If there is one thing that voters probably know by now about Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger in a critical House race in New York, it’s her background as a soldier.
Her 16 years of active duty service have been at the forefront of her campaign from her first ads, which showed a fighting-fit Ms. Conley knocking out pull-ups and bench-press reps with the words “special operations” and “terrorist hunter” superimposed above her.
On the trail, she draws a direct line between her six tours overseas and her campaign in New York’s 17th Congressional District.
“Watching this administration destroy the very values that we fought for — that I was willing to die for — become something I barely recognize was unacceptable,” she said in a June interview.
Democrats hope that Ms. Conley’s military service and patriotic message will help her to replicate the successes of other women who used their military careers to connect with voters outside the Democratic base, including Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.
The strategy may be particularly effective in this district in the lower Hudson Valley, where nearly a third of all voters are unaffiliated and roughly half of all households include an emergency medical worker, law enforcement officer or veteran, according to the office of the incumbent representative, Mike Lawler. This swing district, a patchwork of wealthy commuters, Spanish-speaking immigrants, small business owners and Hasidic Jews, is considered among Democrats’ best hopes to flip a seat in the critical midterms.
In 2024, voters in the district sent Mr. Lawler, a Republican, back to Congress for a second term, even as they narrowly cast more ballots for Kamala Harris over President Trump.
Ms. Conley has framed her candidacy — her first attempt at running for any public office — as an extension of her duty to service. One of her chief policy ideas is to expand a veterans’ mortgage subsidy to other public servants like teachers, nurses and police officers.
Ms. Conley’s military experience, which also includes senior positions in the National Security Council and in the Biden administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, may make her more appealing to right-leaning voters. But her somewhat hawkish approach could put her at odds with some Democratic voters and colleagues.
In a recent debate, Ms. Conley said that she did not believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted a genocide. She criticized the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but said she opposed calls to block military aid to Israel.
She once expressed support for an expensive and thus-far theoretical project called Golden Dome, a defense system proposed by Mr. Trump to protect the United States from ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles. Democrats in Congress have called the plan an unworkable boondoggle.
And she has doubled down on her position that the federal government ought to have every tool available to defend the country, including a drone detection product and an A.I.-powered data analysis tool sold by companies where she worked for 18 months after leaving government.
To Ms. Conley, these stances are a natural outgrowth from her military tenet to keep the American people safe. Ms. Conley spent her entire adult life focused on issues of national security, graduating from West Point and serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa, before joining the National Security Council and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
She then left the government to work for two contractors, a period that Mr. Lawler has said typified Washington’s “revolving door” that allows former lawmakers to capitalize on their connections.
But much of Mr. Lawler’s emphasis has been on characterizing Ms. Conley as being too far to the left for the swing district, suggesting that she had much in common with Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both democratic socialists.
During one particularly tense moment in their first debate, Mr. Lawler demanded Ms. Conley denounce Mr. Mamdani, whom he accused of fomenting antisemitism.
Ms. Conley replied that she denounced antisemitism regardless of where it was coming from. “I absolutely call out my party when I believe that it’s wrong,” she added.
“But you don’t denounce Zohran Mamdani,” Mr. Lawler said, a smile flickering across his face.
“Have you denounced Donald Trump and the harm that he has caused to our families here in the Hudson Valley?” Ms. Conley shot back.
Mr. Lawler, 40, has worked hard to cultivate a reputation for moderation. His signature policy victory, of temporarily raising the cap on state and local tax deductions, is popular across party lines. And he proudly trumpets his record as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress — recently earning the endorsement of Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a Democrat and a fellow member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers caucus.
But Mr. Lawler’s ties to Mr. Trump may hurt him with voters as the president’s approval ratings fall across the country.
In town halls across his district, Mr. Lawler has defended the president, as well as some of the Trump administration’s contentious policies like tariffs, the war in Iran and cuts to the social safety net. Earlier this year he welcomed the president to a rally in the 17th District during which Mr. Trump praised him as “a warrior.” (The president also said, with some tenderness, that in his quest to raise the state and local tax limit, Mr. Lawler had at times been a “pain in the ass.”)
Last month, The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump’s super PAC planned to spend several million dollars to defend Mr. Lawler, who voted with Mr. Trump 94 percent of the time in the past year, according to Roll Call — earning him the title of the third most-independent Republican in the remarkably united conference.
Mr. Lawler, 40, said in a text message that his votes did not fully capture his work behind the scenes to fight for his constituents, offering a 17-page document highlighting areas on which he had opposed the president, including extending temporary protected status for Haitians, restarting offshore wind projects and keeping the Postal Service public.
One of the more effective attack lines against Ms. Conley, who moved to the district only last year, has focused on her residency.
The daughter of a postal worker, Ms. Conley grew up just over the current district border, splitting her time between her mother’s home in Pine Bush and her father’s home near Beacon. Her family has been in the region for decades, she says, happy to tell stories about the volunteer fire department in Cortlandt where generations of her relatives served, and the septic company in Montrose that her godmother founded in 1975.
She was sitting in an 11th-grade English class at Pine Bush High School when she saw the World Trade Center towers collapse.
“That was when I was like, I don’t know exactly what this fight is going to be, I don’t know exactly where this fight is going to take us,” Ms. Conley recalled. “But I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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