On the menu today: It is a stone-cold lock that New York’s twelfth congressional district, covering midtown Manhattan, will be represented by a Democrat after the 2026 midterm election. The question is whether that district is going to be represented by a generic liberal progressive New Yorker, a shameless carpetbagger best known for cable news and his ex-wife, or one of the lesser man-children of the Kennedy clan. Read on.
Midtown Mayhem
A paragraph that got trimmed from this week’s column in that other Washington publication:
Of course, as your financial advisor should be telling you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Perhaps Trump will find a strong challenger to [GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor] Greene; another Trump acolyte, Laura Loomer, posted on X, “Should I buy a house in Rome, Georgia? Do you think President Trump would endorse me?”
(Did you notice that overnight, no one seems to care about carpetbagging, or whether a candidate has any ties to the district they seek to represent? Hey, remember when everyone in the GOP gave Hillary Clinton grief for running for Senate in New York? Good times, good times. . . .)
Back in 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler, then the head of the pro-abortion fundraising outfit EMILY’s List, to serve out the remainder of the late Senator Dianne Feinstein’s term. At the time, Butler was not registered to vote in California. Her Twitter account listed her location as Maryland. On the EMILY’s List filing with the Federal Elections Commission the previous month, her legal address was listed as Silver Spring, M.D. Judging from those FEC records, she hadn’t lived in California for two years. At least Butler had the good sense to not run for elected office herself; since leaving office, she’s become a partner in the global public affairs firm Actum, become a Georgetown University fellow, and is advising OpenAI. But she’s totally not lobbying, because that would be illegal.
Apparently, carpetbagging doesn’t matter anymore, unless it’s Mehmet Oz running in Pennsylvania.
It’s a free country, and voters are free to cast their ballot in favor of a candidate who moved to the district 20 minutes ago. But I find carpetbagging candidates more than a bit ridiculous, because each congressional district has roughly 760,000 people. You’d think that at least one person in that group would be a worthwhile representative, who actually knows a bit about the district they want to represent. But I’m also one of those fuddy-duddies who thinks if the president nominates you to be an ambassador to a country, you should crack a book and try to learn some things about that country, which is apparently too much to ask.
The New York Times reports there’s going to be another high-profile example:
George T. Conway III, the former conservative lawyer and one of President Trump’s fiercest critics, is moving closer to announcing a run for Congress in one of Manhattan’s wealthiest and bluest districts, pitching himself to potential donors as a top attorney who does not “have any more effs to give.”
Mr. Conway, 62, who currently lives in Bethesda, Md., has hired the Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg to work on a budding campaign to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, who is retiring. He is also scouting apartments in the district where he lived and worked for years before relocating to Washington in 2017 when his wife at the time, Kellyanne Conway, joined the first Trump administration as a senior White House official. (The Conways divorced in 2023.)
I’m not going to write about the Conways’ divorce; families deserve the right to go through a painful process like that with as much privacy and little public scrutiny as possible. The problem is George Conway brings up his ex-wife every now and then, and he may well attempt to use his high-profile split with his famous ex-wife as a way to stand out in what is shaping up to be a crowded and competitive Democratic primary.
“I used to live here, about a decade ago” and “you know me from appearing on cable news a lot” are lousy reasons to make someone your representative.
Let’s begin with what Conway says wants to do if he’s elected to the House of Representatives.
On the Tuesday night call, Mr. Conway told the group that Democrats needed “people who don’t have any more effs to give. That’s the advantage I have. I’m not going to run for anything else.”
He added: “I want to fight these mothers. This looks like a way to do it.”
Readers, let me introduce you to New York’s twelfth congressional district.
It is the smallest and most densely packed congressional district in the country, covering the middle third of Manhattan Island. The district’s southernmost point is East 12th Street, and its northernmost point is 110th street. Depending upon your speed, you could walk across the district in three to six hours. Kamala Harris won it, 81 percent to 17 percent. It scores an astonishing D+33 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, the most heavily Democratic district in New York, and the ninth-most heavily Democratic district in the country. The median household income is more than $153,000.
This district had roughly 260,000 Democratic voters in the last congressional election, many of whom are wealthy both by national standards and even by New York City standards. In other words, this district has no shortage of impassioned Democrats who want to “fight these mothers” and who have lived in the district for a long time.
The competition for the Democratic nomination in this district already includes ten candidates, including two state assemblymen, one city council member, and President John F. Kennedy’s grandson. (More on him in a bit.)
Just what does Conway bring to the table that any Democrat who actually lives in this district cannot equal?
Conway’s only real way of standing out is being a former conservative who now detests the president and his allies with a raging fury, who used to be married to one of Trump’s top advisers, and who periodically takes shots at her in his public appearances. I think that’s a classless thing to do to the mother of your children, but again, I’m an old fuddy-duddy.
One other comment from Conway about why he’s running:
There, he said he had landed on the idea of running for Mr. Nadler’s seat after feeling frustrated by the eight Senate Democrats who caved this month and voted with Republicans to reopen the government without a deal to extend expiring health care subsidies.
Apparently, Conway really wanted the government shutdown to continue, for air traffic controllers to show up to work less frequently, and to have even more canceled flights and ruin the Thanksgiving holiday for millions of Americans. “Our lives just aren’t chaotic and frustrating enough” is going to make a heck of a slogan.
Those eight Senate Democrats do not give a hoot about what George Conway thinks of them, or even what the voters of New York’s twelfth congressional district think of them.
Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Dick Durbin of Illinois, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Angus King of Maine care about what their own states’ constituents think of them. Keep in mind, none of the senators are up for reelection in 2026, and Durbin and Shaheen are retiring. The earliest any of them will face the voters is November 7, 2028 — more than 1,000 days away — and a whole lot will happen between now and then.
Senators don’t spend much time worrying about what House members from their own states think, never mind worrying about what House members from other states think. “I’m really mad that eight Senate Democrats voted to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history,” is a dumb reason to run for Congress.
As mentioned above, one of Conway’s ten primary rivals will be Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg, daughter of the late president John F. Kennedy. (Remember, “No Kings!”)
Our Jeff Blehar has already taken a long look at the amazing lifetime accomplishments of 32-year-old Schlossberg:
Schlossberg attended all the best schools — a Yale undergraduate degree, a Harvard Law and Harvard Business double-degree — and last year finally parlayed his studies into his first honest working gig: as a political correspondent for Vogue magazine. I assume it must have been a terrible grind, since he tired of it within a year, as he tired of playing Twitter pundit. Last February, after a series of public meltdowns, he suddenly deleted all of his social media accounts.
Our old friend Jack Butler, now at the Wall Street Journal, detailed some of those public meltdowns:
Mr. Schlossberg has displayed poor judgment in his posts. He has lewdly mocked his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary of health and human services. He wondered whether Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his maternal grandmother, was “hotter” than Usha Vance and joked that he was “having a son” with Mrs. Vance. And then there’s the Nazi salute intended to mock Elon Musk from a now-deleted video.
Eh, let’s keep some perspective, that’s not the worst connection between a member of the Kennedy family and the Nazis.
There’s a famous line from the television show Succession: “You are not serious people.” As laid out in yesterday’s edition of the newsletter, the United States faces grave and worsening challenges at home and abroad. For our government to tackle them effectively, it needs to be led by serious people — not shallow, attention-seeking minor political celebrities angling for their next cable news gig.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Texas Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett is a reckless moron, and updated satellite imagery of Iran’s Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant, the Natanz Nuclear Facility, and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center “reveals virtually zero activity or attempts to rehabilitate these sites.”