PEEKSKILL, N.Y. — In a microcosm of the broader 2024 campaign, former Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., is fighting to unseat Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., in a race where wars in the Middle East and the threat of former President Donald Trump loom large even as a GOP "stealth operation" threatens to spoil the election in New York's 17th Congressional District.
At the Westchester Black Women’s Political Caucus candidate forum on Saturday, a small crowd of a few dozen people waited for the arrival of Jones, a Rockland County native who rose from humble beginnings to Congress.
Ahead of Jones’ appearance at the forum, there was a panel with four other candidates — two Republicans and two Democrats running for state legislative positions. Each candidate was given roughly equal time to respond to a set of questions from the community, which had gathered at the Peekskill Presbyterian Church on the first day of early voting to field questions and hear from the political hopefuls.
The only candidate who had failed to attend was Lawler, the sitting congressman and Republican nominee for New York’s 17th, whose campaign was recently left reeling by a New York Times report that unearthed photos of Lawler dressed in a Michael Jackson costume that included blackface.
Lawler has since apologized for the 2006 costume, however, he again found himself the subject of criticism after he declined to condemn the use of a racial slur for Black people by another participant at a forum on combating antisemitism where he spoke, and for pivoting to a different subject when a far-right radio talk show host told Lawler that neither Islamophobia nor white supremacy exists but that Black supremacy does.
None of the event organizers on Saturday, however, knew why Lawler had decided to skip the event. Jones noted in a short conversation with Salon ahead of his question-and-answer time that the no-show was part of a "pattern of behavior" but didn’t care to elaborate. Lawler had skipped the local NAACP candidate forum earlier in October with the NAACP reporting that Lawler’s campaign accused them of being insufficiently impartial.
The event was also among the last opportunities for residents in NY-17 to get to hear from both candidates at once and to ask questions. It may have also been one of the last opportunities for voters to ask questions of Lawler. As of Tuesday, Lawler had just two events on his campaign calendar before election day while Jones had 17.
"Jones did not mince words, calling Lawler a “mini-fascist.”
At the forum, voters asked about Jones’ plan to restore the state and local tax deduction, the potential expansion of Medicare to include long-term care, Jones’ accomplishments in his first terms and Jones’ vision for comprehensive immigration reform.
However, the issue that seemed to resonate most with the crowd in the room came toward the end of the forum when one voter described a trip their son had taken to an international school in Syria before asking about Jones’ position on Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon and the United States’ role in the conflict.
“Why can’t the United States be like the father, say, to Israel and say stop?” the voter asked. “It’s not about Hamas anymore.”
Jones responded that he was staunchly in support of Israel and its stated goal of defeating Hamas but said, in his view, there was no tension between supporting Israel’s military mission and supporting the human rights of Palestinians.
“So I disagree with you in your use of the word genocide, Hamas started this war on October 7, the worst terrorist attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” Jones said. “ And the pain and the suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere is horrifying as well, and neither of those two things are in tension.”
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Another voter asked about Jones’ position on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It was clear too, from the reaction of the crowd, that the issue had salience.
Speaking with attendees at the event, it seemed that the issues of Israel and Palestine and antisemitism and Islamophobia had eclipsed other issues like immigration in the district. Lawler has also tried to put distance between himself and Jones on the issue in the final days of the race with a campaign ad titled “Standing with Israel” and by attacking Jones in a Newsmax interview for saying that “Settlement expansion under Bibi Netanyahu has been inappropriate,” in a debate.
In a follow-up interview with Salon, Jones said that Lawler had tried to “create differences between us where there are none.”
“My commitment is to Israel having the resources it needs to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah and other terror proxies of Iran and obtaining the hostages that were cruelly taken from Israel, including American citizens,” Jones said.
Even as divisions over the war in the Middle East seem to split the Democratic constituency in New York’s 17th on Saturday, the looming threat of Trump’s potential return to the White House seemed to unite them. Even the Republicans speaking at the forum were uneager to tie their fortunes to Trump’s in the heavily Democratic area. Lawler, however, has not been so circumspect.
Of the two events Lawler has left on the calendar, one of them is with former Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, who represented the First District in New York, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who recently spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, which drew comparisons to the 1939 German American Bund pro-Nazi rally held there.
On this issue, Jones did not mince words, calling Lawler a “mini-fascist.” Lawler himself has complained about Republicans being called "fascists" at length, including prominently on “Face the Nation.” However, he has repeatedly called Jones a “socialist.” Jones told Salon that he was “comfortable” standing with Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and General Mark Milley in calling Trump a "fascist."
“In his own words, [Trump says] he wants to terminate the Constitution and be a dictator in day one, neither Donald Trump nor Mike Johnson, a House speaker Lawler says he proudly voted for, have committed to accepting the legitimate results of the 2024 presidential election,” Jones said. “Donald Trump says he wants to jail his political opponents despite all of these things and more, Mike Lawler is supporting him for the third consecutive presidential election cycle.”
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In the race, Jones is seeking to reclaim the seat he represented following the 2020 election. When New York adopted new district lines ahead of the 2022 elections Jones and former Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., who had represented the state’s 18th District, faced a potential primary against one another. Maloney reportedly offered to bow out of the race but Jones declined and considered a challenge to Rep. Jamal Bowman, D-N.Y., in the neighboring 16th District until internal polling indicated he would likely lose the race, according to City and State.
Going into the 2022 elections, Jones decided to run in the crowded Democratic primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District, which covers parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In that primary election, Jones and two other Democratic candidates split the vote from the progressive wing of the party and Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., won with just 26% support.
In 2024, Jones returned to the Hudson Valley to run against Lawler in his old district. What little polling has been done has only confirmed expectations of a close race. An Emerson College/The Hill/WPIX from the beginning of October found that Jones was trailing Lawler by just one point, 44% to 45%, while the Working Families Party nominee, Anthony Frascone was polling at 3% support.
Frascone, however, does not have the endorsement of the Working Families Party, and Ana Maria Archila, the co-director of the New York Working Families Party, says that Frascone was recruited by Republicans to spoil the election for Jones.
“As we learned about who he was we also learned about how he got on the ballot which was through a stealth operation with a set of Republican operatives in Rockland county who registered 200 people,” Archila told Salon.
According to Archila, Republican operatives recruited 200 people to register with the Working Families Party ahead of the state primaries and to vote for Frascone, without the Working Families Party’s knowledge. Before this operation, there had only been about 1,000 registered Working Families Party voters in the district.
“Despite our efforts to contact all the real Working Families Party registrants we did not get enough of them to show up and Anthony Frascone won that primary against Mondaire Jones,” Archila said.
Now, Frascone is threatening to spoil the close election for Jones and some prognosticators have taken notice. The Cook Political Report changed the race’s rating from “tossup” to “lean Republican” just last week despite the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district 227,000 to 140,000.
However, at the Westchester Black Women’s Political Caucus’ candidate forum on Saturday, Democrats in attendance didn’t seem to be aware that elections watchers saw the race as slipping away from them. Attendees, activists and staffers for the down-ballot races for state Senate and state Assembly elections seemed confident that 2024 was going to be different than 2022, in part because of the presidential election and in part because of the support they were receiving from the state party this year.
Lawler’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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