Three weeks after announcing his candidacy to represent New York’s First Congressional District, the author, columnist, and former CNN anchor John Avlon formally launched his campaign at the World War II memorial in Sag Harbor’s Marine Park on Saturday, promising supporters that the race to unseat Representative Nick LaLota is winnable.
Since announcing his candidacy, Mr. Avlon has shaken up the Democratic Party primary campaign. Two candidates seeking the party’s nomination quickly withdrew from the race, and several Democratic officials and organizations have thrown their support to Mr. Avlon, including the East Hampton and Southampton Town Democratic Committees. He will likely face one competitor, Nancy Goroff, the Democrats’ 2020 candidate, in the June 25 primary election. Ms. Goroff lost to then-Representative Lee Zeldin by 10 percentage points.
Under a blue sky on an unseasonably warm afternoon, Mr. Avlon was joined by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., Southampton Town Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni, Gordon Herr, the Southampton Democrats’ chairman, former Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman, Suffolk County Legislator Ann Welker, and Anna Skrenta, the East Hampton Democratic Committee chairwoman. All have endorsed Mr. Avlon’s candidacy, as have Perry Gershon, the Democrats’ 2018 nominee, former Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming, the Democrats’ 2022 nominee who lost to Mr. LaLota, former State Senator James Gaughran, who dropped out of the 2024 race, and former Senator Doug Jones of Alabama.
In remarks before supporters, Mr. Avlon sought to tie Mr. LaLota, a freshman Republican, to former President Trump and a Republican-majority House of Representatives that passed just 27 bills in 2023 and has been characterized by dysfunction, resignations, and the expulsion of Representative George Santos of New York’s Third District, who is now challenging Mr. LaLota in the First. Mr. LaLota has endorsed Mr. Trump for president.
“It’s our turn to step up, because this is no ordinary time and no ordinary election. This is really about freedom and democracy in a fundamental way like we’ve never faced. . . . Together, we’re going to win by forming the broadest possible coalition to defend our democracy, to defeat Donald Trump, and win back the House from his MAGA minions,” he said, using the acronym for “Make America Great Again,” Mr. Trump’s longtime campaign slogan.
The First District is a swing district, Mr. Avlon said, an increasing rarity in American politics: Just 19 percent of congressional districts are competitive. The growing prevalence of “safe” seats in Congress “goes a long way toward explaining why our politics have gotten so ugly and so mean and so polarized and so divisive and dysfunctional,” he said. “The incentive structure is screwed up. Most folks in Congress who don’t have competitive elections, they only worry about playing to the base, so there’s no incentive to try to reach out and solve problems. In a swing district, the only way to win is by reaching out. The only way to win is by persuading people you might not agree with. Yeah, you’ve got to fire up the base, but you need to win over independents. And that’s what we can do in this election. We can remind folks that this hyper-partisanship fever that we’re living under these past few years doesn’t represent the best of us.”
Control of Congress “can go right through Long Island” via the First District, Mr. Avlon said. “If we win here, Democrats will take back Congress.” His campaign has “changed the energy and the calculus,” he said. He was attacked by the National Republican Congressional Committee on the day he entered the race, and he considers it a badge of honor. “That’s a sign that they’re scared.”
He pledged not to be “one of these Democrats always on defense.” Rather, “we’re going to flip the script. We’re going to reach out not only to independent voters but those reasonable Republicans who recognize that Donald Trump doesn’t represent anything about why they might have thought themselves Republicans in the first place.”
Republicans, he charged, are weak on defense. “They’re weak on national security, not supporting Ukraine and allowing Vladimir Putin to try to walk all over our fellow democracies. They’re weak on democracy. They’ve rolled over for a guy,” Mr. Trump, “who tried to destroy our democracy on the back of a lie, and what’s worse, that election lie is now a litmus test for party loyalty.”
Republicans are weak on immigration, he said, charging that “they try to fearmonger this issue, they try to fundraise off this issue, but they refuse to fix it.” Last month, following Mr. Trump’s declaration of opposition to a bipartisan border security deal that would also have funded support for Ukraine and Israel, Senate Republicans narrowly scuttled it.
“They can’t take yes for an answer,” Mr. Avlon said of Republicans. “And Nick LaLota, the one-term congressman,” he said to cheers, “showed once again that he’s a follower, not a leader.” He criticized Mr. LaLota for a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter, mocking the Republican Senator James Lankford, who had spent four months negotiating the border security deal. Republicans, Mr. Avlon said, “walked away from fixing the problem they’ve been fearmongering, and that’s a firing offense.”
Democrats, he said, can defend democracy, combat climate change, protect women’s reproductive freedoms, improve infrastructure and transportation, strengthen the middle class, and “deal with the crisis of affordability,” but “we’ve got to win here.”
“We can deliver common-sense problem-solving to Suffolk County families,” he said. “We can start to restore faith that maybe democracy can work again, if we all stand up together right now.”
