A new profile from the New York Times highlights how Army Combat Veteran Cait Conley’s 16 years of active duty service, including six tours overseas, is driving her campaign to flip New York’s 17th District.
The Times notes that Cait’s service background could be “particularly effective” in NY-17, “where nearly a third of all voters are unaffiliated and roughly half of all households include an emergency medical worker, law enforcement officer or veteran.”
Meanwhile, they point out that MAGA Lapdog Mike Lawler has spent his time at town halls defending Trump’s tariffs, reckless war in Iran, and devastating cuts to the social safety net after Trump praised him as “a warrior” for the MAGA agenda during a rally in NY-17.
In a district the Times calls “among Democrats’ best hopes to flip a seat,” Cait is ready to bring her lifetime of service to Congress.
Read the profile for yourself:
- If there is one thing that voters probably know by now about Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger in a critical House race in New York, it’s her background as a soldier.
- Her 16 years of active duty service have been at the forefront of her campaign from her first ads, which showed a fighting-fit Ms. Conley knocking out pull-ups and bench-press reps with the words “special operations” and “terrorist hunter” superimposed above her.
- On the trail, she draws a direct line between her six tours overseas and her campaign in New York’s 17th Congressional District.
- “Watching this administration destroy the very values that we fought for — that I was willing to die for — become something I barely recognize was unacceptable,” she said in a June interview.
- Democrats hope that Ms. Conley’s military service and patriotic message will help her to replicate the successes of other women who used their military careers to connect with voters outside the Democratic base, including Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.
- The strategy may be particularly effective in this district in the lower Hudson Valley, where nearly a third of all voters are unaffiliated and roughly half of all households include an emergency medical worker, law enforcement officer or veteran, according to the office of the incumbent representative, Mike Lawler. This swing district, a patchwork of wealthy commuters, Spanish-speaking immigrants, small business owners and Hasidic Jews, is considered among Democrats’ best hopes to flip a seat in the critical midterms.
- Ms. Conley has framed her candidacy — her first attempt at running for any public office — as an extension of her duty to service. One of her chief policy ideas is to expand a veterans’ mortgage subsidy to other public servants like teachers, nurses and police officers.
- Ms. Conley’s military experience, which also includes senior positions in the National Security Council and in the Biden administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, may make her more appealing to right-leaning voters.
- Ms. Conley spent her entire adult life focused on issues of national security, graduating from West Point and serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa, before joining the National Security Council and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
- But Mr. Lawler’s ties to Mr. Trump may hurt him with voters as the president’s approval ratings fall across the country.
- In town halls across his district, Mr. Lawler has defended the president, as well as some of the Trump administration’s contentious policies like tariffs, the war in Iran and cuts to the social safety net. Earlier this year he welcomed the president to a rally in the 17th District during which Mr. Trump praised him as “a warrior.”
- The daughter of a postal worker, Ms. Conley grew up just over the current district border, splitting her time between her mother’s home in Pine Bush and her father’s home near Beacon. Her family has been in the region for decades, she says, happy to tell stories about the volunteer fire department in Cortlandt where generations of her relatives served, and the septic company in Montrose that her godmother founded in 1975.
- She was sitting in an 11th-grade English class at Pine Bush High School when she saw the World Trade Center towers collapse.
- “That was when I was like, I don’t know exactly what this fight is going to be, I don’t know exactly where this fight is going to take us,” Ms. Conley recalled. “But I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
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