ALBANY, New York – The Associated Press announced this Johannes Mannion the winner of the Democratic primary in a Syracuse-area congressional seat, It prepared him for a challenge in November against one of the House of Representatives’ most vulnerable Republicans.
With a majority of the vote, Mannion had 62 percent in his race against DeWitt City Councilwoman Sarah Klee Hood.
He will face Republican Rep. Brandon Williams in November.
The race is poised to be one of the most competitive in the country. Williams won his first term in 2022 with 50.5 percent of the vote. The district has since been redrawn to become slightly more favorable to Democrats.
Mannion spent most of his career as an AP biology teacher in suburban Syracuse. In 2020, he toppled a long-standing Republican stronghold in the Senate before being re-elected by 10 votes two years later.
He says experience in close contests — this is the first of his four appearances on the ballot where a winner is declared on election night — will help as he enters a national battlefield.
“I have been tested. I won a tough election,” he said in an interview.
Come the general election, Mannion will cite his experiences in Albany and in schools as evidence he can accomplish more than Williams.
“Last year they passed 22 bills in the House of Representatives that were turned into law,” he said. “In 2023, I personally had 27 pieces of legislation passed by both houses of the state legislature and signed by the governor.”
People want “logic, they want results,” he said. “And I think I’ve done that for the last four years, and I certainly feel like I’ve done that for the last 25 years in the classroom as well.”
Mannion has long been a favored candidate of the prosperous teachers union for which he once served as local president. He is popular with other New York labor groups, who are expected to make major investments in his candidacy. And House Majority PAC, a leading Democratic super PAC, has already reserved airtime for ads in the Syracuse market this fall.
