🚨 NEW REPORT: NY-17 Is Becoming The Least Affordable District Thanks to Mike Lawler [Washington Post]

And while Lawler continues to rubber stamp Republicans’ price-hiking agenda, Hudson Valley families are left “accumulat[ing] credit card debt to buy groceries.” As two Rockland County parents have been forced to pick-up second jobs and sell vintage rock band t-shirts to get by, they’re making it clear that “affordability has started to play a larger role in driving which way [they’re] voting.”

DCCC Spokesperson Riya Vashi:
“Hudson Valley families can’t afford another two years of Mike Lawler bending the knee to Donald Trump and corrupt special interests. Next week, New Yorkers will kick Lawler to the curb and send Cait Conley to Congress.”

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Washington Post: Costs outpaced wages in more GOP-held battlegrounds, Post analysis shows

• Six in 10 families can’t afford the basic cost of living in the battleground districts that will determine which party controls the House, a Washington Post analysis has found
• Incomes have not kept up with rising costs in 42 of the 46 most competitive midterm election districts. But the problem is marginally worse in Republican-held districts, according to Post analysis of family budget data between 2019 and 2024.
• As voters decide which party can best rescue their chance at the American Dream, political experts say prolonged economic hardship is the defining feature influencing voters in the midterms.
• Two years ago, when Republicans won control of the House and President Donald Trump won the White House, affordability and immigration were consistently voters’ top issues in polling.
• But this year, affordability polls in a tier by itself, and voters appear ready to deliver political consequences to Republicans, said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, who reviewed the findings.
• In the past three years, for example, rents in Republican-held battlegrounds have risen 9 percent, compared to 4 percent in Democratic-held ones, according to average monthly rents from the real estate company Zillow. More recently, inflation triggered by the Iran war has increased energy and food prices across the country in 2026.
• Paychecks aren’t keeping up, either. In September, prices were up 3.7 percent from a year earlier, while average hourly wages rose 3 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• The battleground district with the biggest affordability gap is New York’s 17th District, in the Hudson Valley. Costs there rose 34 percent between 2019 and 2024; incomes rose only 19 percent.
• Kayla Vander Wiele, 39, said her family in Rockland County, a New York City suburb, has shifted into an untenable paycheck-to-paycheck existence over the past year. Despair set in when she had to accumulate credit card debt to buy groceries.
• “I don’t know how people are supposed to live,” she said. “We’re really noticing that our money is not going very far.”
• The family of four’s combined $115,000 income, slightly above the county median, falls roughly $36,000 short of what The Post estimates a family of four like hers in Rockland County needs for the basics — about $151,000 a year including child care.
• “I have, for a long time, felt like I must have done something wrong, because I didn’t think it was this hard for my parents,” she said. “I have a quote-unquote ‘good job,’ and I’m just struggling so much, and I’m like, what did I do that it’s not working out for me? Where did I make a bad decision?”
• Vander Wiele has a master’s degree; her husband a bachelor’s. They have minimal debt and both have remote office jobs, she said. She works for a hospital, her husband for an insurance company. They had moved in with her parents for two years to save enough for a first home, and bought early in the pandemic, locking in a cheap mortgage rate before they skyrocketed.
• Rather than pay for day care that felt too expensive, they juggled two full-time working parents at home with two kids in tow — a daughter, now 6, and son, now 2.
• Her husband started selling his collection of vintage rock band T-shirts online to help make ends meet. She works a second job as a Starbucks barista, picking up evening and weekend shifts to earn an extra $300 a week.
• Vander Wiele says she typically votes for Democrats, and for years had been picking her candidates based on who projected a sense of decency.
• “The longer I own my home, the longer I’ve been a mother, and the more I’m finding myself struggling financially, affordability has started to play a larger role in driving which way I’m voting,” she said.