Walking along Main Street in Nyack, N.Y., Beth Davidson seemed to have the political patois of the local candidate down pat.
She talked of rising gas prices and her time on the school board. She greeted supporters by name. There was Mersina, the owner of a local diner; Jeff, who runs the music shop; two of her son’s high school classmates; and the village mayor.
But the homespun quality of Ms. Davidson’s campaign for Congress belied the importance of this high-profile race in New York’s Hudson Valley, as well as its increasing vitriol.
Ms. Davidson is facing Cait Conley, a national security expert and combat veteran, and two others in the June 23 primary that will determine who takes on Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican, in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in this swing district, making Mr. Lawler among the most vulnerable of House Republicans.
In 2024, Kamala Harris won this district, which includes all of Rockland and Putnam Counties as well as parts of Westchester and Dutchess Counties. And while her margin of victory was narrower than Joseph R. Biden’s in 2020, Democratic leaders are hoping that President Trump’s increasing unpopularity in New York will help them reclaim a seat they lost in 2022.
The primary contest has been bitterly fought, with the two presumed front-runners — Ms. Conley and Ms. Davidson — slinging enough mud that the residue may well still be visible in November.
Ms. Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature, has repeatedly gone on the offense, pointing to Ms. Conley’s work for intelligence and defense firms that have worked with the Trump administration as evidence that she has assisted I.C.E. in its deportation agenda.
When Ms. Davidson made that accusation at a recent debate, Ms. Conley struck back.
“I have never and do not work for ICE, and my work does not support that,” Ms. Conley, 40, said, calling her opponent’s attacks “incredibly” disappointing, before launching one of her own.
“What voters are sick of,” she said, “is politicians and political operatives who continue to use lies and pretend like they’re delivering when they’re not.”
The exchange laid bare the dynamics of this Hudson Valley primary in the 17th District, which is also being contested by Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive activist, and Mike Sacks, a lawyer and journalist.
Ms. Davidson and Ms. Conley would prefer to focus their attacks on Mr. Lawler, 39, a two-term congressman whose recent town hall events in the district have been marked by protests.
Instead, the increasingly ugly primary fight has resurfaced many of the divisive and unresolved issues — from outside money in politics to generational change and a rejection of the establishment — that have bedeviled the Democratic Party. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has declined to weigh in on the primary, but is expected to invest heavily in the general election.
Ms. Davidson, 53, is relying on her wealth of experience and community ties in the Hudson Valley, where she has lived for over 20 years. On a rainy morning last month, she turned out several dozen volunteer canvassers and supporters — including the mayor of Nyack, Joe Rand.
Mr. Rand said he believed Ms. Davidson’s grasp of the district’s complexities would maker her the most competitive against Mr. Lawler, even as he acknowledged that he also liked Ms. Conley.
“I think that any other candidate will get swamped in Rockland County, which is a big, big chunk of the votes for the district,” Mr. Rand said. The county has a reputation as something of an electoral cipher containing blue villages on the river and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish population that tends to vote as a bloc.
“Michael is from here, and he has roots here,” he said of Mr. Lawler. “But so does Beth. She can kind of neutralize him in his strength.”
Mr. Lawler, a former political operative and current head of the Rockland County Republican Party, has broad name recognition, even if some of it is tied to his relationship with President Trump, who held a campaign rally for the congressman last month.
While Mr. Lawler has said he will be happy to run against any Democratic nominee, his attacks have increasingly centered on Ms. Conley, who many Republicans see as the stronger general election candidate.
“She’s fumbled it every step of the way, running one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever seen,” he said during a recent visit to the State Capitol in Albany.
Ms. Davidson’s decision to go negative on Ms. Conley — not only in candidate forums but also mailers and even a cable TV ad — has led to some unlikely bedfellows.
In the past few days, a super PAC called Progressive Champions was formed to run ads attacking Ms. Conley, with similar lines to those Ms. Davidson employs. The PAC uses the same bank in Alabama that a similar dark money group uses in its spending against Rebecca Bennett, a Democrat trying to unseat Representative Thomas Kean Jr. in New Jersey.
The negative campaigning has turned off some voters, who see it as counter to the party’s goal of flipping the seat in November.
Bob Berkowitz, a cardiologist, said he met with both Ms. Davidson and Ms. Conley. He valued Ms. Davidson’s work in local politics, but ultimately found Ms. Conley more inspiring. Seeing a negative Davidson campaign mailer made him feel like he’d made the right choice.
“That’s politics,” he said disdainfully of the attack ads. Then he gestured across the room to where Ms. Conley was speaking and said: “She’s not politics.”
In ads and stump speeches, Ms. Conley seems happy to avoid appearing overly partisan. She often invokes her years of service, appealing to a sense of national identity, ideals and a willingness to accept diverse viewpoints.
“Not everyone’s going to share the same perspective, and that’s OK,” she said. “But we’re going to share the same values.”
Her résumé and rhetorical style mirror those of successful Democrats like Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, Representative Pat Ryan of New York or Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.
Ms. Conley graduated from West Point, did six tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and was among the first women to lead a special ops unit. And while she speaks with pride about her time in uniform, she said the military was not always an easy fit.
She joined the U.S. armed forces during the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell” — a policy that allowed the military to discharge service members if they were discovered to be gay — a contradiction which, as a lesbian, she felt deeply.
“It was really hard,” she said in an interview. “Every single day you struggled with this love you had for your country, and the love you have toward yourself.”
In that moment, post-9/11, she said she decided that “service mattered more.” But the sting of that contradiction stuck with her and has become motivation behind her campaign.
“I spent my entire life trying to make sure that our nation was safe and that families were safe, and that as a government it could focus on taking care of the people,” Ms. Conley said in an interview last month.
The actions of the Trump administration — from ICE agents rounding up immigrants and killing citizens, to dismissing transgender service members — were a betrayal of American values, she said. “To watch this nation that I was willing to die for become something I barely recognize is unacceptable,” she said.
Ms. Conley’s campaign has raised over $3 million from donors across the country, and has also benefited from big-money operations like Majority Democrats and The Bench. VoteVets, a PAC focused on electing veterans, has spent more than a million dollars on cable and digital ads declaring that “Cait fights for us.”
At the same time, her rivals have tried to portray Ms. Conley as an outsider beholden to dark-moneyed groups outside the district, despite having won the support of a number of local groups and leaders.
Asked whether voters can trust her to stand up to corporate power, Ms. Conley points to her support from another group that opposes money in politics, End Citizens United. She has also pledged to support term limits, bar former members of Congress from lobbying and ban stock trading in Congress.
The volley of accusations has not been enough to sway undecided voters like Jordan Turner, an “almost retired” social studies teacher at Clarkstown Central School District who had known and liked Ms. Davidson for years. He had come out to one of Ms. Conley’s “Pints and Patriots” events to check out the competition.
“Cait seems great,” he said.
“I go back and forth,” he said, nearly shouting over the throng. “It’s not really about either of them. It’s about who can beat Mike Lawler.”
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