New York’s Race to Moderation

New York’s 17th district holds the keys to power in the House. Held by Republican Representative Mike Lawler, he’s facing Democratic challenger Cait Conley, a 16-year Army veteran touting a big-tent coalition. The district is one of the most competitive in the country, with the highest stakes for Republicans. If House Democrats hold all of their seats, they need only flip three districts to gain a majority. Lawler’s seat is in one of three Republican-held districts that Kamala Harris won in 2024, and he unseated Democratic incumbent Sean Patrick Maloney by just 0.6 points in 2022. If there’s a seat that Democrats could flip, it’s this one, even though the Lawler campaign is outspending Conley 40:1 on television ads.

But the race is just as valuable for what it reveals about campaign strategies in toss-up districts like NY-17 and beyond, where winning over skeptical voters is just as important as mobilizing a preestablished base. Voters on the margin typically reward a center tack. And though the extremes of each party seem to dominate the national psyche, many Americans live in a place like NY-17: a racially and economically diverse collection of suburbs with a healthy variety of political affiliation, likely adjacent to a deep-blue city. 

The party powers ostensibly believe that Lawler and Cait Conley are the most moderate faces they can offer. But for a Republican entering what is soon to become a midterm Trump-a-Palooza and for a Democrat saddled with the party’s reputation for woke excess, what does a moderate strategy even mean? 

For Lawler, it’s frequently reminding voters of a record of bipartisanship, such as co-sponsoring bills with Democrats or criticizing partisans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene for their inability to collaborate across the aisle. This makes him as popular as a Republican can be with some House Democrats, according to one Democratic source to Axios: “If you’re going to have a Republican, [Lawler is] the kind of Republican we want in the Congress.” For voters on the margin, such a candidate is heartening for their potential to actually move things through Congress, of which 78 percent of Americans currently disapprove. 

Though his votes align with Trump’s position 94 percent of the time, he typically obscures his agreements with the president and frequently makes his departures from Trump’s position public. 

That explains an only tepid welcome of Donald Trump into his campaign orbit, reflected in what he told Axios when asked about collaborating with the President. “He’s the president of the United States. Many of my constituents do support him, many others don’t,” Lawler said. “When Joe Biden was president and he came to my district, I showed up. Donald Trump is president, came to my district, I showed up. You have to be able to work with the president.” 

This is a trend across other vulnerable Republican seats. There’s no room to sing the praises of a president with a 39 percent approval rating, but there’s certainly no space to shun the party boss, either. The strategy is to make voters forget that you’re a capital-R republican, and remind them of their proximity to the zaniest, socialist wings of the Democratic Party. 

For Conley and other Democratic candidates in similar districts, it’s tempering progressive policies with a right-coded veneer of personality. Conley is a part of the Hell Cats, a coalition of four female Democratic candidates with military backgrounds running in swing districts such as New Jersey’s seventh, Arizona’s sixth, and New Hampshire’s first congressional districts. 

Running candidates with military backgrounds is a smart way to outrun the accusations that the left is overly soft or anti-American, which spook the average voter. Physically fighting for America through military service is concrete evidence of an assent to the fundamental goodness of America. Military service ostensibly instills martial rigor, and only those who appreciate its value would stay in a military career. 

This identity gives a Democratic candidate the ability to court more moderate voters while also catering to a solidly blue base with political offerings like federal funding for Planned Parenthood, further expanding Medicare, or universal pre-K. 

However, Conley is less than warm to her party’s more vocal left wing, whose power players occupy neighboring New York City. Though she embraced an endorsement from the Working Families Party, which endorsed DSA card-carriers Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, Conley softly refused a Mamdani endorsement and rebuffed much of his platform. Giving full-throated support to a two-state solution in the conflict between Israelie and Palestinians also marks a break from the growing proportion of the Democratic left flank that has more hostile views. 

Both candidates find common ground on hot-button issues such as AI and data-center regulation, and support for Israeli sovereignty, but the obvious strategy for Lawler, Conley, and candidates in similarly competitive races is the same: demonstrating a concerted effort to outrun the caricatures of their party and selling their ability to break from partisanship. This is a race to moderation, something that both parties could use for a change.