SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — In the two years since U.S. Rep. Brandon Williams won central New York’s primary by just one percentage point, the state’s Democratic leaders have done what they can to make him the most threatened Republican in the nation. Congress to make.
The Legislature changed his district boundaries, eliminating rural areas that heavily favored Donald Trump and adding the college town of Cortland, resulting in a new area where voters gave Joe Biden an 11-point lead in the 2020 presidential election.
The seat, which includes the city of Syracuse, is now seen as a crucial opportunity for Democrats as they try to take control of the House in November. While national attention has focused on districts closer to New York City that hold the key to the balance of power in Congress, the Democratic Party has devoted significant resources to this pivotal race in New York and feels it has one of the best chances this fall.
John Mannion, the Democratic senator trying to defeat Williams, will tell you he’s not a shoo-in.
Syracuse, he notes, has been represented by Republicans in Congress for about a decade now and has a Republican county executive. Just two years ago, voters in the district narrowly favored a Republican candidate for governor.
“We have a conservatism around us and sometimes that is reflected in our mood, so our independents are conservative in many ways,” Mannion said in an interview. “We are just a middle district.”
In Mannion, a former school teacher and two-term senator known as a moderate in Albany, Democrats have a candidate they bet will appeal to swing voters. He has substantial support from unions, opposes abortion restrictions and has taken a centrist position on changes to the state’s bail laws.
Williams, meanwhile, has tried to portray Mannion as a liberal masquerading as a centrist.
“He has all the credentials of the far left, but he’s going to pose as a Republican here for a few weeks, with a wink and a nod and hoping the Democratic base will forgive him or not notice,” Williams said.
Williams, who grew up in Texas, served as a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy and then was a tech entrepreneur before starting a truffle farm in central New York, has spent much of the campaign recapturing the momentum that helped him an exciting race to win in 2022.
That year, Republican candidates in New York outperformed their national counterparts by capitalizing on the public backlash against changes to the state’s bail laws. The changes limited the practice of requiring many people accused of non-violent crimes to pay money to be released from jail pending trial.
Mannion was not in office when the bail changes were passed, but he supported legislation that subsequently gave judges more discretion over whether to jail a person before trial, a change that many progressives opposed but that moderates said was necessary.
The race between Mannion and Williams started off mostly cordial, but became increasingly aggressive in the final stretch.
A Republican super PAC has aired ads centering on allegations from an anonymous complaint published online this summer accusing Mannion of verbally abusing his Senate staff. Mannion’s campaign has dismissed the allegations as a political smear and said an independent Senate investigation cleared him of wrongdoing. The authors of the anonymous complaint did not respond to requests for comment left at an email address in their online message.
Mannion’s campaign ran an ad showing a video of Williams yelling at one of his own former staffers at a holiday party last year. The video was widely circulated in the political media around the time it was recorded and shows Williams pointing to a man’s face and telling him, “I will end every relationship you have.” Williams later said in an interview that he was angry because the former assistant had threatened to publicly reveal his adult daughter’s presence on a website where people pay to view sexually explicit content.
Perhaps the biggest reason for optimism for Democrats is the extent to which the district has rejected Trump. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump in an old version of the district by about 7 points. Now Biden’s margin of victory would be in the double digits under the district’s new boundaries.
In 2022, when Trump was not on the ballot, Williams had a very tight race but ultimately defeated Democrat Francis Conole, a U.S. Navy Reserve captain, by about 2,600 votes to win the seat.
Republicans can also point to positive past election results. The district supported Republican Lee Zeldin, a former congressman, when he ran for governor of New York in 2022.
“Every election here is up for grabs,” Williams said.
Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, called it a “fundamentally moderate district,” even though on paper it appears to favor Democrats.
“In some ways you almost have two generic candidates, one more conservative and one more mainstream. And you have a district that seems built more for people who live closer to downtown, regardless of party,” Reeher said.
Rahzie Seals, 41, a community organizer in Syracuse who has become a stay-at-home parent since recently adopting a child, said at a campaign event for Mannion in Syracuse that they were “still up in the air” about even voting this year but noted that one thing was clear in the neighborhood.
“A lot of people are excited to vote against Trump,” Seals said.
