It's the political race you can't miss in the Lower Hudson Valley, from the barrage of TV and internet ads to the flotilla of lawn signs and the glossy campaign flyers stuffed into mail boxes almost every day.
Republican Rep. Mike Lawler and Democratic challenger Cait Conley are squaring off in a nationally watched contest for New York's 17th Congressional District, the suburban swing seat Lawler has held for two terms. Their high-stakes battle will help decide control of the House and set the balance of power for President Donald Trump's last two years in office.
Pundits rate the contest a toss-up, putting a premium on turnout. Lawler and Conley have been criss-crossing the district for weeks to drum up support, greeting voters at one gathering
after another as the campaign trail nears its end. Mail-in voting started in September and polls open for early voting on Oct. 24, 10 days before the Nov. 3 election.
Affordability is the dominant theme, reverberating in messages about the Iran war and soaring gas prices, tax cuts, rising utility rates, and health insurance.
Lawler, first elected in 2022 and seeking a third term, is pitching himself to voters as a bipartisan lawmaker who has brought home a bounty of grant money for his district, muscled a string of bills through Congress and helped score a big win for New Yorkers in last year's tax cuts passed by Republicans.
"I've consistently been rated among the most bipartisan and effective members of Congress," Lawler told the USA TODAY Network in an interview. "That's why a Democrat, Jered Golden, just endorsed me [on Sept. 21], because I do work across the aisle. I do work to get things done for my district and our country. I've passed over two dozen bills through the House, 17 of which have been signed into law by both President Biden and President Trump."
Conley, an Army combat veteran who held national security posts in the Biden administration, is highlighting her 16 years of military service and pledging to shake up what she describes as a corrupt status quo in Washington. She laces into Lawler for voting consistently with Trump and backing the president on an Iran war and tariffs that have driven up costs for Americans.
Conley argues that voters in his district deserve better.
"On Mike Lawler's watch in the last four years, their life has only gotten harder," she told the USA TODAY Network. "Everything has gotten more expensive, and that's because he has been fighting for Donald Trump and special interests and corporate backers instead of the people of the Hudson Valley. I'm running to fight for them, and they deserve better than Mike Lawler."
Recent polls of likely voters in the 17th District suggest the race is tight. Conley led by 2 points in an Emerson College/PIX11 News poll at the end of September, while Lawler led by 3 points in an internal poll taken around the same time and made public by his campaign. Both leads were within the surveys' margins of error.
Clashes over backgrounds and recent work
Conley, 41, is a Hudson Valley native who graduated from West Point, served in Iraq and Afghanistan during her six deployments and led special operations forces. She entered the 17th District race early in 2025 and competed in a Democratic field that grew as large as eight, ultimately winning the June primary by 18 points over her nearest rival.
Lawler, 40, was a political consultant and first-term assemblyman when he pulled off a big upset in 2022, narrowly beating five-term Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. He won a second House term two years later with a six-point win over former Rep. Mondaire Jones.
Conley and Lawler have been taking shots at pieces of one another's resumes.
Conley contrasts her serving her country in war zones with Lawler's political career before he came to Congress, describing him as "political operative" and "utility lobbyist" in those roles. The second label refers to his lobbying on behalf of New Yorkers for Affordable Energy, a group backed by utilities and fossil fuel companies that advocated for gas pipelines and opposed climate polices.
"For the last 20 years, Mike Lawler is a political operative, has found every way possible to profit off of democracy when I was out there defending it," Conley said in an interview.
Lawler, in turn, is hammering Conley's recent consulting work for two tech companies with military contracts, one that makes drone detectors and another that uses artificial intelligence to mine data. Conley disclosed in May that she had been paid a total of $328,000 by those two firms — Hidden Level and Primer A.I. — since she left the Biden administration in January 2025.
Lawler calls her work an example of a corrupt "revolving door" that moves federal employees into lucrative jobs in the private sector.
"She negotiated for herself a sweetheart deal to leave the administration, get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in effectively a no-show job," he told the USA TODAY Network.
Tough election climate for the GOP
The Lawler-Conley race is one of about 20 that non-partisan organizations have ranked as toss-ups in the looming battle for control in the 435-seat House. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority of 218-214 with one independent and two vacancies, meaning a shift of just a few seats to Democrats in November would flip the chamber to their party and pose a new foil for Trump's agenda.
The odds of a power shift have seemed to rise as Trump's approval ratings have sunk, raising the prospect of a Democratic election wave. But even with that possibility, the 17th District remains an unpredictable toss-up that either Lawler or Conley could win, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
"Just because it's a wave doesn't mean everyone will lose," Kondik said in a USA TODAY Network interview.
He pointed out Lawler is well-funded and praised his political skills, two strengths in his re-election bid. Then again, Conley is well-funded, too, Kondik added. Conley had $1.3 million on hand as of June 30 — even after spending on the June 23 primary — and announced a massive haul of $5 million in the three months since then. Lawler had $4.8 million by mid-year and will report his latest funding on Oct. 15. (Outside groups are spending millions more on ads to back or bash the candidates.)
Kondik predicted inflation could hurt Republicans like Lawler in this election just as it hobbled Biden's aborted run in 2024, Kondik said. In addition, Lawler took the risk of holding a rally with Trump in May, which could motivate the GOP base to vote but backfire with other voters.
"If Lawler loses, Trump's unpopularity is going to be a big piece of that puzzle," Kondik said.
Whether or not a Democratic wave materializes, Kondik saw no chance the political tides will reverse course by Election Day. "This is not going to turn into a positive Republican environment," he said.
Bipartisanship, Trump support
Lawler has made his willingness to work across the aisle with Democrats his calling card, touting the high scores he earned in congressional rankings in 2024 and 2026 for the volume of bipartisan bills he co-sponsored. His message is that he's more focused on results than partisan victories.
Conley rejects that image and paints Lawler as a Trump loyalist, pointing to another analysis that said he voted on Trump's side every time last year on matters of interest to the president. Lawler was one of 182 Republicans who voted 100% with Trump in that study of 282 floor votes by the nonpartisan research group VoteHub.
"Mike Lawler has voted for the Donald Trump agenda 100% of the time, even when it has literally cost families here in the district and across the Hudson Valley," Conley said. "It's been everything from voting eight times for the reckless foreign tariffs that have jacked up the prices on goods, where the average household in the Hudson Valley is now paying $4,200 more."
Lawler, in a mailing from his congressional office, counters that 100% figure with yet another ranking that shows him voting with Trump slightly less often that most other House Republicans, making him a standout for dissent. In that study of 80 votes in 2025 by Congressional Quarterly, Lawler voted 94% in support of Trump and 6% in opposition.
"She just keeps reciting this lie," Lawler said of Conley's 100% figure. "I have stood up to the president on dozens of issues that matter to the Hudson Valley. It's not just about votes. It's also about working the administration and the departments and the agencies on the rule-making, on decisions, on funding. And we have consistently been able to do the work to actually deliver results."
Lawler got a rare campaign boost from across the aisle in September when he was endorsed by Rep. Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat who's leaving office in December after forgoing re-election.Golden, in a Journal News op-ed column, praised Lawler as a bipartisan problem solver who collaborated with him. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sharply rebuked Golden's endorsement, calling Lawler a "partisan hack."
Big and beautiful ... or ugly?
Lawler has campaigned on the tax cuts Republicans passed year, particularly a raised cap on state and local tax deductions that he fought for in negotiations with Trump. Those cuts, which also featured a renewal of lower tax rates set in 2017 and added breaks for overtime, tips and seniors' income, were part of a massive package known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
"We delivered the largest tax cut in American history, putting an average of $4,000 back in the pockets of hardworking New Yorkers and hardworking Hudson Valley families," Lawler told the USA TODAY Network. "Lifting the cap on SALT was the single biggest win in the bill. It raised it from $10,000 to $40,000 and alllowed over 90% of my constituents to be able to fully deduct their state and local taxes on their federal income tax returns."
Democrats uniformly opposed that law for what happened on the other side of the ledger: cuts in spending on Medicaid and SNAP food aid that helped pay for the tax cuts. They have savaged those safety-net pullbacks in what they call the "big, ugly bill" and have been hammering Lawler since last year for those changes.
Conley said she supports lowering taxes on the working class, but sharply disputes Lawler's victory claims on raising the SALT deduction cap. She points out that there was no limit at all until Republicans and Trump established one in their 2017 tax bill. And instead of raising the cap this time, Congress could have simply let it expire at the end of 2025 and disappear altogether.
"Donald Trump did it to punish us," she said of the cap. "And then right when it was going to end, Mike Lawler and Republicans in Congress reinstated it and made it permanent, a permanent double-tax on New Yorkers. That is not a gift, it is punishment. It was going away completely."
Sharp split on the Iran war
Conley is scathing in her denunciation of the war Trump launched against Iran in concert with Israel, saying the administration has bungled its war without making America safer or in "a better shape for long term national security."
She deplored "the literal cost we are paying, whether it is the degradation of our military readiness, the degradation of our force presence in the Middle East, the loss of service members' lives, and a conflict they haven't articulated clear military objective for." What it has done, she argued, is put Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which it didn't have before the war, and raised gas prices for American families.
Lawler hasn't wavered in his support of the war, arguing it was justified by the prospect Iran would develop a nuclear weapon.
"We want this to come down expeditiously," he said of the resulting spike in fuel prices. "But we also have a responsibility to ensure that the greatest state sponsor of terrorism does not possess a nuclear weapon and does not have the capabilities militarily to wreak havoc in the Middle East and around the globe. And that is the focus of what this military intervention has been."
Chris McKenna covers government and politics for The Journal News and USA TODAY Network. Reach him at CMcKenna@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Mike Lawler, Cait Conley make their cases in NY House race | Exclusive
