As he walked through Central Park, George T. Conway III — the former conservative lawyer who became a prominent activist foe of President Trump — reflected on what has made his move to New York City pleasurable.
There were the restaurant finds near his new Chelsea home; the Central Park strolls with his corgi, Clyde; the proximity to Broadway. (He confided that he had just seen “Hamilton” for the third or fourth time, this time with his new girlfriend, whom he met on Bluesky, the liberal alternative to X.)
And then Mr. Conway turned to the underlying reason for his newfound New Yorkerness: his brash, if overly optimistic, run for Congress in Manhattan’s famed 12th District.
“I’ve been yapping about Trump for years,” said Mr. Conway, 62, explaining his decision to run. “It’s sort of unfair for me to be lobbing things into the cheap seats. I felt like I had to put my money where my mouth is.”
Mr. Conway is a candidate made for cable TV watchers, the ones who self-consciously correct themselves when they refer to the channel as MSNBC instead of MS Now. He is a candidate for professionals — lawyers all the way to investment bankers.
“You look like a lawyer,” Mr. Conway told one supporter at a recent happy hour, to which the supporter responded, “That’s the meanest thing anyone’s ever said.” (He worked in finance.)
Most importantly, Mr. Conway, a longtime Republican who recently became a Democrat, is a candidate for people who refer to the president as the enemy who must not be named.
“I think everyone in this room shares your animus for the man whose name I will not say,” said Peggy Farber, 73, a lawyer, at a recent happy hour Mr. Conway hosted on the Upper West Side.
Mr. Conway’s campaign is in some ways a test of whether the fixation on Mr. Trump — the rage that fueled the Women’s March and early waves of resistance, the emotions that were plastered on T-shirts — feels quite as potent, politically, more than a year into his second term.
Mr. Conway, after all, has borne the toll of the Trump administration more personally than most, because disagreements over the president ended his marriage to Kellyanne Conway, the former counselor to Mr. Trump who was one of the better-known faces of the MAGA world.
Mr. Conway was elated for his ex-wife’s career when Mr. Trump was first elected in 2016, but he quickly turned on the president, diagnosing him as a narcissist in an 11,400-word essay in The Atlantic. He then helped found The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political action committee.
Ms. Conway hasn’t weighed in on his decision to run for office, but her ex-husband suspects she disapproves. “I think she deep down feels like whenever I criticize Trump I’m criticizing her,” he said.
Molly Jong-Fast, a closer friend of Mr. Conway’s, said there were “few people who have had more sacrifices, more destruction in their life, because of Donald Trump.”
“In 2016, his life looked a certain way, and it doesn’t look that way anymore,” she continued. “I have a lot of nachas for George Conway. He has paid in many different ways.” Ms. Jong-Fast lives in the 12th District, but would not disclose who she plans to vote for.
But having made sacrifices for President Trump hasn’t historically been much of a campaign strategy. Anti-Trump sentiments helped fuel a blue wave in the 2018 midterms, but this time around, plenty of candidates seem to be searching for a vision that extends beyond opposition to MAGA.
There’s Graham Platner’s paean to the working class, James Talarico’s faith-fueled campaign and, in New York City, a smattering of candidates running on the democratic socialism that catapulted Mayor Zohran Mamdani into office.
Mr. Conway, for his part, is skeptical of this progressive fervor. “I think what’s hard for young voters to understand is that they’ve seen nothing but this,” Mr. Conway said. “They don’t have a historical sense of how dangerous a moment this is, how America has gone off the rails, because they don’t remember anything else. History is something I don’t think we teach enough of.”
Mr. Conway is running in an attention-drenched district — home of Candace Bushnell, Martin Scorsese and Gayle King — among a set of buzzy candidates. His race can feel a little like a meta-story about how people attract and wield attention.
There’s Jack Schlossberg, whose celebrity status is both traditional (he’s a Kennedy heir) and modern (he’s an influencer). There’s Alex Bores, whose name recognition soared after big tech came after him. There’s Micah Lasher, whose reputation came the old-school political way. And then there’s Mr. Conway, who has hitched his attention wagon to a politician more adept at occupying mental real estate than perhaps anyone in the country.
Mr. Conway argues that his singular focus on the president is what’s most important. “I don’t think it’s a race about A.I., I don’t think it’s a race about any particular issue,” he said. “This is a moral crisis.”
“Realistically the job has to be to address the corruption,” he continued. “As a lawyer, as someone who has conducted investigations and as someone who has gone toe to toe with this man and is not afraid of him, I think I’m this person for this moment, and God bless everybody else.”
Perhaps trying to broaden his appeal, Mr. Conway has run a campaign oddly focused on his dog. Every other week, Mr. Conway hosts a canine campaign event. When he showed up at his happy hour, with his corgi in tow, he told the group assembled: “It’s an honor you took time to see Clyde.”
And on a recent stroll around Central Park, Mr. Conway got affectionate gazes from several pedestrians who didn’t seem to recognize the candidate, but were clearly enamored of his pet.
There were also a few pedestrians who clocked Mr. Conway. “I hope you can be in Congress!” one power walker shouted.
“You live in the district?” Mr. Conway asked, and was met with an apologetic “No.”
Mr. Conway believes that the issues young people are concerned about on the left, like affordability, can’t really be solved until someone takes seriously the rot at the heart of American politics. Recently a voter came up to him at Starbucks, he said, and asked if he was going to be like John Fetterman, arriving in Congress and immediately pivoting to a more conservative posture. He denied this. But even at his own happy hour, some voters pushed back on his singular Trump focus.
Chris Bastian, 67, a retired transit engineer, had come to the event to tell Mr. Conway how much he disagreed with the effort of trying to impeach the president. “In one of the first primary debates, you said your primary goal is to impeach Trump,” Mr. Bastian said.
“Yes!” Mr. Conway replied.
“I think that’s a terrible idea,” Mr. Bastian said, explaining that in his view Congress should focus on legislative ambitions beyond the president. “I think we can muddle through.”
“That’s the mistake we’re always making with Trump,” Mr. Conway said. “Thinking we can muddle through.”
Sometimes, it isn’t clear whether Mr. Conway can really imagine winning. When asked whether he is enjoying running, he paused and said he hasn’t been doing it as much recently. Has he enjoyed running for office, though? He apologized for misinterpreting the question. He was planning, he explained, to train for a half marathon after the campaign ends.
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about New York City and the Mamdani administration.
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