A decorated Army veteran, a Working Families Party candidate and a longtime liberal politician and activist make the Democratic primary in Hudson Valley’s CD-17 riveting.
Cait Conley, now a candidate in New York’s 17th Congressional District, at a Politico conference on AI in September 2024.
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Running for Congress in a Democratic primary to face GOP Representative Mike Lawler in New York’s purple 17th Congressional District, up in the Hudson Valley, Effie Phillips-Staley and Cait Conley have essentially the same strategy: to dramatically expand the electorate.
But for Tarrytown Village trustee Phillips-Staley, the district’s Democratic coalition needs to widen to win progressives, young people, poor people, and people of color, especially Latinos (her mother is an immigrant from El Salvador). For political newcomer Conley, a decorated Army veteran, Democrats need to embrace “the estimated 50 percent of the district that has a family member, if not themselves, who is a first responder or a military veteran, or actively serving in the military.” Plus, West Point graduate Conley says, “people who don’t see themselves as voting Democrats.” Such people, she told a recent forum, “relate to me.”
But will they relate in a Democratic primary? We’ll find out June 23.
If the Conley vs. Phillips-Staley faceoff sounds familiar, it should. This debate, between whether Democrats must mobilize their presumed base or expand the party’s reach to independents and even Republicans, is taking place all over the country in the 2026 midterms. The 17th is diverse enough that both women can find data proving them right. It’s the lone district carried by Kamala Harris in 2024 that’s represented by a Republican in the House. Its four counties—Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, and Duchess—contain pockets of poverty and affluence, whiteness and multiculturalism. Putnam County is almost 90 percent white; Westchester County is roughly 50 percent white and almost 30 percent Latino.
The Hudson Valley showdown even contains elements of a mini establishment vs. insurgents blowup: Should Democrats speak to journalists, podcasters, and others whose views, even when they’re not right-wing, are abhorrent to some in the party? In this case, Phillips-Staley recently sat down with heterodox progressive Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has said the US “deserved” the 9/11 attacks, dismissed accounts of rape by Hamas on 10/7 because Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza, and has made sexist remarks he’s dismissed as “satire.”
The chairs of the four Democratic county parties in the 17th denounced Phillips-Staley’s appearance with Piker. But the progressive shot back by saying “the Democratic party has long operated with an outdated mentality” that’s driving away young people and those who “prioritize human rights.”
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The dynamics of this race have gotten scrambled since I covered only a part of it writing about Conley’s membership in the “Hell Cats,” four female military veterans running for Congress as Democrats. At that point, Conley looked like she would have the most money (she does), the most prominent endorsements (she mostly does), and the best chance to beat Lawler in what is still a purple district. But she stumbled when asked questions about consulting for two AI firms that work alongside Peter Thiel’s software company, Palantir, which has contracted with ICE, the Department of Defense, and many other government and private entities; she says her work has nothing to do with Palantir’s ICE contracts. She’s also been criticized for getting money from the PAC Democratic Majority for Israel.
The race has essentially come down to three female front-runners, Conley, Phillips-Staley, and Beth Davidson, the not-to-be underestimated Rockland County executive and longtime nonprofit advocate. On the eve of a debate that was supposed to showcase four front-runners, locking out people who didn’t have sufficient pulling support, self-funding tech executive Peter Chatzky locked himself out, after a bunch of unsavory sexist social-media posts emerged. Chatzky suspended his campaign, but there are still two men in the race, progressive writer and activist Mike Sacks and Air Force Academy newcomer John Capello. But they have polled in single digits and raised little money, which is why they were excluded from the early April debate.
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Chatzky’s departure is especially good news for Phllips-Staley, who was given little chance of winning early on, since she was trailing badly in fundraising, and Chatzky seemed to be using his millions to grab the progressive lane. But now Chatzky’s out, and Phillips-Staley won the endorsement of the Working Families Party in March. “Our folks really do love her. And are excited about her campaign,” WFP New York chair Jasmine Gripper told me. Gripper says the number one issue for WFP voters is the wars in Iran and in Gaza; Phillips-Staley has been an outspoken opponent of both, calling Israel an “apartheid” state and its actions in Gaza “genocide.” It’s not clear that WFP voters are signing on to exactly those terms, but they want a “fighter,” Gripper adds.
She continues: “Effie represents to our base of voters the willingness to back bold ideas—why [New York Mayor] Zohran [Mamdani] won, right? We’re not leaving behind immigrants. We’re not leaving behind people of color. We’re not going to leave behind trans people, and we’re going to build a coalition of the people who are on the margins.”
Conley’s national security service serves as a kind of Teflon when her rivals try to make at least one negative point against her: She only recently moved back to the district she grew up in, and also only recently registered as a Democrat. (At a recent forum, Davidson got off a zinger, saying Lawler would like nothing more than to “run against a Biden administration insider who just moved to the district.”) But Conley notes that her recent residency, and Democratic voter registration, are due to her 20 years of military national security service, including her final two years serving as director for counterterrorism on Biden’s National Security Council staff, which included overseeing the security of the 2024 elections. We’ll see if voters accept that.
Conley says she strongly opposes the Iran war, telling a Haverstraw Democrats forum, “I’m a firm believer in Iran not getting a nuclear weapon. The regime was evil. But Trump has not made America safer in the long term. We just replaced one dictator with his son, 30 years younger. We are paying at the pump and in our daily lives, and in the lives of American service members. Give me the privilege of unleashing on them, as they send others’ sons and daughters to war while never sending their own.” Conley says the US must again rely on “using soft power, reinvesting in USAID, diplomacy, partnerships and alliances. There is strength in unity and teamwork.”
On the phone with me, she looks back at our January conversation. “The things that have changed so much since you and I spoke, Joan, what we are seeing play out, oh God, domestically, and around the world. We knew this administration was going to pursue reckless policies that were driven by greed and corruption. The weaponization of the executive branch is unprecedented; watching federal agents on American streets go out there and assault, harass and kill the very people they’re sworn to serve and protect.” Backed by Vote Vets, and Representative Pat Ryan, a Hudson Valley Democrat who won a nearby purple district in 2022, Conley believes she has the profile with which the district will resonate.
“To wake up on a Saturday morning over a month ago and find out that a draft-dodging president, and a guy who knows more about Botox than bombs, our secretary of defense, got us into yet another Middle East war…” She trails off. Conley thinks the district’s concerns about the war will ultimately highlight the importance of her military background, and her opposition to the war that is born of painful experience, even if the issue helped drive Phillips-Staley’s WFP endorsement among progressives. (I was unable to reach Phillips-Staley for this article.)
Davidson, who is Jewish, is in a unique and maybe advantageous position in between Conley and Phillips-Staley on the war, especially in Gaza. “We have a responsibility to support the safety and security of Israel, but also push for a two-state solutions,” she tells the crowd in Haverstraw. “We need to have hard conversations about the conduct of the war. Too many people have died, in Israel and Palestine.” She notes that the 17th CD boasts the eighth-largest Jewish population in the country, and her own Rockland County is heavily Jewish. “I think a Jewish woman from Rockland County is Mike Lawler’s worst nightmare,” says Davidson.
But it must be said, a large percent are Orthodox Jews who often vote Republican. In 2024, Lawler won an estimated 95 percent of the 26,000 Orthodox voters who cast ballots. Still, Davidson has the highest name recognition in the district—that’s according to her own polling, but I’ve seen no one contradict that—and she’s second only to Conley in fundraising. She got the endorsement of her hometown Rockland County Dems; Conley got Putnam County Dems, but didn’t get her home county of Westchester, which she shares with Phillips-Conley. Westchester Dems endorsed no one.
“Lawler is our congressman because he also is from Rockland,” Davidson remarked (he’s from Pearl River). “He is omnipresent at local events. People talk about his constituent services and his deep roots to the district. So that’s my biggest contrast to the rest of the field: I have been here for 20 years, raising my children here through public schools. I have belonged to half a dozen nonprofit boards. I served on my school board.” She ran for school board in 2017, after Donald Trump’s first election. “So many women raised their hands, and I was one of them,” Davidson tells me. “I had worked behind the scenes, electing dozens of women. So to raise my hand myself was not what I expected.”
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While Davidson has jabbed Conley in public events around her ties to tech firms tied to Palantir and her only recent return to her hometown, she is milder in our interview. She tells me she believes she can “win back” even Orthodox voters who went for Lawler last time, and reminds me that Orthodox voters are diverse in themselves. She talks about schools, and the lack of a “one seat ride” on public transit from Rockland into New York City (with family in Rockland, I can attest to that).
She returns for one last jab at Conley: “I would certainly not take any money from Palantir or work with companies that work with them.”
Still, I mostly hear comity in my candidate interviews. That doesn’t surprise WFP’s Jasmine Gripper. “I think everyone is like, the real race is with Mike Lawler, and so folks don’t want to expend a ton of resources in the primary,” she tells me. “We’re trying to keep the primary clean. We want to continue to remind voters of Lawler’s alignment with Trump.”
Conley sounds major notes of accord. “I agree with Effie, and that we do need to inspire people to come out and vote who feel disenfranchised. I’m with her. I agree. And I’m gonna work hard to try to do that, too. I think we also need to work hard to win over folks who feel like government is failing, and both political sides are broken. and give them hope that there’s a new generation coming in that’s gonna do things differently. And that the politicians who got us into this mess, we recognize, aren’t gonna get us out of it, and we will do things differently going forward.”
Conley, it should be said, has the support of the 17th’s teachers’ unions, who are stalwarts of the labor-heavy Working Families Party. So it is not as if all local progressives are with Phillips-Staley. Other progressive groups are holding off endorsing, at least for now. And it is almost certain that if Phillips-Staley doesn’t win the primary, whoever does will get the WFP endorsement—and the backing of all the disparate 17th CD political leaders and committees and groups that are fired up to defeat Lawler. In 2024, in an adjacent Hudson Valley district, Josh Riley won more than 22,598 votes on the WFP line, adding to his margin of victory.
“What I am sure of is that Democrats across the spectrum are going to come together after the June 23rd primary, and unite around whoever the voters choose to take on this fight,” Conley concludes.
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