Like other top Democrats, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is taking New York very personally this year. During a live interview at the Democratic National Convention, she told Politico’s Jonathan Martin that the state was key to Democrats’ winning control of the House in November. She reminded Martin that the Party unexpectedly lost five competitive congressional races in New York two years ago. “What happened last time in New York, do you think?” he asked. Pelosi frowned. “The gubernatorial race,” she said coolly. In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul beat her Republican challenger by just six per cent of the vote. It was the worst statewide showing by a Democrat in two decades.

Martin brought up a story he said he’d read somewhere, about Pelosi turning down a New York Republican congressman’s invitation to a dinner put on by the Sons of Italy, the largest Italian American fraternal organization. Martin asked if it was true that she’d told the unnamed congressman, “I’m not going to come to your dinner. I want to beat you.” “Not exactly that way,” Pelosi said, smiling. “It is true that I had other plans for dinner, like a hot dog, at home.” The audience broke out laughing. “I have told him on a number of occasions to prepare for defeat,” Pelosi went on.

I asked around New York Republican circles to see if anyone knew who the mystery congressman was. Many assumed it was Mike Lawler, a fast-rising freshman who represents a district in the northern New York City suburbs which may be home to the closest race in the country this year. A local Republican aide texted me: “I got $5 its lawler.” Lawler denied it. “I can assure you, if she ever said, ‘I’m coming to defeat you,’ or whatever the hell the quote was, I would know that she said that to me, and I would have responded,” he said. (Pelosi’s office declined to comment further.) Still, Lawler agreed with Pelosi’s assessment that races like his are crucial this year. “If I lose my seat, we’re definitely losing the House,” Lawler told me. “If I win my seat, we’re holding.”

Although the rest of the country is said to be hopelessly polarized, New York’s suburbs and exurbs are undecided. Seven congressional races in New York this year are rated competitive by both parties. Six are in the suburbs and exurbs of New York City. Five are held by first-term Republicans. The current Republican majority in the House is eight seats. Any one of the competitive races in New York has a chance of becoming what analysts call the “majority maker”—the seat that swings control of the entire House.

As such, the state’s Democratic Party has recently shown great sensitivity to the interests of voters in these districts. This spring, a pending congestion-pricing plan, which would have charged car drivers fifteen dollars during rush hour to drive below Sixtieth Street, became an object of ire for suburban New Yorkers. “People were, like, ‘They’re trying to suck money out of my license plate now?’ ” a Hudson Valley Republican consultant named Bill O’Reilly (no relation) recalled. “They don’t like that Big Brother stuff.” On June 5th, despite having previously endorsed the congestion-pricing plan, Hochul suddenly announced that she’d decided to pause it.

If the intent was to help Democrats’ electoral chances in the suburbs, there is little evidence that it did so. “They will do case studies on how stupid this was for decades,” one despondent transit activist wrote on X. Officials at the M.T.A., who had been counting on revenue raised by the tolls, were left scrambling to fill a fifteen-billion-dollar hole in their budgets. Amazingly, even opponents of congestion pricing booed the governor. “This cynical decision to ‘pause’ or ‘delay’ rather than cancel congestion pricing is nothing more than an election-year stunt,” Lawler said. In the weeks following Hochul’s “pause,” the picture only got bleaker for Democrats in New York’s most contested congressional districts. Across the state, Democratic candidates—most of them newcomers to national politics, or people who had lost in the last election cycle—found themselves up against surprisingly strong Republican incumbents. It didn’t help that few believed the state Party, headed by Hochul, could successfully lead any kind of Party-machine effort to boost its candidates. “You live in a blue city, but it’s going red very, very quickly,” Donald Trump bragged joyfully at a rally in the Bronx in May, just a few days before he was branded a felon in a Manhattan courtroom. Some Democrats worried he was right.

Then Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, and things seemed to change. Democrats saw a huge surge in fund-raising, volunteer enthusiasm, and Party confidence. But they were still facing formidable opponents, who embodied a new form of Republicanism in the state—savvy on local issues, pro-Trump but not too shouty about it. The two parties, plus their attendant super PACs, were preparing to collectively spend more than a hundred million dollars to bombard the most expensive media market in the country with television ads, social-media campaigns, door knockers, and phone bankers. By August, a Siena poll had Kamala Harris leading in New York by fourteen percentage points—better than Biden, but far from the roomy margin that Democrats enjoyed four years ago. If anything, the races in New York, already expected to be close, became only more competitive, not less.

The Saturday before Biden suspended his campaign, Mondaire Jones, the Democratic nominee in New York’s Seventeenth District, left his apartment, in Sleepy Hollow, and climbed into the passenger seat of his campaign manager’s beat-up S.U.V. Jones is challenging Lawler, and he had a day of campaign events ahead of him. “You know what this is, right?” he said, turning to me in the back seat. “This is all a function of Republican gerrymandering of House seats in New York,” he continued, referring to the extraordinary closeness of his race.“This shit is not normal.”

No one has experienced the recent seesaw of the Democratic Party in New York like Jones has. In 2020, when he was thirty-three, Jones won a competitive primary to succeed Representative Nita Lowey, a Democrat who had represented the lower Hudson Valley since Jones was a baby. Amid the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, Jones distinguished himself by endorsing Medicare for All and calls to defund the police. That November, Jones won by nearly twenty-five per cent of the vote, and became one of the first openly gay Black men ever elected to Congress. Many of his supporters thought of him as the New York City suburbs’ contribution to the Squad.

Jones told me that any perception of Squadness in him was a mistake. He’s generally grown mistrustful of labels like “progressive,” “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative,” and thinks the strength of incumbent Republicans in New York is partly a product of “gross incompetence” on the part of the Democrats in Albany. Like many others, he blames the Hochul administration for letting Democrats—including him—lose ground in 2022. That year, state lawmakers had a once-in-a-decade chance to redraw the state’s political maps, and botched it: the State Supreme Court decided that the map Democrats wanted was unconstitutionally gerrymandered, and ordered a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University to produce a fairer one. In G.O.P.-controlled states such as Wisconsin, Republicans have lately elevated gerrymandering to something like an art; in New York, Democrats proved that they don’t even need Republicans around to draw themselves out of power.

Among other devastating changes for the Party, the new map erased a district in the upper Hudson Valley that had been held for more than a decade by Sean Patrick Maloney, the powerful head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Maloney decided to run in Jones’s district, the newly drawn Seventeenth. Jones, wanting to please the Party, moved to Carroll Gardens and ran in the Tenth, which covers lower Manhattan and part of brownstone Brooklyn. He finished third in the primary, then watched Lawler, then a thirty-six-year-old Republican in the State Assembly, beat Maloney, a seasoned Democratic operator, by fewer than eighteen hundred votes.

Jones has since had time to think deeply about how and why Democrats in New York faltered. He has a theory that Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, as domineering as he was, would never have let the Party lose control of the redistricting process. “I want my Democratic governor of New York to be a political animal—I want them to maximize Democratic power,” Jones said. “I want my Democratic governor of New York to be Nancy Pelosi, O.K.? And not some, like, little bitch who is afraid to stick his or her neck out.” He paused. “By the way,” he said, looking back at me, “I’m not talking about any specific person.”

A few miles away from where Jones grew up, in Rockland County, we made a stop at an office of Service Employees Union International Local 1199—one of several powerful New York unions that have pooled more than ten million dollars in a super PAC called Battleground New York. Inside, a small crowd of home health aides, janitors, and school-cafeteria workers, most of them Black or Hispanic, were on a lunch break, after a morning of canvassing. “It’s turning Republican,” a veteran canvasser named Sandra told me with dismay. “People are shutting down. People are angry.” Some of the canvassers complained that they’d been sent to an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and had doors slammed in their faces. Jones was flummoxed. “Who cut the turf list and told you all to go to Monsey on a Saturday?” he said. A guy in the back of the office sheepishly raised his hand. “That was me,” he said. “Sorry.” In past years, Local 1199 had focussed its efforts on exporting canvassers to traditional battleground states such as Pennsylvania. For some in the room, knocking on doors close to home was new.

The Seventeenth is more conservative now than it was when Jones won it the first time. There is less of Westchester County, and more of Putnam, which has traditionally leaned right, and Rockland, which is home to several large Orthodox Jewish communities. (“The Orthodox went Republican,” one area political operative told me, of Lawler’s victory last time. “Maloney lost his relationship with the rabbis.”) In his campaign-announcement video, Jones endorsed a call to “fund” the police; on the trail, he has emphasized his steadfast support for Israel. In June, he made headlines for endorsing the Westchester County executive, George Latimer, a candidate backed by AIPAC, in his primary challenge of Jamaal Bowman, a Squad-affiliated congressman and an outspoken critic of Israel and its war in Gaza.

The endorsement cost Jones allies and friends on the left, but he felt that it was worth it. “I think he fell into the trap that other far-left members of Congress fall into, which is caring more about celebrity, cool, than holding the support and respect of the people who they represent,” he said, of Bowman. In Jones’s view, “Lawler’s path to reëlection requires driving a wedge between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party”—essentially, painting Democrats as anti-Zionist radicals. Like other New York Democrats, Jones is up against a Republican incumbent who is a member in good standing of the party led by Trump, and yet who, back home, reads as fairly normie to constituents. By comparison, Jones had alienated many in his own party, and was reintroducing himself to voters, who may or may not be persuaded by his shift toward the center.

Listening to Jones, I thought back to 2018 and 2020, when the progressive wing of the Democratic Party seemed so close to real power in New York. “I believe the progressive movement in America is declining, but it’s not for lack of policy achievements,” he said. “The progressive movement is dying because of personnel decisions, and a lack of strategic leadership committed to winning elections, as opposed to social-media engagement and feelings of self-righteousness,” he continued, glancing out at the lawns and well-paved roads of the Seventeenth.

Every year, U.S. News & World Report puts out a list of the “safest” counties in America. Typically, New York City’s suburbs are well represented. In 2022, Nassau, Suffolk, Putnam, Rockland, and Westchester made the list. That same year, in these same counties, many voters told pollsters that their top issue was crime.

After Election Day, analysts found a pattern that applied not just in New York but across the tri-state area: any congressional district that fell within New York City’s commuting radius had trended to the Republican Party. During the pandemic, New York City had experienced its first uptick in violent crime in decades; national and local media exhaustively covered a series of grisly murders, and social media was flooded with images and videos of violence, homelessness, mental illness, and drug abuse on the city’s streets. “There is some reason to believe that the New York City media’s outsize concern with crime might have cost Democrats the House,” Eric Levitz wrote in New York. All the talk of shootings and “hellhole” conditions in the five boroughs freaked out people in the suburbs and exurbs—and that impression has persisted, even as conditions in the city have improved.

In New York’s First District, at the very eastern end of Long Island, where the wealthy have bought up so much property that there’s a housing shortage, crime is still expected to be a top issue for voters this cycle. John Avlon, a former CNN anchor and Daily Beast editor-in-chief who is the Democratic nominee in the district, believes there is no avoiding that. Like other Democrats in New York, he drew a lesson from a special election that took place in February farther west on Long Island, in the Third District, to fill the seat vacated by the former Republican congressman and serial grifter George Santos. In that race, Avlon said, the Democrat, Tom Suozzi, had won by going “on offense” on crime. “Don’t pretend it’s not an issue, because then people feel like they’re being gaslit,” Avlon said. “Talk about real stats and facts. Like how violent crime rose under Donald Trump, and it’s fallen under Joe Biden.” This was how Avlon planned to court Republicans and Independents: “Seize the center,” he said. “We gotta reclaim the American flag.”

Avlon likes to remind people that the First District tends to change political hands every decade or so, and that Republicans have held it since 2014. The current office-holder is Nick Lalota, a former Navy officer in his first term. He has yet to really distinguish himself in Washington, but he is confident in his read of the district and its mood this year, and he rejects Avlon’s contention that he’s too conservative for the district. “It’s less blue versus red on Long Island,” he said. “It’s more suburbs versus the city.” Avlon will likely win the vote in the eastern half of the district, in the Hamptons and on the North Fork, where the global élite spend their summers. But most of the First’s voters live in Brookhaven, Smithtown, and Huntington, two of Long Island’s enormous suburbs—more “Tinas and Tonys,” in the words of one Republican aide. “One needs to be about trilingual to understand this district,” Lalota said.

The Trump brand is monolingual. The most stylistically Trumpy Republican in New York’s contested races is Alison Esposito, a Republican challenger in the Eighteenth, in the upper Hudson Valley. Esposito is ex-N.Y.P.D.; she served twenty-five years in uniform, and once posed for a photo embracing the department flag, in homage to a famous Trump photo in which he’s hugging the Stars and Stripes. She was encouraged to run by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and she talks with somewhat rehearsed intensity on issues such as Israel, immigrants, and trans rights. “It’s a sleeper!” she said, about the local cause of banning trans athletes from girls’ sports. We were eating lunch at a roadside diner in Goshen—Esposito ordered a meat-lover’s breakfast skillet, well done—but, for her, the spectre of the city loomed. Whenever she could, Esposito mentioned immigrants in the same breath as crime, tending to lump New York City’s pandemic crime spike in with its post-pandemic migrant crisis. “It’s not just perception,” she said. “People feel it on the streets. Things are changing.”

Her opponent, the Democratic incumbent Pat Ryan, a forty-two-year-old West Point grad, isn’t so sure that fear will motivate the district’s voters. “I’ve spent maybe too much time trying to understand, actually, what she’s about, what drives her, and what the heck they’re doing with their campaign strategy,” he said, of Esposito, one recent morning, seemingly bemused. Remembering his last race, in 2022, he said, “All the Republican ads at that time were sirens. We ran an ad, it was just me and my six-month-old at the time, strapped to my chest on a BabyBjörn.” We were having coffee outside Rough Draft Bar & Books, in Kingston’s revitalized old downtown. Ryan knows Rough Draft’s owners, and during the hour we sat there several people moseying past stopped for a word with him. “This is a purple district,” he said. “What I’ve learned, in just a few times doing this, is that what we talk about”—for Ryan, this means abortion rights, housing, and local issues like utility costs—“is maybe more important than certain positions on certain topics.” He took pains to discuss immigration and crime as two separate matters, and tended to mention the opioid epidemic—a significant issue in his district—when talking about crime.

Republicans see Ryan as the toughest Democrat to beat among those in competitive New York races, and Democrats evidently see him as a talent worth nurturing. He ran for Congress in August, 2022, in a special election to fill a vacancy. All the polls had Ryan losing, but he won by thirty-eight hundred votes. It was among the first federal elections to take place after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and the Party saw the victory as an early sign of how abortion rights could motivate voters. Ryan has since shown a willingness to run ahead of his party, in ways that have caught the eye of the leadership. He came out against congestion pricing as early as January, when Hochul was still ardently supporting it; in July, while Hochul continued to pledge support for Biden’s candidacy, he was one of the first congressional Democrats to call for the President to step aside. At the D.N.C., the Governor was given a speaking slot on Monday, the opening night. Ryan got a slot on Thursday, in prime time, a few hours before the nominee herself took the stage.

For years, the New York State Democratic Party’s apparent lack of interest in winning close elections has been a source of dark humor. “Everything just seems to be behind the scenes to the point where nothing is happening,” Erica Vladimer, a Democratic state committee member, told me. “We don’t have a party.” This year, Hakeem Jeffries, who stands to become Speaker if Democrats retake the House, has teamed up with Hochul and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on a joint fund-raising and field effort to dispel the notion of Party neglect in New York. Jeffries has visibly stepped beyond his power center in New York City to babysit the key districts in the city’s suburbs. “To win in New York, we gotta win your district,” Jeffries recently texted Josh Riley, the Democratic nominee in the Nineteenth District. “So no pressure.”

One night in August, I attended the Chenango County Fair with Riley, a tall and affable forty-three-year-old who looks strikingly like a young Bill de Blasio. Before he came back home to the Nineteenth District, Riley was Al Franken’s lawyer in the Senate, and there’s still something of the staffer’s deference and determination in his manner. At the fair, he went around shaking the hand of every guy he could find wearing a red hat. Modern campaigning best practices say that Democrats should consider anyone in MAGA gear hopelessly committed to the other side. Riley felt that, to win, he had to make contact with every person in the district.

This year’s race in the Nineteenth is a rematch between Riley and the incumbent Republican, Marc Molinaro, who became the mayor of Tivoli in 1995, at the age of nineteen, and has been involved in regional politics ever since. The Nineteenth, which runs from the Hudson Valley through the Finger Lakes region, is largely rural or post-industrial—more like the Rust Belt than Scarsdale. (“We’re the places where the state put mental institutions and the jails and then shut them down,” Molinaro told me.) Riley is telling voters that Molinaro is a stooge for the oil industry and other corporate interests, while Molinaro smears Riley as a local kid who left to make money in Washington. If politics were actually a spectrum, the two would be as close as any two opponents in the state—they both have criticized Biden’s handling of the border, for instance—but they each believe that the other represents the worst of their respective parties. “He’s a fraud,” Molinaro told me, of Riley. “I’ve walked by his million-dollar house.” (Riley’s house in D.C. matches the description.)

At the fair, most Republicans whom Riley approached listened politely. One woman who supported Trump told him she was opposed to sending military aid to Ukraine. “A lot of the support that the United States is giving to Ukraine is actually being used to manufacture munitions in Endicott,” he said, referring to his home town. “So it’s money that’s actually being used for American manufacturing.” No dice. “Maybe I just wasted twenty minutes,” Riley said, after speaking with one middle-aged white guy who wanted to talk about food access. “But I don’t feel that way.” Two years ago, Riley lost to Molinaro by forty-five hundred votes out of a total of nearly three hundred thousand; back then, his campaign could afford only three field organizers. This cycle, thanks to extra dollars coming from the Party, he had thirteen—a meaningful difference in a race this close.

By a concession stand, I tracked down one Trump supporter whom Riley had talked to, who said he’d served in the Army. He thought Democrats were behind Trump’s near-assassination, in July. In fact, he said, if you looked back at history, every Presidential assassination could be tied to Democrats. Jeffrey Epstein came up, as did the New World Order. The man talked of Trump as a physical marvel, and a man willing to stay up all night working. (The proof was in how late at night he posted on social media.) But was he open to voting for Riley, after talking to him? He told me he’d have to think it over.

One group of people who don’t believe that Democrats in New York are weak: New York Republicans. “The problem Democrats have is that they control everything,” Mike Lawler said recently. “They control everything in Albany. They control everything in New York City.” A former Party operative, Lawler has very quickly stood up a political operation in the lower Hudson Valley. His win over Maloney in 2022 was to New York Republicans something like what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary upset, in 2018, was to New York lefties. “For a long time after Pataki, we had a moment where we didn’t think we’d ever win a race again,” a former aide to the Republican governor George Pataki, who won his last race in 2002, told me. If Lawler can beat Jones in November, many expect him to run for governor in 2026, an aspiration he barely conceals in conversation. Even Jones acknowledges Lawler’s political skills. “We have a rapport,” he told me. “I also see him very clearly for who he is. Unlike other people, I am not charmed.”

I recently drove up to see Lawler hold “mobile office hours” in Putnam County. He’s short, and he sports the kind of wraparound beard that used to read as Brooklyn hipster and now increasingly reads as D.C. conservative. He kept his suit buttoned up as he spoke. One attendee was worried that Harris planned to confiscate guns. “I do not support mandatory gun buybacks,” Lawler told him. The attendee was also upset that trees near his home had recently been cut down to install a solar-panel field. “I do believe in climate change,” Lawler said. A woman standing in the back doorway raised her arms in exasperation. She hadn’t come to hear about climate change. She wanted to talk about crime. Actually, she wanted to talk about immigration. “What can Congress do to close the borders at this point, and stop some of these criminals that are coming in and wrecking our country?” Lawler nodded sympathetically, but said he supported a “pathway” to bring undocumented immigrants out of “the shadows.”

Later, I met Lawler at a Dunkin’ in Mahopac. He struck me as a guy who’d done some reading—on climate, on housing, on the migrant crisis. He avoided talking too much about Trump. “Look, he is who he is,” he said. “That’s baked in.” Like other ascendant New York Republicans, he had a set of examples he brought up to illustrate his distance from the more conservative reaches of his party: he emphasized that he opposed Representative Jim Jordan’s bid for Speaker of the House, that he is willing to concede holding a minority opinion on abortion rights, that he pushed to expel Santos from Congress when folks like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene were embracing him, and that he believes that Biden did, in fact, win the 2020 election. Lawler is proud of scoring high on rankings of bipartisanship in Congress, yet occasionally a Trump-like aggressiveness comes through.

“What happens in New York doesn’t stop at the city’s edge,” he said, certain that the New York City cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, and other commuters who live in his district would put him over, even if registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by eighty thousand. (Jones often touts this fact.) Lawler told me that he had experienced the city’s recent problems firsthand. He’d been standing on the street in midtown Manhattan when, in his words, a “migrant on a bike” grabbed a chain off a young woman’s neck. “I grabbed his handlebar, and we started tussling,” Lawler said. Eventually, the man rode off. “This poor girl is chasing after him,” Lawler said. “It was her grandfather’s chain.” How did he know the assailant was a migrant? “The cops came,” he said, not answering the question. “They’re seeing this constantly.”

I almost couldn’t believe this story, it seemed so perfectly crafted for Fox News. I asked the N.Y.P.D. if officers had been dispatched to such a scene on July 1st at Madison and Fifty-fifth Street, where Lawler said it happened. A spokesperson said they had, though the culprit remained at large.

A sitting congressman tussling with a “migrant”—this was Trump’s Republicanism, and though it had taken a while to find a local form in New York’s suburbs, its practitioners are poised to compete for power, whether or not Trump wins in November. “The sugar high is going to dissipate at some point,” Lawler said, talking about the Democrats’ summer switch-up. “The fundamentals of the election haven’t really changed.” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated when Pat Ryan first ran for Congress, and misidentified a house belonging to Josh Riley.