Former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D., N.Y.) lost his comeback bid for his Lower Hudson Valley congressional seat against Rep. Mike Lawler (R.) after spending months bleeding support from former allies.
Lawler led Jones by 16 points with 94 percent of the vote reported when the Associated Press called the race at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday. The GOP’s slim majority in the House of Representatives largely relied on Lawler and fellow Empire State Republicans flipping blue seats in 2022 and maintaining them in 2024.
Jones ran his first two campaigns on far-left policies and joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus during his only term before getting ousted in 2022. He accused immigration enforcement officers of "terrorizing" communities and promoted defunding police and abolishing prisons. But this year, Jones abandoned those positions and ultimately alienated himself.
Far-left groups like the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Working Families Party rescinded their support for the New York Democrat after he rebuffed Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) for his incendiary and anti-Semitic rhetoric and endorsed his pro-Israel primary challenger George Latimer.
His views on Israel, however, have been inconsistent. During an October debate, he called on Israel to relinquish some settlements in a "land swap" to ensure "lasting peace and security" in a proposed two-state solution.
Union leaders also deserted Jones. Lawler secured endorsements from national and local unions representing boilermakers, electrical workers, plumbers, and steamfitters—a reversal from 2022 when they backed Lawler's Democratic opponent. One union leader, Transport Workers Union of America head John Samuelsen, said Jones hadn’t effectively pursued an endorsement and called the former congressman a "whining district-flopping no-show."
"Mondaire Jones wouldn’t recognize me if he bumped into me at a fund-raiser. He literally bumped into me at a Nancy Pelosi event at the Democratic convention, and he didn’t know who I was," Samuelsen said. "
And as establishment Democrats adopted a message of unity in July following the first assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, Jones refused to tone down divisive rhetoric, saying he wouldn’t be "gaslit" away from decrying Trump as a "threat to democracy."
Jones’s only congressional victory came in 2020 after he primaried former Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey as a progressive outsider. After redistricting caused members to shuffle their districts, Jones jumped ship and ran for an open seat sprawling from Manhattan to Brooklyn in 2022 but lost in a distant third place in the primary.