Her opponent, the Democratic incumbent Pat Ryan, a forty-two-year-old West Point grad, isn’t so sure that fear will motivate the district’s voters. “I’ve spent maybe too much time trying to understand, actually, what she’s about, what drives her, and what the heck they’re doing with their campaign strategy,” he said, of Esposito, one recent morning, seemingly bemused. Remembering his last race, in 2022, he said, “All the Republican ads at that time were sirens. We ran an ad, it was just me and my six-month-old at the time, strapped to my chest on a BabyBjörn.” We were having coffee outside Rough Draft Bar & Books, in Kingston’s revitalized old downtown. Ryan knows Rough Draft’s owners, and during the hour we sat there several people moseying past stopped for a word with him. “This is a purple district,” he said. “What I’ve learned, in just a few times doing this, is that what we talk about”—for Ryan, this means abortion rights, housing, and local issues like utility costs—“is maybe more important than certain positions on certain topics.” He took pains to discuss immigration and crime as two separate matters, and tended to mention the opioid epidemic—a significant issue in his district—when talking about crime.
Republicans see Ryan as the toughest Democrat to beat among those in competitive New York races, and Democrats evidently see him as a talent worth nurturing. He first ran for Congress in August, 2022, in a special election to fill a vacancy. All the polls had Ryan losing, but he won by thirty-eight hundred votes. It was among the first federal elections to take place after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and the Party saw the victory as an early sign of how abortion rights could motivate voters. Ryan has since shown a willingness to run ahead of his party, in ways that have caught the eye of the leadership. He came out against congestion pricing as early as January, when Hochul was still ardently supporting it; in July, while Hochul continued to pledge support for Biden’s candidacy, he was one of the first congressional Democrats to call for the President to step aside. At the D.N.C., the Governor was given a speaking slot on Monday, the opening night. Ryan got a slot on Thursday, in prime time, a few hours before the nominee herself took the stage.
For years, the New York State Democratic Party’s apparent lack of interest in winning close elections has been a source of dark humor. “Everything just seems to be behind the scenes to the point where nothing is happening,” Erica Vladimer, a Democratic state committee member, told me. “We don’t have a party.” This year, Hakeem Jeffries, who stands to become Speaker if Democrats retake the House, has teamed up with Hochul and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on a joint fund-raising and field effort to dispel the notion of Party neglect in New York. Jeffries has visibly stepped beyond his power center in New York City to babysit the key districts in the city’s suburbs. “To win in New York, we gotta win your district,” Jeffries recently texted Josh Riley, the Democratic nominee in the Nineteenth District. “So no pressure.”
One night in August, I attended the Chenango County Fair with Riley, a tall and affable forty-three-year-old who looks strikingly like a young Bill de Blasio. Before he came back home to the Nineteenth District, Riley was Al Franken’s lawyer in the Senate, and there’s still something of the staffer’s deference and determination in his manner. At the fair, he went around shaking the hand of every guy he could find wearing a red hat. Modern campaigning best practices say that Democrats should consider anyone in MAGA gear hopelessly committed to the other side. Riley felt that, to win, he had to make contact with every person in the district.
This year’s race in the Nineteenth is a rematch between Riley and the incumbent Republican, Marc Molinaro, who became the mayor of Tivoli in 1995, at the age of nineteen, and has been involved in regional politics ever since. The Nineteenth, which runs from the Hudson Valley through the Finger Lakes region, is largely rural or post-industrial—more like the Rust Belt than Scarsdale. (“We’re the places where the state put mental institutions and the jails and then shut them down,” Molinaro told me.) Riley is telling voters that Molinaro is a stooge for the oil industry and other corporate interests, while Molinaro smears Riley as a local kid who left to make money in Washington. If politics were actually a spectrum, the two would be as close as any two opponents in the state—they both have criticized Biden’s handling of the border, for instance—but they each believe that the other represents the worst of their respective parties. “He’s a fraud,” Molinaro told me, of Riley. “I’ve walked by his million-dollar house.” (Zillow estimates the value of Riley’s house at $589,300.)
At the fair, most Republicans whom Riley approached listened politely. One woman who supported Trump told him she was opposed to sending military aid to Ukraine. “A lot of the support that the United States is giving to Ukraine is actually being used to manufacture munitions in Endicott,” he said, referring to his home town. “So it’s money that’s actually being used for American manufacturing.” No dice. “Maybe I just wasted twenty minutes,” Riley said, after speaking with one middle-aged white guy who wanted to talk about food access. “But I don’t feel that way.” Two years ago, Riley lost to Molinaro by forty-five hundred votes out of a total of nearly three hundred thousand; back then, his campaign could afford only three field organizers. This cycle, thanks to extra dollars coming from the Party, he had thirteen—a meaningful difference in a race this close.
By a concession stand, I tracked down one Trump supporter whom Riley had talked to, who said he’d served in the Army. He thought Democrats were behind Trump’s near-assassination, in July. In fact, he said, if you looked back at history, every Presidential assassination could be tied to Democrats. Jeffrey Epstein came up, as did the New World Order. The man talked of Trump as a physical marvel, and a man willing to stay up all night working. (The proof was in how late at night he posted on social media.) But was he open to voting for Riley, after talking to him? He told me he’d have to think it over.
One group of people who don’t believe that Democrats in New York are weak: New York Republicans. “The problem Democrats have is that they control everything,” Mike Lawler said recently. “They control everything in Albany. They control everything in New York City.” A former Party operative, Lawler has very quickly stood up a political operation in the lower Hudson Valley. His win over Maloney in 2022 was to New York Republicans something like what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary upset, in 2018, was to New York lefties. “For a long time after Pataki, we had a moment where we didn’t think we’d ever win a race again,” a former aide to the Republican governor George Pataki, who won his last race in 2002, told me. If Lawler can beat Jones in November, many expect him to run for governor in 2026, an aspiration he barely conceals in conversation. Even Jones acknowledges Lawler’s political skills. “We have a rapport,” he told me. “I also see him very clearly for who he is. Unlike other people, I am not charmed.”
I recently drove up to see Lawler hold “mobile office hours” in Putnam County. He’s short, and he sports the kind of wraparound beard that used to read as Brooklyn hipster and now increasingly reads as D.C. conservative. He kept his suit buttoned up as he spoke. One attendee was worried that Harris planned to confiscate guns. “I do not support mandatory gun buybacks,” Lawler told him. The attendee was also upset that trees near his home had recently been cut down to install a solar-panel field. “I do believe in climate change,” Lawler said. A woman standing in the back doorway raised her arms in exasperation. She hadn’t come to hear about climate change. She wanted to talk about crime. Actually, she wanted to talk about immigration. “What can Congress do to close the borders at this point, and stop some of these criminals that are coming in and wrecking our country?” Lawler nodded sympathetically, but said he supported a “pathway” to bring undocumented immigrants out of “the shadows.”
Later, I met Lawler at a Dunkin’ in Mahopac. He struck me as a guy who’d done some reading—on climate, on housing, on the migrant crisis. He avoided talking too much about Trump. “Look, he is who he is,” he said. “That’s baked in.” Like other ascendant New York Republicans, he had a set of examples he brought up to illustrate his distance from the more conservative reaches of his party: he emphasized that he opposed Representative Jim Jordan’s bid for Speaker of the House, that he is willing to concede holding a minority opinion on abortion rights, that he pushed to expel Santos from Congress when folks like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene were embracing him, and that he believes that Biden did, in fact, win the 2020 election. Lawler is proud of scoring high on rankings of bipartisanship in Congress, yet occasionally a Trump-like aggressiveness comes through.
“What happens in New York doesn’t stop at the city’s edge,” he said, certain that the New York City cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and other commuters who live in his district would put him over, even if registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by eighty thousand. (Jones often touts this fact.) Lawler told me that he had experienced the city’s recent problems firsthand. He’d been standing on the street in midtown Manhattan when, in his words, a “migrant on a bike” grabbed a chain off a young woman’s neck. “I grabbed his handlebar, and we started tussling,” Lawler said. Eventually, the man rode off. “This poor girl is chasing after him,” Lawler said. “It was her grandfather’s chain.” How did he know the assailant was a migrant? “The cops came,” he said, not answering the question. “They’re seeing this constantly.”
I almost couldn’t believe this story, it seemed so perfectly crafted for Fox News. I asked the N.Y.P.D. if officers had been dispatched to such a scene on July 1st at Madison and Fifty-fifth Street, where Lawler said it happened. A spokesperson said they had, though the culprit remained at large.
A sitting congressman tussling with a “migrant”—this was Trump’s Republicanism, and though it had taken a while to find a local form in New York’s suburbs, its practitioners are poised to compete for power, whether or not Trump wins in November. “The sugar high is going to dissipate at some point,” Lawler said, talking about the Democrats’ summer switch-up. “The fundamentals of the election haven’t really changed.” ♦
