Mondaire Jones tests progressive appeal in swing House district

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For Mondaire Jones, who aligned himself with the Squad during his single term in Congress, that margin was a bit tighter — 20 points — but still comfortable enough for him to campaign on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and win.

Jones no longer holds his Hudson Valley seat after a redistricting spat prompted him to run in a nearby district he lost in 2022.

But his attempted comeback bid, announced on Wednesday, will test whether the progressive message that propelled him to office in 2020 will resonate in what is now an outright swing district.

One of the knock-on effects of redistricting last year was that Jones opted to run for a Brooklyn-area seat rather than face a bruising member-on-member primary on his home turf.

Another was the district he once represented became a lighter shade of blue. Biden only won New York’s 17th Congressional District by 10 points in 2020 under the new lines, putting it within reach for Republicans for the first time in decades.

Jones wasn’t the only Democratic incumbent to lose in New York in 2022, despite Republicans’ own troubles nationally. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, then the powerful head of House Democrats’ campaign arm, was toppled by Republican Mike Lawler in his bid for Jones’s old seat.

Maloney was an establishment centrist, underscoring the difficulty Democrats will have in reclaiming the district in 2024. But Jones is betting his brand of self-styled “pragmatic progressivism” will nonetheless play well as he challenges a now-incumbent Lawler.

When he first ran for Congress, Jones campaigned as an unabashed liberal. He denounced the “immorality” of the American healthcare system and joined calls to defund the police.

He has since walked back or toned down that rhetoric — most notably, he supports law enforcement funding today. But he aligned himself, with exceptions, closely to the Squad during his two years in Congress.

Jones alluded to his progressive record in announcing his candidacy this week, saying in his rollout video that he pressed lawmakers in his own party “to fight harder for working people.”

But his views are far more oblique than strident this go-around. Gone are the “bold, progressive policies” that featured prominently on his 2020 campaign website.

In fact, public safety is a dominant theme of his announcement video.

“Mondaire Jones listened and funded the police,” a Hudson Valley officer tells voters in the 30-second spot, likely referring to his vote for law enforcement funding that passed the House days before the midterm elections.

Just as notable is a new line on his campaign website that touts his “reputation as someone who stood up to the extremes in both parties to deliver results for the Lower Hudson Valley.”

Jones has broken with the Squad on polarizing issues, all before the district became more competitive. That includes his support for Israel, an issue important to the large Jewish population in the Lower Hudson Valley.

But the extent Jones has gone to create daylight between himself and the group at the outset of his campaign suggests he views it, at least to some extent, as a liability in the newly configured 17th District.

Jones is not running away from the progressive brand per se — he makes repeated appeals to economic populism with his emphasis on the working class — but he does appear to be softening, or perhaps recasting, those views in a way that could still resonate with a more centrist Democratic voting base.

His record shows that he “stands up for his principles” and is a man of conviction, Jones’s announcement video suggests. They even make him something of an outsider.

“I have never been Washington’s choice,” he proclaims, arguing his rejection of corporate PAC money and a bill he co-sponsored to ban lawmakers from trading stocks ruffled feathers on the Hill.

There’s some truth to his statement — Jones was in effect pushed out of the district last cycle so Maloney, a top Democrat in the House, could run in a safer seat post-redistricting.

But Jones was viewed as a rising star in Democratic circles and was elected to leadership himself as the ambassador for the freshman class in 2020.

Suzanne Berger, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Westchester, the largest county in the 17th District, acknowledged the shift in messaging from four years ago but attributed it largely to circumstance.

“Part of that is driven by the fact that he’s running on a record now as an incumbent would, as opposed to a vision,” Berger, who has endorsed Jones in the race, told the Washington Examiner.

The political moment has also changed, she said, from even four years ago, when the death of George Floyd at the hands of police sparked calls for reform and accountability. Today, suburban voters are concerned about a crime wave that has swept big cities, and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has abortion rights front and center for the second cycle in a row.

Jones focused on these issues heavily in his announcement video.

“2024 is a different year than 2020 in terms of other influences on the electorate,” Berger said.

The Democratic primary this year will inevitably be viewed through the lens of ideology, however. Jones will have to defeat Liz Gereghty, the sister of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), to make it to the general election next year.

Gereghty, a school board member and small business owner, is viewed as the more centrist Democrat in the race, setting up a moderate versus progressive showdown.

But Jones’s liberal record will be put into sharper relief if he advances to the general election against Lawler.

Republicans plan to attack Jones as a radical, no matter how he positions himself ideologically.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC supporting Republican House candidates, responded to his entrance into the race by calling him a “socialist,” citing his past support for ending cash bail and vocal calls to expand the Supreme Court.

“Republicans dominated in New York last cycle because voters are fed up with liberal extremists whose socialist agenda has caused skyrocketing prices and a crime wave, and this race will be no different,” said Courtney Parella, the group’s communications director.

While that message may resonate with the GOP voting base, Jennifer Colamonico, chairwoman of the 17th District’s Putnam County Democrats, believes Jones would have been called a radical whether he was a progressive or not.

“It’s totally stale. Anybody and everybody who’s a Democrat that runs for office gets called a socialist,” Colamonico, a Jones supporter, told the Washington Examiner. “They don’t even know what that word means anymore.”

Democrats, for their part, will attempt to label Lawler, who describes himself as a “bipartisan problem solver,” as the extremist. Democratic leadership in the House has already sought to associate him with “extreme MAGA Republicans,” and the Gereghty campaign even flashed a clip of him followed by firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in her launch video.

It’s premature to say how these dueling claims of extremism will be received by voters, but an early poll released in May, well before Jones entered the race, had him trailing Lawler by 2 points. A generic Democrat, by contrast, beat a Republican 49%-48% in the poll.

Both candidates are within the margin of error, meaning the seat will be among the most competitive of the 2024 cycle. The Cook Political Report rates it as a toss-up.

Lawler will have the advantage of incumbency, but Colamonico believes the district’s demographics still fundamentally work in Democrats’ favor. She argued the last-minute scramble caused by a judge throwing out New York’s maps months before the general election helped hand the seat to Republicans.

Lawler, despite his threadbare victory last year, won three of the four counties that fall in the 17th District, each by double digits. But Maloney handily won Westchester.

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Even if Lawler maintains those margins in the counties he won, Berger believes Jones will outperform Maloney in Westchester with President Joe Biden and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) at the top of the ticket.

Those coattails will be enough for Jones to retake the seat, she argued. “I think in a presidential year, it should be a Democratic district.”