District Background

For my campaign reflection, I decided to focus on the election in New York’s 17th District. NY-17 covers parts of the Lower Hudson River Valley. It was previously represented by Mondaire Jones and had been represented by a Democrat since 1983. During the 2020 redistricting cycle, the district’s boundaries were redrawn, making it somewhat more Republican. Prior to redistricting, the Cook Political Report had NY-17 as a D+7 district, but after redistricting, it became a D+3 district.

Democratic Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney had represented New York’s 18th district, which lies just north of NY-17, since he was first elected to the House in 2012. Maloney also served as the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), so he was essentially the person in charge of getting Democrats elected to the House. After the New York maps were redrawn by an independent commission, Maloney decided to run in the new NY-17, which heavily overlapped with Jones’ old district but included Maloney’s home. Maloney’s decision to run in the new district angered some of his fellow Democrats. Jones decided to avoid a primary battle with Maloney and instead ran in the Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn-based NY-10, where he lost to Dan Goldman in the primary.

Maloney’s opponent in NY-17 was Republican Mike Lawler, a member of the New York state assembly.

Comparing Predictions and Results

In what was a surprising result, Lawler beat Maloney to flip the district for the Republicans. In terms of my probabilistic forecast, I gave NY-17 the largest Democratic win percentage for a district that would ultimately be won by a Republican. My model gave Maloney an 84.55% chance of winning and predicted he’d win 55.29% of the two-party vote share, when in fact he only won 49.53%. The actual result was still contained within my 80% prediction interval, but the result was still certainly a shock. Similarly, FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe model gave Maloney a 70% chance of winning and predicted he’d win 51.6% of the two-party popular vote. Maloney’s defeat aligns with widespread Democratic underperformance in typically deep-blue New York state, as the Republicans flipping four seats in the state.

Analyzing the Campaign

Maloney has branded himself as a moderate and is a member of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of fairly centrist members of Congress. He faced a primary challenge from the left. Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive state senator endorsed by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, launched a high-profile primary challenge against Maloney. Maloney earned endorsements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Bill Clinton and eventually defeated Biaggi, emphasizing his moderate credentials. In his primary victory speech, Maloney said that “Tonight, mainstream won. Common sense won. Democrats want candidates who get results and bring home the win.” Throughout the general election, presented himself as a common-sense candidate while framing Lawler as a MAGA extremist. “MAGA Mike versus Mainstream Maloney” became a slogan for the campaign. Maloney worked to tie his opponent to Trump. After a debate between the two candidates, Maloney’s spokesperson released a statement accusing Lawler of extremism and racism. “Tonight, MAGA Mike Lawler showed his true colors — he is an extremist, Trump-like hack who can’t tolerate the slightest criticism. When pressed on a racist mailer sent in support of his campaign, Lawler repeatedly refused to condemn it in spite of calls from local Black leaders and the NAACP to do so. Between his refusal to condemn blatant racism, his history of anti-Semitism, and his acceptance of donations from extremists like Carl Paladino, Lawler has proven he will pursue a path of racist division instead of bipartisan leadership.”

Maloney’s campaign also emphasized the issues of abortion and gun control. “Together we will protect our reproductive freedom from Mike Lawler and his MAGA friends,” Maloney tweeted on September 28th. “MAGA Mike Lawler’s radical anti-choice views endanger the lives and rights of women here in the Hudson Valley and all across America. I will never stop fighting to protect our rights from anti-choice extremists like Lawler,” he tweeted on September 30th.

Lawler, meanwhile, emphasized issues such as inflation and crime. “Joe Biden and Sean Patrick Maloney’s reckless inflationary agenda is crushing senior citizens on fixed incomes, small businesses, working families, and young people just starting their careers,” says Lawler’s website. “Biden’s and Maloney’s hidden tax has led to penny-pinching and long nights at kitchen tables across the Hudson Valley and elsewhere.” The Lawler campaign ran an ad criticizing Maloney for supporting cashless bail and promising to support the police and “make our communities safe again.” Crime in particular became a key issue for races across New York state. According to Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, crime and “fear of New York City spilling into the suburbs” was top of mind for New York voters. A late October Quinnipiac poll found that crime was the number one issue for New York voters.

Given Maloney’s role as DCCC chair, the controversies surrounding Maloney’s choice to run in the district, and the tightness of the race, NY-17 was one of the most high-profile races of 2022. Both campaigns spent millions of dollars; in late October, the DCCC spent $605,000 on an attack ad against Lawler.

Where the Model Went Wrong

So how was Lawler able to beat expectations and win a race that Maloney seemed to be favored in? Part of the upset is perhaps explained by the redistricting mess that preceded the campaign. Maloney was coded as an incumbent in my model, but the district he was running in only contained a fairly small proportion of his previous district, so it’s possible that my model was overestimating the impact of incumbency. Moreover, Maloney’s decision to run in the district left a sour taste in the mouth of many fellow Democrats and led to a fairly significant primary challenge from the left. This may have hurt party unity when campaigning in the district, leading to lower Democratic turnout.

Furthermore, Maloney was not helped much by the top-of-the-ballot races. Governor Kathy Hochul only defeated Republican challenger Lee Zeldin by around 6 percentage points, whereas Biden had beaten Trump by over 23 points in the state in 2020. Poor Democratic turnout for the governor’s race may have held back Democrats at the district level, unlike how strong performances from Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Governor-elect Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania liked pulled up Democrats in down-ballot races.

We can also consider the effects of campaign tactics through Lynn Vavreck’s campaign typology. In The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns, Vavreck provides two types of campaigns. An incumbent candidate/party in a bad economy should run an “insurgent campaign,” which focuses on elevating a particular issue that has strong public support. Meanwhile, a non-incumbent candidate/party in a bad economy should run a “clarifying campaign,” which focuses mainly on talking about the economy. If we consider the economy heading into 2022 to be a bad one (which was probably the conventional wisdom given inflation, though also a debatable point given low unemployment), then both Maloney and Lawler ran the types of campaigns we’d expect. The challenger Lawler indeed focused mainly on the economy, in addition to crime. The incumbent Maloney, meanwhile, tried to cast abortion as an insurgent issue. And, indeed, this aligns with campaigns across the country: the Democrats focused on abortion, the Republicans emphasized inflation.

So why was Maloney’s message unsuccessful in New York when it had been fairly effective in states where Democrats overperformed expectations, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania? One theory is that focusing on abortion was less successful in a state like New York because abortion rights weren’t really under threat. New York enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution back in July. Similarly, Democrats performed relatively poorly in California, where it is also unlikely that abortion rights will get restricted. The Democrats were far more successful in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio where abortion rights are already or could be in peril given Republican victories. This speaks to some of the regional differences that are not captured in Vavreck’s typology. What might be a convincing insurgent issue in one state may not be an effective line of attack in another. This analysis of NY-17 provides a helpful reminder that it can be difficult to apply a national narrative to 435 separate elections occurring in vastly different contexts. And it also demonstrates that it’s important to consider regional disparities when constructing a predictive model.