on that, right? He was plugging into that discontent.”
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Some swing-district Dems are leaning into the messaging they say helped Suozzi retake the Santos seat: liberal on abortion, tough on the border, pro-cop, pro-Israel. There’s a flavor of centrism that tastes of 2022 — just with more money behind it this time. The House Majority PAC, the main super PAC supporting Democratic candidates, spent $7.4 million in the four key districts Republicans won in 2022 (but no money on the race Maloney lost); this year, it has reserved $16 million in ads in the New York City media market, which also covers Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley. Battleground New York, a grass-roots organizing coalition, hopes to fan out volunteers to knock on 120,000 doors in each of six districts. A campaign led by Jeffries, Hochul and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is aiming to spend seven figures on turning out New Yorkers, with a focus on young voters and people of color.
Will it be enough?
The bridge-and-tunnel crowd is fickle and finicky: This month, New York magazine reported that concerns about losing votes in swing districts led Hochul to dead-end a long-expected plan to tax drivers coming into Manhattan — a claim her office disputes. And as usual, Trump is an X factor. He wasn’t on the midterm ballot. In November, he’ll be front-and-center — as will Biden.
“My feeling,” Levine says, “is that even the best-run Democratic House race can be overwhelmed if Trump surges in any of these competitive districts.”
I wish that I had not been so affected,” Jones says, driving with his campaign manager through one of those competitive districts, “by watching Black people get brutally murdered despite being unarmed.”
In 2020, a few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Jones had thrown his support behind the defund-the-police movement on his way to a smooth victory in a blue district. He was an up-and-coming agitator in Washington then, a deputy whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Then, ahead of his reelection bid in 2022, New York’s 17th District was redrawn to include Putnam County, a Trump-leaning area to the north — and to exclude White Plains, where Jones lived. With Maloney running in the new version of the 17th, Jones ran for a different seat and lost his primary.
“We cost Congress the Democratic majority,” he says. “And it is absolutely on New Yorkers to fix it.”
Jones, 37, is now on a particular kind of comeback quest. He’s moved to Sleepy Hollow, inside the new boundaries of his old district, and launched a campaign to unseat Lawler.
The redrawn district is redder than it once was. And Jones has changed, too.
He now calls the defund-the-police slogan “one of the dumbest phrases ever to exist in American politics.” He boasts about voting for “record levels of law enforcement funding,” as he told the crowd in Patterson, and has attacked Lawler for voting to trim funding from the budgets for the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies. He says he’s still in favor of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which he voted for while in the House; that bill proposed limits on no-knock warrants, chokeholds, transfers of military equipment to police departments and the use of qualified immunity, but it never became law.
Then there’s the war in Gaza. Jones has broken with the progressive wing of his party and not called for a permanent cease-fire. He has endorsed the Democrat trying to defeat his former ally Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) in the primary, saying his stances on the war in Gaza have caused “anxiety, fear and anger” among Jews in Jones’s district. That led the Congressional Progressive Caucus to un-endorse Jones.
“There is a loud chorus of people who are working to redefine progressivism to mean anti-Israel,” Jones says. “And if they are to be successful, then I don’t want to be part of that, I don’t want to, I don’t want that label.”
He was riding shotgun in a black Hyundai SUV with a gash on its rear bumper, and arrived at a drab strip mall in Yorktown — which was part of his old bailiwick — to rally door-knockers for a local candidate. After talking her up to the elderly crowd, he stepped out into the parking lot for a group photo. Then a 67-year-old woman named Maura Gregory approached him. People sensed tension. She made heads turn when she raised her pitch.
“And the United States is causing it!” she said as she walked away.
Causing what?
“She refers to what’s happening as a genocide, which I disagree with,” Jones said, before getting in his car. “And said that she won’t carry literature for me if I don’t send her my position in a way that is satisfactory to her.”
He didn’t seem rattled that someone who supported him in 2020 would conscientiously object to his stances now.
“It is incumbent upon me to explain that, as I mentioned to Maura today, your ideological purity tests are things that we don’t have the luxury for in this country, because we are facing the end of democracy itself and the stripping away of basic freedoms and starving babies in the United States of America.”
In a cul-de-sac in Setauket, on Long Island, Richard Bronstein watches John Avlon from a floral-print armchair by the coffee table. He is one of about 30 guests at the home of a local dentist who have come to take the measure of Avlon, a candidate in the Democratic primary. Bronstein, a 75-year-old former attorney, is worried about omens he is seeing here — cars festooned with “F--- Biden” signs rolling around the county.
“So, I just saw this movie called ‘Civil War,’” Bronstein says to Avlon. “It does raise the question: How close are we?”
Avlon, a 51-year-old former Daily Beast editor in chief and on-air CNN journalist, looks down at the cream-colored carpet and nods. He wears the kind of look you might expect from a TV anchor: navy suit, white button-down, black Chelsea boots, bronzed complexion. He made $625,000 a year at CNN, but the idea of running for public office, he would tell the crowd, “felt a lot more satisfying” than giving his takes on the news.
About the civil war?
“I wrote a book called ‘Wingnuts’ over a decade ago about extremism in the Republican Party and the feedback loop and where this stuff comes from,” Avlon says. “And to me, when people raise the specter of a second Civil War, it is such an insult. It shows they know nothing about our history. But there are some things you got to keep in mind to feel better so you don’t, you know, watch that movie and think we’re teetering on the brink.”
Avlon loves talking. About his books. And about history in general, kind of a Special Interest among the retirees of this slice of New York’s 1st Congressional District, a wide tract of working-class towns and middle-class suburbs and uber-rich redoubts — like the Hamptons and Sag Harbor, where people have the time to consume history books like beach novels. (Avlon lives in “Sag.”)
He tells Bronstein that the conditions just aren’t there now — then, states had organized armies and slavery was a “fundamental contradiction” of the American idea. “For all our challenges,” he says, “we don’t have those kinds of dynamics that can lead to inexorable escalation.”
So Avlon moves on to issues less existential than civil war, such as helping taxpayers claim bigger deductions on their state and local taxes.
It might not shock you to learn that the well-off, middle-aged White guy with a jones for historical nonfiction is closer to the political center than he is to the edge. He calls his time writing 9/11 eulogies for then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani a “defining moment” of his life. He later wrote commentary pieces for the conservative Manhattan Institute with titles like “What Independent Voters Want” and “California Agonistes.” He endorses the broken windows theory, the 1980s idea that visible signs of disorder, like a broken window or a run-down building, lead people to feel unsafe. (That notion became the basis of Giuliani’s crackdown on low-level crimes in New York City in the ’90s.) He co-founded No Labels in 2010.
Avlon is not running to undo a Democratic loss from 2022, but rather to flip a seat New York Republicans have held for almost a decade. Either he or his primary opponent, Nancy Goroff — a wealthy former Stony Brook University chemistry professor who has tried to use Avlon’s conservative bona fides against him — would be fighting uphill against Republican Rep. Nick LaLota, who won the district by 11 points in 2022. If there’s a path to victory for a Democrat here, Avlon is betting it’s through the purplish middle.
“This stereotype of New York being farther than the far left doesn’t fit the historical patterns,” he says later, over Buffalo wings at a nearby restaurant, somewhere in a five-minute mini lecture in which he name-checks Roosevelt and Rockefeller and La Guardia. “When you see it, New Yorkers will support the most courageous candidate who represents the vital center and who’s a reformer, not a machine cog.”
On immigration, Avlon is toeing the latest Democratic Party line: knocking Republicans for allowing Trump to torpedo a bipartisan Senate bill that would’ve imposed restrictive limits on immigration at the southern border — a page from the Suozzi playbook. He’s received the endorsem*nt of establishment figures like the New York Democratic Party chair. In Setauket, he warned the crowd that any Republican they voted for would reelect Mike Johnson (R-La.) as House speaker and that Johnson would in turn try to pass a national abortion ban. He praised Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) for his strident support of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Perhaps in Avlon’s eyes, those aren’t conditions that could lead to an inexorable escalation. Still, against the backdrop of Trump and everything that goes with him, Bronstein didn’t feel very reassured by the dismissive answer about what kind of a historical moment this election season might portend — not just for New Yorkers, but for everyone.
“This time, we’re divided, but the right wing just seems to be much more violently inclined. I mean, what with the militia groups out there … they would rebel in another civil war. I think they would be the spearhead of it,” Bronstein says later, by phone. “So I don’t think it’s all that far-fetched.”
At this time two years ago, it didn’t seem all that far-fetched to think Laura Gillen would win her House race against Republican Anthony D’Esposito. Democrats had represented New York’s 4th District, also on Long Island, since 1997, and Biden beat Trump there in 2020 by 12 points. In Gillen’s 2022 race, the House Majority PAC would spend about the same as its Republican counterpart. And Gillen, elected in 2017 as the first Democratic town supervisor of Hempstead in 112 years, wasn’t a new face around here.
Then she lost.
“I got in the race really late and had a short runway to try to put together the effort that I needed to make sure all our people came out to vote,” Gillen says, waiting for her chamomile tea at a diner in Baldwin. “And quite honestly, I think there was a lot of folks who thought that this was just a safe seat.” She also suggests her loss might have had something to do with Zeldin, a Long Islander, boosting Republican turnout in the 4th, and Hochul, the Democrat from Buffalo, not having a similar effect on local Democrats.
This time around, those politicians aren’t in the mix, and Gillen, 54, launched her campaign in May — of last year. She calls herself a moderate (noticing a trend here?) and is hoping to peel off some dissatisfied Republicans. To wit: She says one of her Republican friends was throwing “a little house party for me” so that she could talk to her neighbors.
“If Laura Gillen doesn’t win, we’re not going to win,” Suozzi says. “The Democrats are not going to win.”
Gillen expects Republicans to attack Democrats on crime. It appeared to work last time: Two years ago, D’Esposito used a 2019 bail revision project that was passed by Democrats in the state legislature to cast Gillen as a public safety liability. “What the Democrats and people like Laura Gillen have supported over the past years in instituting cashless bail has created and caused havoc amongst our streets,” D’Esposito said in a debate against her in 2022.
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The bail project, passed in part to reduce the number of people in pretrial detention, meant certain individuals accused of nonviolent offenses would be released while awaiting trial without having to post bail, as long as they weren’t considered flight risks. Gillen opposed it in 2022, as she does now. Her public safety platform focuses on getting guns off the street and lowering retail theft.
Still, the Democrat expects D’Esposito and other Republicans to try to double down on the soft-on-crime narrative. “That’s their issue,” she says. “And they’ve been doing a good job, right? Because they’ve been winning all these seats — even though, you know, you can look at the stats.”
Let’s look at the stats. From 2020 to 2022, New York City recorded a 28 percent increase in violent crimes and a 36 percent increase in property crimes, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, while Nassau County recorded 24 and 56 percent increases, respectively, over the same period. In 2023, those numbers rose again in Nassau — but by only 5.2 and 3.7 percent, respectively. The state database does not have comparable data for New York City in 2023, but according to the New York Police Department, major felony offenses (murder, felony assault, rape, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and grand theft auto) in the city remained at roughly the same level in 2023 as in 2022. So far in 2024, the city has recorded a 2 percent decline in those offenses, and Hochul announced in June that violent and property crimes outside the city decreased 10 percent in the first quarter of 2024. The Nassau County Police Department did not respond to requests for its 2024 crime data.
Stats aside, buzz about city crime can still shape attitudes in the suburbs. On a per capita basis, crime is lower in Nassau than it is in the city of New York. But Insha Rahman, the director of Vera Action, a New York-based anti-mass incarceration group that conducts research on crime and safety issues, says there’s a perception problem Democrats have to contend with: Long Islanders are seeing a lot of coverage of crime. “So you hear from Long Island voters and Hudson Valley voters who literally never take the subway or do it once or twice a year when they go into the city for, like, a weekend out,” she says. “Like, they are desperately worried about crime on the subways or retail theft, none of which is going to happen to them.”
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This year, the Republicans’ havoc-in-the-streets narrative is intertwined with the presence of migrants in the city. “The migrant issue equates to crime,” D’Esposito told Politico in January — though there appears to be little statistical support for a “migrant crime wave” in New York, and migrants have generally long been imprisoned at lower rates than the native-born. Gillen, who supports the bipartisan border bill that died in the House this year and Biden’s subsequent executive actions, wouldn’t push back on Adams’s rhetoric about how migrants could “destroy” the city. (The mayor has said housing and caring for asylum seekers in shelters could cost the city $12 billion by the end of 2025.) Gillen says that if elected to Congress, she’ll advocate for sending more federal money to the city to alleviate its strained resources as it deals with the newcomers.
On the other side of the diner, after Gillen leaves, John Kanaras sits at the coffee counter in a black T-shirt and a New York Islanders hat. Kanaras, 61, is the co-owner of this place, and he’s lived on Long Island all his life. He voted for Trump but has since gotten turned off by him, and says he doesn’t “partake in the Democrat or Republican crap.” He wishes Democrats would cool it with the no-bail stuff. (“Stop it. It’s crazy. It’s insane.”) But he also says people around here worry too much about crime. (“There’s so little of it. They don’t get it.”)
Kanaras didn’t know Gillen was running, but he did remember D’Esposito coming by his diner once and asking for his vote. He says he thinks the Republican is a good guy, despite disagreeing with his politics, and has seen him on TV a lot.
How does he think things will go in November?
“D’Esposito is going to beat her. He’s going to stay.”
A win for the New York Republican: not a lock, just easier to imagine this time.
