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The New York Race That Could Tip the House

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › mondaire-jones-lawler-new-york-house › 680182

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On a rainy Saturday late last month, Mondaire Jones was doing his best to convince a crowd of supporters that his campaign was going great. “We’ve got so much momentum in this race,” Jones said. “It has been an incredible week.”

It was a tough sell—not only for the dozens of Democrats listening to Jones in Bedford, New York, but also for the many others who have spent millions of dollars to help him defeat a first-term Republican, Representative Mike Lawler, and win back a district he gave up two years ago. The suburbs surrounding New York City have become a central battleground in the fight for Congress, and Jones’s race against Lawler is among the most competitive in the country—one that could determine which party controls the House next year.

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the majority, and New York has four of the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, who are all newly representing districts that Joe Biden carried easily in 2020. Yet the traditionally blue bastion is proving to be rough terrain for Democratic candidates, who must distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City’s recently indicted mayor, Eric Adams.

[Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]

Jones’s curious claim to momentum was based on a poll his campaign released that had him trailing Lawler by four points—not exactly a strong showing in a district that has 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans. As for his incredible week: It began with him apologizing to Hochul for telling a reporter that he didn’t want his state’s governor to be “some, like, little bitch.” Jones said he was not referring to Hochul and told me that his comments were “taken out of context.” (Jones’s prospects did brighten the following week, when it was Lawler’s turn to apologize after The New York Times uncovered photos of the Republican wearing blackface in college as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.)

Democrats are hoping that the enthusiasm Kamala Harris’s campaign has generated will help them reverse the gains Republicans made in New York in 2022. Hochul’s victory that year was so underwhelming—she won by fewer than seven points, a margin that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in his three elections—that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed her performance for costing Democrats the House.

Pelosi’s successor as Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has prioritized the purple districts in his home state as he seeks to become the nation’s first Black speaker. But Democrats’ prospects in New York aren’t looking much better than they did two years ago. Hochul’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and the federal corruption charges against Adams—who runs the city where many of Jones’s would-be constituents work—won’t help. Polls show Harris beating Donald Trump by fewer than 15 points statewide; in 2020, Biden won by 23.

Lawler has hammered Jones on the same issues that helped get him elected two years ago—the high cost of living and the influx of migrants straining local government resources—while appealing to the district’s large Jewish community by championing Israel and criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protesters. He’s supporting Trump for president while vowing to stand up to him—at least more than most Republicans have. (He’s refused, for example, to parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies.) “I’m not going to be bullied by anybody,” Lawler told me.

Key to the Democrats’ strategy against Lawler—as with many Republicans—is abortion. Party strategists believe that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, GOP candidates fared better in blue states such as New York and California because voters there did not see a legitimate threat to abortion rights. Hoping to spur greater turnout, state Democrats have placed a measure on the ballot this year that would further enshrine abortion rights into New York law, and they’re warning that victories by Lawler and other swing-district Republicans could empower the GOP to enact a national ban. “I think people see the threat. They’re taking it much more seriously,” says Jann Mirchandani, the local Democratic chair in Yorktown, a closely divided town in New York’s Hudson Valley. But she wasn’t sure if Lawler could be beaten. “It’s going to be tight.”

Jones’s first stint in Congress was cut short, in part, by an electoral game of musical chairs. Because New York’s population growth had flatlined, the state lost a seat in 2022, two years after his election. In response, a newly vulnerable senior Democrat, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, decided to run in Jones’s district, so the freshman moved to Brooklyn in hopes of holding on to office there. He didn’t make it out of the primary, and then a few months later, Lawler beat Maloney by only about 1,800 votes.

To try to reclaim the seat he once held, Jones is shedding some of his past progressivism. He’s renounced his support for defunding the police and no longer champions Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. His biggest break with the left came in June, when he endorsed George Latimer, the primary opponent of Jones’s former colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the left-wing “Squad,” because of Bowman’s criticism of Israel after October 7. In retaliation, the progressives’ campaign PAC rescinded its endorsement of Jones. When I asked him whether he would try to rejoin the Congressional Progressive Caucus if he won in November—he was a member of the group during his first go-round in the House—he said he didn’t know. But he told me he was planning to join the more moderate and business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Do you still identify as a progressive? I asked. “I am a pragmatic, pro-Israel progressive.”

[Read: Why Jamaal Bowman lost]

Jones’s rift with the left has hurt him in other ways as well. Lawler and Jones are the only candidates actively campaigning in their district, but they won’t be the only people on the November ballot. A relative unknown named Anthony Frascone stunned Democrats by beating out Jones for the nomination of the left-leaning Working Families Party after earning just 287 votes.

Democrats say they were the victims of a dirty trick by the GOP, pointing to two seeming coincidences. Frascone, a former registered Republican, has ties to powerful conservatives in the district, including his longtime lawyer, who serves as a county chair. And, as Gothamist reported, nearly 200 voters registered with the party in conservative Rockland County just days before the deadline. Few residents are eligible to vote in the WFP primary, which typically rubber-stamps the Democratic candidate. So when Frascone got on the ballot at the last minute, the Jones campaign didn’t have many supporters it could even attempt to turn out.

If it was a ploy by Republicans, it worked brilliantly. In a close race, Frascone might siphon enough votes from Jones for Lawler to win. “The combination of the surprise primary and us having a very public fracture with Mondaire created a perfect storm,” Ana María Archila, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told me.

Now the WFP has the awkward task of telling supporters not to vote for its nominee. Meanwhile, state Democrats are suing to get Frascone off the ballot, and the Jones campaign is devoting time and money to ensuring that a ghost candidate won’t cost his party a crucial House seat. A poll released yesterday by Emerson College found Lawler ahead of Jones, 45–44, with Frascone taking three percent of the vote, suggesting that he could play the role of spoiler.

Lawler told me he had nothing to do with Frascone’s candidacy. “He has no ties to me,” he said. “If Mondaire couldn’t win a Working Families Party primary with 500 voters, that’s on him.”

Democrats appear to be in a stronger position in other New York swing districts. Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican, is seen as a slight underdog to retain his seat around Syracuse after Democrats redrew his district in 2022. In a Long Island district that Biden carried by double digits, the Democrat Laura Gillen’s campaign got a boost when The New York Times reported that her opponent, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, had given congressional jobs to both his lover and the daughter of the woman he was cheating on. Farther upstate, in New York’s Nineteenth District, which is currently the most expensive House race in the country, an early-September poll by a Republican-leaning firm found that the GOP incumbent, Representative Marc Molinaro, was three points behind his Democratic challenger, with a larger group of voters undecided.

Elsewhere on Long Island, Representative Tom Suozzi is favored to win again after his special-election victory in February, when he flipped a GOP-held seat by talking tough on the border and assailing Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill at Trump’s behest—a message that Democrats from Harris on down are adopting this fall.

But Suozzi also benefited from his being the only race on the ballot; Democrats bused in canvassers from across the New York metropolitan area to knock on doors for his campaign, and he won by nearly eight points. Now the same organizations that powered Suozzi’s win are trying to convince party activists and volunteers that their local elections are just as important as the one for the White House. “One of those races gets more attention than the other, but it turns out that Kamala Harris is going to need a Democratic Congress,” Jones told the supporters gathered at the event I attended in Bedford.

[Read: What Tom Suozzi’s win means for Democrats]

I met two Democrats there who said they would vote for Jones but not canvass for him. One of them, Joe Simonetti, said he was still “deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed” by Jones’s effort to unseat a Black progressive in Bowman. “I just can’t get out there with full-throated support,” Simonetti, a retired social worker, said. Roger Savitt, a 70-year-old retiree and former Republican, told me that he was hoping to get on a bus to Pennsylvania to volunteer for Harris for a day. Why not knock on doors for Jones too? I asked. Savitt had nothing against Jones, he said, but “I have a less strong view of the congressional race.”

Indeed, part of Jones’s dilemma is that some Democrats in the district have a grudging admiration for Lawler. “Lawler’s done a halfway-decent job,” Rocco Pozzi, a Democratic commissioner in Westchester County, told me. “But we need to get the majority back.” A former political consultant, Lawler is visible both in the community and on cable news, where he tries to position himself as a reasonable voice amid the warring factions in Congress. “You have seen him on Morning Joe, where he never gets asked tough questions,” Jones complained to the Bedford crowd at one point.

As their party embraced Trump, moderate Republicans in blue states have occasionally found a receptive audience among Democrats looking to reward politicians willing to criticize their own party. In Vermont, the Republican Phil Scott has for years been among the nation’s most popular governors. Massachusetts twice elected the moderate Republican Charlie Baker as governor, and in Maine, Senator Susan Collins won reelection in 2020 even as Biden easily carried the state.

Lawler is eyeing that same path to statewide office in New York; if he wins reelection, he told me, he might run for governor against Hochul in 2026. “It’s certainly something I’ll look at,” Lawler said.

Yet despite his image, Lawler is more conservative than the Republicans who have demonstrated cross-party appeal in nearby Democratic strongholds. Although he has vowed to vote against a national abortion ban, he opposes the procedure except in cases of rape or incest and told me he would not vote with Democrats to restore Roe v. Wade. Lawler also said he’d vote against the bipartisan immigration bill that Harris has promised to pass if elected.

Those positions offer openings for Jones, who needs the Democrats that still dominate the district to recognize the importance of his race to the national balance of power. Lawler isn’t making it easy for him. A couple days after Jones’s rally in Bedford, I saw Lawler speak a few miles northwest in Yorktown at a commemoration of the October 7 attacks. The event wasn’t partisan, and Lawler spoke for only a few minutes, but attendees in the largely Jewish audience came away impressed.

Nancy Anton, a 68-year-old retired teacher and artist, said she had “definitely” been planning to vote for Jones before she came, but now she was leaning the other way. She supports Harris for president and wants Jeffries to be speaker, she told me, but she might vote for Lawler anyway. “I’m hoping in these other districts the Democrats win so we retake the House,” Anton said. I asked her if she’d have any regrets come November if a Lawler victory allowed Republicans to retain the majority. “Oh yes,” she replied. “That’s a terrifying thought.”

Israel and Hamas Both Think They’re Winning

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2024 › 10 › israel-hamas-october-7-lebanon › 680162

One year after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, both sides believe they are winning. The war in Gaza appears poised to continue indefinitely and probably expand, to the apparent delight of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Each must be surveying the wreckage in the region and anticipating the dark days ahead with determination and confidence. Each must think he is playing a sophisticated long game that the other will lose.

This is hardly the first time that the designs of right-wing Israeli leaders have coincided with those of Hamas. Netanyahu has long seen Hamas as a useful tool for weakening Fatah, the secular nationalist party that dominates the Palestinian Authority and rules parts of the West Bank. As he allegedly explained at a Likud strategy meeting in 2019: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Netanyahu denies having said this, but it certainly reflects his actions.)

As an exercise in divide and rule, Netanyahu’s policy succeeded admirably. The Palestinian national movement was crippled by the disunion that Israel fostered like a hothouse orchid. But by foreclosing the possibility of Palestinian statehood or citizenship, the policy created the conditions for a violent backlash, as many Palestinians concluded that the only way to achieve their national aspirations was through armed struggle. In the months leading up to the October 7 attack, Hamas decided to prove that it, and not its rival on the West Bank, was worthy of leading such a movement.

On the evening of October 7, Netanyahu vowed a “mighty vengeance” for Hamas’s killing of 1,139 Israelis and kidnapping of about 250 more. That much Israel has achieved: Israel has now killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled ministry of health, which has published evidence suggesting that most of the dead were civilians, including thousands of children. Yet the war has failed to achieve much else. Netanyahu has vowed that Hamas would be “destroyed.” But this is quixotic; Hamas is more an idea among Palestinians than a collection of individuals or equipment. And Netanyahu’s call for the group’s destruction has allowed Hamas to declare victory simply by surviving.

[Read: The choice America now faces in Iran]

Israel has ravaged Gaza from north to south and wiped out almost everything of value to Hamas—nearly all of its known facilities, agents, associates, and aboveground assets. But the war is not over. In fact, Hamas has only just begun to get the war it really wants.

Hamas is far from being destroyed; its fighters are popping up in areas across the Gaza Strip that months ago the Israeli military had declared pacified and abandoned. Israel is now playing whack-a-mole with militants who emerge for quick attacks before disappearing. When Israel strikes back, it usually leaves a pile of dead civilians behind. Hamas can likely keep this dynamic going for a decade or two—and in doing so, stake its claim to Palestinian leadership by waving the bloodied shirt of martyrdom and preaching the virtues of armed struggle against occupation.

Netanyahu is doing his best to ensure that this happens. He has so far refused to discuss the next phase in Gaza, in which the Israeli military might withdraw and leave someone in charge other than Hamas. In the absence of any such plan, the Israeli military has been left to administer Gaza for the foreseeable future—a role it has begun to acknowledge by appointing one of its own to oversee humanitarian relief efforts. Through inaction, silence, and calculated inattention, Netanyahu has ensured the existence of only two possible candidates to run Gaza: Israel and Hamas.

Everything Netanyahu has done since October 7 has guaranteed Israel’s continuing presence in Gaza, which is exactly what Hamas was counting on. Israel could have declared victory and left after battling the last organized Hamas battalions in Rafah—but it missed that opportunity. Now it is fighting an amorphous and pointless counterinsurgency campaign, from which it can’t withdraw without appearing to throw away a hard-fought victory and hand power back to the enemy.

Hamas hoped for exactly this outcome when it attacked on October 7. It also wished to spark a region-wide, multifront war with Israel, in which other members of the Tehran-led “Axis of Resistance,” especially Hezbollah, would leap into action. The late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah essentially rejected Hamas’s plea, committing only to liberate two small towns still held by the Israelis, and to moderately step up rocket attacks over the border.

But Netanyahu decided to call Nasrallah’s bluff with continuous escalations, which culminated in recent weeks with the killing of numerous Hezbollah leaders, including Nasrallah himself. Israel has killed or maimed nearly 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with booby traps; destroyed much of the group’s heavy equipment, including missiles and rocket launchers; and launched its third major invasion of Lebanon, where a potential Israeli occupation would surely face another open-ended insurgency.

Iran responded to Nasrallah’s killing by sending a barrage of missiles into Israel on October 1. Most failed to cause damage, but the attack has buoyed Hamas’s hopes for a regional war nonetheless. Even the Biden administration, which has sought to restrain escalation in Lebanon, recognizes that Israel will retaliate against Iran. Washington is trying to persuade Israel not to strike Iran’s oil-production facilities or nuclear installations, but these warnings may be in vain, as Israel feels flush with victory and may imagine that it can reshape the region through force.

And so both Israel and Hamas seem to believe that they are on the brink of unparalleled success. Hamas endured the battering in Gaza, and appears confident that it will ultimately assume the Palestinian national leadership. Looking at the same set of facts, the Israeli government apparently believes that it has struck back decisively against the architects of the October 7 attack and reduced Hamas to virtual irrelevancy, beyond being a ragtag nuisance in Gaza. Now Israel is fighting the war it wanted to fight—against Hezbollah in Lebanon—with dramatic early success.

[Read: Lebanon is not a solution for Gaza]

Some in Israel have begun talking about subduing not just Hamas but the whole Axis of Resistance, including Iran itself. Even if Israel doesn’t strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, it may seek to compel the United States to attack those installations in Israel’s defense, or to finish a job that Israel will have started. Netanyahu has long argued that an American military strike is necessary to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. If he can’t bring that about today, additional opportunities will surely arise to steer the U.S. into an armed confrontation with Iran, no matter who is in the White House when the time comes.

The Israeli leadership imagines a new Middle East—one where Iran’s nuclear program is eliminated and its regional influence greatly reduced; where Israel becomes part of an alliance of pro-American Arab states, including Saudi Arabia; and where, fantasy of fantasies, the Iranian regime is overthrown. Americans should find something familiar both in this vision of a pacified region and in Israel’s post–October 7 doctrine of “peace through strength” and “escalation to de-escalate.” Washington embraced similar ideas after 9/11, and they met a bitter end in Iraq.

Both Israel and Hamas are probably kidding themselves. Sooner rather than later, Palestinians will come to resent Hamas’s brutal recklessness, which has led to more Palestinian bloodshed even than the catastrophe of 1948. The attack on October 7 did incalculable damage to the Palestinian national movement and prospects for statehood. And if Hamas dreams that it can ever take over the Palestine Liberation Organization and speak for its people at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, the group has not comprehended how radioactive it has become internationally. Playing the long game of insurgency may win the sympathies of many Palestinians, but overcoming the stigma of October 7 will require renouncing terrorism—something that Hamas can’t do without completely transforming its ideology and leadership.

Israel, too, may be facing a rude awakening. Its degradation of Hezbollah, which Iran sees as its forward defense force, may persuade Tehran to sprint toward nuclear weaponization. Attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities could set this process back a year or two, but Iran will surely succeed if that becomes the regime’s single-minded goal. Neither Israel, the United States, nor Arab countries can do much to force regime change in Iran if domestic conditions are not ripe for it—and there’s no sign that they are. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has made clear that it will not normalize relations with Israel, let alone enter into a partnership, unless the Palestinian issue is resolved. No amount of Israeli military success will change that.

Netanyahu’s war of vengeance in Gaza has ensured that yet another generation of Arabs regards the Palestinian cause as a collective responsibility—one that may give rise to or strengthen extremist groups. Yet Israel appears more hostile to Palestinian statehood than ever, as it steadily annexes much of the West Bank with no plan for what to do with the Palestinians there.

[Read: ’It’s an earthquake’]

After October 7, Israel unleashed its military in search of greater security, and many Israelis appear to feel that the project could hardly be going better. But Israel now finds itself fighting one insurgency to its south, in Gaza, and marching briskly toward another such quagmire to its north, if it occupies Lebanon. Its hostility toward the Palestinian Authority and violent clashes with armed youth in Palestinian cities suggest a third insurgency developing to its east. If that’s a formula for security, it’s hard to imagine what insecurity would look like.

One year on from October 7, Hamas and Israel both think events are moving in their direction. Any appreciation of the old adage about being careful what you wish for was, perhaps, one of the most significant victims of October 7.