Will NY's Mondaire Jones have any allies left if he goes back to Congress?

Mondaire Jones, a Democratic former congressmember running in a New York swing district, wants desperately to get back to Capitol Hill.

And he’s shown he’s willing to discard his allies to get there.

Jones burned the influential New York Working Families Party and his former colleague, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, to better stake a position as a supporter of Israel. He publicly used a gendered expletive that was widely perceived to be directed at Gov. Kathy Hochul as she struggles to improve her own polling numbers.

And he attempted to distance himself from President Joe Biden after the president attacked supporters of former President Donald Trump, despite taking credit for signature Biden initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Along with his allegiances, some of his political stances have shifted — presenting Jones as a candidate who rose with the Democratic Party’s tide of progressivism and shifted right, to the party's center.

To some political observers, it’s the price to pay for victory against a Republican incumbent in a swing district. But to his critics, Jones’ apparent willingness to discard his allies presents a conundrum for him after the election: If he wins, who will be left in his corner?

“I don't know if he will have any friends at the lunch table left,” said former New York state Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, a progressive who placed second over Jones in the 10th Congressional District primary in New York City in 2022. “He'll probably eat lunch in the bathroom, by himself.”

Jones represented an earlier version of the Hudson Valley’s 17th District after his first election in 2020. After new electoral maps made the district less safely Democratic, he moved to Brooklyn to run for a New York City seat in the 2022 midterms. He placed third.

Now back in the Hudson Valley, Jones has been underperforming in the polls against Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 85,000. The 17th District has become one of the most contested seats of the 2024 House elections. Democrats suffered a humiliating loss there in 2022, when Lawler defeated Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, then the Democratic Campaign Committee chair.

Party strategists have pointed to Maloney’s loss as symbolic of New York’s role in handing control of the House to the Republicans, fomented by a disastrous redistricting process.

Jones has blamed the Democrats’ failure in the 17th District on a singular factor — the fact that he was not the nominee in 2022. He has complained about how redistricting played out, saying former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hochul’s predecessor, would not have let the process go off the rails.

“I want my Democratic governor of New York to be a political animal — I want them to maximize Democratic power,” Jones told the New Yorker in September. “I want my Democratic governor of New York to be Nancy Pelosi, OK? And not some, like, little bitch who is afraid to stick his or her neck out.”

Jones added that he was “not talking about any specific person,” and later apologized to Hochul. His campaign did not make him available for this story.

Lupe Todd-Medina, a senior adviser on Hochul’s 2022 campaign, balked at Jones’ assessment — Cuomo, too, was accused of laying the groundwork for the botched redistricting — and said that if Jones is struggling now, he should look in the mirror.

“Nobody made you run,” she said. “If you didn't feel confident and you had some previous concerns from years past that you felt were going to impact your candidacy this time around, then maybe you shouldn't have run."

Jones’ comments put him in tenuous territory with Hochul — and, in one respect, women. At a rally in Tarrytown with U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in late October, he said women galvanized by a desire to protect abortion rights could prove pivotal in his race.

“I'm proud, by the way, to be in a district and a race that will be decided by women,” Jones said, to applause from a crowd of several dozen. “Every day I run into Republicans who say they're voting for me.”

But Todd-Medina warned of the effect that Jones’ “unsavory” comments — which many people believed to be about Hochul — could have with female voters.

“It's not something you want to hear on the record coming out of the mouth of your chosen candidate,” she said. “That a man would use that term to describe a woman regardless of her being the governor or not — you don't want to hear that.”

Hochul was back in the Hudson Valley the weekend before the election to court voters for Hudson Valley Democrats. Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat in a competitive race to Jones’ north, broadcast the governor’s appearance in his district. Jones instead posted pictures of himself with her lieutenant governor Antonio Delgado and Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who won his grueling congressional primary this year over Bowman.

Jones had recently appeared on the campaign trail in Tarrytown with Hochul, but his team didn’t inform reporters beforehand or broadcast it on social media, as reported by the New York Times. In early September, the governor stumped for him at a bar in Ossining — though Jones did not show up, despite living 20 minutes away, a person present told Gothamist. The Jones campaign did not comment on Hochul's visit.

Jones has had the support of national Democrats like Biden in his comeback bid. The president mentioned him in a speech from Irvington this spring, saying Jones “needs to win in November.”

But when Jones was asked on Friday about a quote in which Biden seemingly called Trump supporters “garbage,” he took the opportunity to criticize the president. “Anybody who is referring to Donald Trump supporters as 'garbage' is completely inappropriately speaking,” Jones said during the last televised debate on PIX11.

The White House said the comment amounted to a misunderstanding over an apostrophe.

When Jones endorsed Latimer during the primary season, the state Working Families Party withdrew its funding and ground support for Jones. The Lawler campaign seized on the development in mailers to Working Families Party voters that were sent out before the June primary, according to photos shared with Gothamist. Jones later lost the party’s line to a mysterious candidate named Anthony Frascone, a former Republican who has been accused of being a GOP plant.

Despite any lingering resentment progressives might feel toward Jones, the Working Families Party is now asking voters to vote in his favor — and against their listed candidate.

“Our folks are knocking doors around the district,” said Jasmine Gripper, codirector of the New York Working Families Party. “And we're talking to what we believe is our base of voters — people who typically vote on the Working Families ballot line — and making sure that they know we're asking them to vote on the Democratic line, and voters are listening.”

Jones campaign manager Shannon Geison defended his endorsement of Latimer as a decision with “clear morality” and one he “does not for a second regret.”

“His endorsement did not result in the loss of the Working Families Party line,” Geison said in a statement. “Journalists would do well to cover the stakes in this election, given that Mike Lawler continues to bend the knee to Donald Trump and even attended his recent hate-fest at Madison Square Garden.”

It’s not only Jones' alliances that have changed during this election cycle. His political positions have shifted as well.

He was first elected to the district in 2020, when he embraced progressive rallying cries that included calls to “defund the police,” alongside Bowman, who was elected to the neighboring district that same year. Now, facing a more conservative electorate, Jones has attributed his comments to a time before he became an elected official, calling his words “stupid” and not representative of the full scope of his views on the matter.

He has also recalibrated his stance on the MTA's congestion pricing plan for parts of Manhattan to say he has always been critical of a program without exemptions. He said during his 2022 congressional run in the city that he supported the toll, while calling for "adequate transportation infrastructure" in the event there were no exemptions for the program.

“Mondaire Jones, four years ago, he was saying ‘defund the police.’ Now all of a sudden he's claiming that he's this big supporter of the police,” said Paul Bidell, an independent voter from Rockland County who attended a Lawler rally on Thursday. “It feels like, why should I elect a liar?”

Jones has faced criticism from constituents for leaving the district — baggage made heavier by his delayed campaign presence in parts of the district, including the Dutchess County portion. Based on events posted on his social media, he only began visiting there in early October.

Still, Democrats who feel the pull of national headwinds — a presidential election where former Trump is yet again the Republican nominee, now in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade — say there’s more at stake than any one candidate for Congress.

Alyse Alper, who on a recent Sunday attended a candidate breakfast by her shul that included both congressional candidates, said she felt strongly about abortion rights, gun control and other Democratic priorities. She said she supported Jones for those reasons.

“He’s changed his positions, but … I have a very hard time voting for somebody who supports Donald Trump and his views and his actions and his thoughts,” Alper said, in a nod to Lawler. “So I have to go for Jones.”

Jon Campbell and Brigid Bergin contributed reporting.