On the final Friday before Election Day, in what may be the tightest House race in the country, Josh Riley, the Democratic candidate for New York’s 19th Congressional District, was making the case to me that this contest would turn not on voters’ partisan leanings but on which candidate people believe shares their “upstate values.” Not that he was terribly illuminating about what those are.
“I’m a Democrat,” he said after an evening rally in Ithaca. “I come from a Republican family, and, around here, people care a lot less about your politics than your work ethic and your character.” It’s not a Republican or Democratic thing to lower the cost of prescription drugs, he said, or cover pre-existing health conditions, or protect basic government benefits.
“It’s something that should be uniting us as Americans,” he went on. “I don’t think it’s a Democratic or Republican idea that you should be able to retire with dignity and get the benefits that you’ve earned. And so, around here, it’s not so much about what your political party is. It’s about those basic upstate values.”
To win in deep-purple swing districts like this one, candidates like Mr. Riley generally are not well served by running around willy-nilly lobbing hyperpartisan howlers à la Marjorie Taylor Greene. They need to find that sweet spot where they are firing up their base yet not turning off the moderates and swing voters weary of smash-mouth politics.
This means drawing clear distinctions between themselves and their opponents, without coming across as ideologically or temperamentally extreme. It means presenting themselves as fearless fighters, but also reasonable and measured and ready to reach across the aisle to get things done. It means driving home what is at stake in their race, and the entire election, without going too dark. It can be a tough balancing act for so-called majority makers like Mr. Riley, especially in this era of nationalized elections and hyperpolarization.
Mr. Riley uses to his advantage an abundance of dorky-dad energy, which infuses his call to arms with gee-whiz sunniness. His vibe tends to be more Morning in America than American Carnage. At an earlier Friday event, he had urged a moment of Zen on the crowd that gathered in a slightly shabby American Legion post in downtown Binghamton.
“Take a minute and appreciate how cool this is, what we are all doing together here. We’re not a swing state for the presidential race. We’re not going to decide the Senate. But this is the most competitive House race in the country. Here!” he gushed, radiating the awe of a kid on his first visit to Disney World. “Somehow fate has chosen all of us together to decide the direction of the country. And I get to do it with you!”
Mr. Riley told nostalgic stories about growing up in the area, recalled how his parents would put his school clothes on layaway at the local Kmart and how his dad picked up bottles and cans for redemption during family vacations in the Adirondacks; he lovingly name-checked local businesses; he joked about his height (6-foot-7-ish); he shared his 4-year-old son’s love of “PAW Patrol.”
Not that he is averse to playing hardball. He paints his opponent, Representative Marc Molinaro, as having been co-opted by the extremist elements of the Republican Party. Forget all of his opponent’s soothingly moderate claims, Mr. Riley warned his Friday audiences, asserting that Mr. Molinaro has thrown in with this team’s plans to undermine Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and — that hottest of hot-button issues — women’s reproductive rights.
“He went down to Congress and, how many times did he vote to restrict abortion rights?” Mr. Riley prompted. “Thirteen times!” (While some votes were more directly related to abortion access, such as Mr. Molinaro’s support of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, this number includes mostly procedural votes and tangential measures; such is the hazard of a legislative voting record.) Last month, things got so heated at the candidates’ debate, with fiery cross-talk and fast-flying accusations of lying, that Politico dubbed this “New York’s nastiest House race.”
But, broadly speaking, Mr. Riley seems set on selling himself as fiercely yet affably moderate.
Waiting for the rally in Binghamton to begin, I stood outside talking with two of the younger attendees in line, Luke Rzeznik and Jake Citrin. They are students at Binghamton University and would seem to be prime targets for the charm offensive on young men that Team Trump and the Republican Party have been running this year.
As it happens, both men used to be Republicans. But Mr. Rzeznik said Jan. 6 and Trumpworld’s “scheme” to overturn the 2020 election turned him against the party.
“It’s really ridiculous that we live at a time where the marketplace of ideas is so flooded with so many things that the average person can’t determine what’s real and what’s not,” he said.
This election, the men hadn’t been hearing all that much about down-ballot races, and they said most of their knowledge about the House candidates came from political ads.
“We watch a lot of sports,” said Mr. Rzeznik, citing the crazy number of advertising spots that had been running during games.
Mr. Citrin had been struck by Team Molinaro’s over-the-top attacks on Mr. Riley.
“I see a lot of similarities to Trump,” he said of the ads’ style and tone. The Republicans are pitching Mr. Riley as “a pro-Chinese communist” who would hand the whole country over to illegal immigrants, he said, sarcastically. “Literally, I’m not even joking!”
“I’m not liking the right-wing rhetoric,” agreed Mr. Rzeznik.
The men spoke more favorably of Mr. Riley’s ads aimed at introducing himself to voters. (Mr. Rzeznik recalled in particular the Democrat’s pledge to reject corporate PAC money.) And while they had seen ads accusing Mr. Molinaro of undermining reproductive rights, it was the issue itself rather than the ads that concerned them — despite New York’s existing protections for abortion access.
“I think it’s scary for all the states because nobody expected Roe v. Wade to be turned down in general,” said Mr. Rzeznik. “And now we don’t expect to be threatened here in New York, but who knows?”
“It’s unpredictable,” insisted Mr. Citrin.
Post-redistricting, NY-19 is a huge, sprawling, weirdly configured district that meanders across 11 counties on the east side of the state. Candidates need to woo a wide cross-section of voters, evenly split in partisan affiliation, from different socioeconomic groups and with different political priorities.
This contest is a rematch between Mr. Riley and Mr. Molinaro, who went through a similarly tough fight in 2022. In many ways, the race looks a lot like that one, with each candidate pitching himself as a champion of local values, even as they work to ride the national political winds. Mr. Molinaro is hitting Mr. Riley on immigration, while Mr. Riley has leaned in on abortion rights. (Mr. Molinaro has said he does not support a federal abortion ban and has opposed restrictions on mifepristone. Mr. Riley insists that his opponent cannot be trusted to hold the line against his party.)
In 2022, Mr. Molinaro had the benefit of being a known quantity, having served in various elected offices since becoming mayor of Tivoli at age 19. Over the decades, he had established himself as a pragmatic, moderate problem-solver — an approach he pledged to take with him to Congress. He wound up besting Mr. Riley by about 4,500 votes.
But this time. …
“Far and away, the biggest difference is that my opponent now has a voting record,” Mr. Riley told me. He charged that Mr. Molinaro “voted to kill investments from the Inflation Reduction Act” aimed at bringing manufacturing jobs to the area, and that Mr. Molinaro is just another Republican who would rather play politics than make progress on border security.
“He had two years to do something about the crisis at the border,” said Mr. Riley. “Instead of solving the problem, he decided to continue the problem so he’d have something to campaign on.”
This line of attack goes beyond policy. Team Riley has been pushing out the message that Washington and Trumpism have fundamentally warped Mr. Molinaro, that he is not the man voters sent to Congress just two years ago.
Mr. Molinaro has done his part to help their case. During his first term, his moderate pragmatism wound up taking a back seat to party loyalty on multiple occasions, including his support for opening an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, his vote to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, and his vote for Jim Jordan, the right-wing, attack-dog chairman of the Judiciary Committee, for speaker. Twice.
More recently, Mr. Molinaro, an immigration hard-liner, was among the Republicans peddling the pet-eating migrant smear. (By contrast, the office of another freshman Republican from just a couple of districts over, Mike Lawler, issued a plea for his colleagues to “exercise great restraint when spreading unfounded theories and claims.”)
A former Capitol Hill staffer (he was a general counsel to former Senator Al Franken on the Judiciary Committee) and a former policy analyst for the Department of Labor, Mr. Riley presents himself as someone who is not a career politician but who understands how Washington works, in ways both good and bad. “The most bipartisan thing in Congress is the corruption,” he has asserted.
He has also kept a bit of space between himself and his party’s leadership in Washington, a standard move for moderates in tough races. Most notably, he has long been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of border security. This summer, his campaign released an ad noting that he “opposed President Biden on the border” and declaring that, for him, “it’s not about party. It’s about doing right by upstate New York.”
That doesn’t mean Mr. Riley doesn’t appreciate a bit of political star power now and then. And last Friday, he was joined on the trail by Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader. In both Binghamton and Ithaca, Mr. Jeffries took the stage to sing Mr. Riley’s praises, while more broadly stressing the stakes of this election and the importance of having a Democratic majority in the House. He cast Mr. Molinaro as just another “extremist MAGA Republican” — one of Mr. Jeffries’s favorite phrases — and he repeatedly characterized Mr. Riley as a “common sense,” “common-ground-seeking” kind of guy.
NY-19 “is a microcosm in many ways of the state,” Mr. Jeffries told reporters in Ithaca. “It is filled with hard-working people who just want a better life for their families, themselves and their community. They deserve a common-sense, hard-working get-stuff-done, bring-people-together type of public servant, and that’s Josh Riley.”
The candidate’s success in convincing voters of this could be key to determining whether Democrats flip the House — which, if Donald Trump wins the presidency, could wind up providing the only backstop to unfettered MAGA control of the federal government.
As Mr. Riley has been joking on the trail, “No pressure.”
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