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Four Democrats (And Counting) Step Up To Challenge Lawler For CD-17 Seat

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Democratic activists protest in front of Peekskill Social Security office

April 18, 2025

By Barrett Seaman–

New York’s 17th District Republican Representative Mike Lawyer, now in his second term, is seen as a solid “retail” politician who actively caters to his constituent’s needs. He is not shy about touting the $2.5 million in federal funds he has brought back to the district or the 21 pieces of legislation he says he has introduced since being elected to Congress.

What Lawler hasn’t talked about much is the dramatic impact of Trump administration policies. To that end, he has so far avoided the kind of “town hall” settings that have been scenes around the country of strong voter backlashes aimed at GOP officeholders. Since January, he has held one “tele-town hall” meeting, a virtual format that allowed his tech staff to screen the questions. As a result, there was little opportunity for the 4,000 participants to pin the congressman down on sticky issues like tariffs, Social Security and Medicare. A story in Lohud characterized eight of the 11 questions as friendly, often prefaced with praise for the job Lawler is doing in Washington. The first of two live, in-person town halls is scheduled for April 27 at Clarkstown High School—an event that is already sold out.

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CD-17 is a so-called “purple district that some observers say may be New York State‘s only real toss-up congressional race in 2026. The strongest evidence of that so far is the entry of four Democrats who have registered to run against Lawler. And that is for an election that is still a year-and-a-half away, with a primary that won’t be for another 14 months.

Candidate Beth Davidson of Nyack speaks at Peekskill rally

First to announce was Nyack resident Beth Davidson, 52, a Rockland County Legislator, former school board member, community activist and self-described “lacrosse mom.” She had an early endorsement from Mondaire Jones, the former CD-17 representative who lost to Lawler last fall. Many observers believe that his loss was in part due to his ill-fated 2022 attempt to run in New York City’s progressive 10^th district after Sean Patrick Maloney bumped him off the ballot in CD-17 before losing to Lawler himself.

Davidson calls herself a “bipartisan problem solver” a label that, if it sticks, would set her neatly in the center of the moderately inclined 17^th. She cites her record on the Nyack School Board and County Legislature as having “worked across the aisle” with Republicans on gun safety, property tax cuts and hiring more police officers. Like all Democrats in the district, she attacks Lawler for his failure to restore the state and local tax deduction (SALT) and for remaining silent “as Elon Musk takes a wrecking ball to our constitution.”

Next to step up was Jessica Reinmann, 49, of Chappaqua. Trained as a lawyer, she has been the CEO of 914CARES, a $2.5 million nonprofit that collects and distributes clothing and other personal essentials to needy Westchester families. Her main issue is the cost of living, but gun safety and abortion rights are high on her platform agenda. She too looks to place herself in the political middle of the district. Mondaire Jones lost, she opines, because he was constantly on the defense. “I’m not on defense,” she says. “I have nothing to be defensive about.”

In the 2024 cycle, she believes, “we lost because we as a Democratic electorate didn’t focus on the kitchen table issues.” Everything Lawler does, she charges, “he does for himself. When he voted for the budget bill, he said to District 17, ‘you don’t matter.’”

Like Davidson and Reinmann, the third registered candidate, Cait Conley, 39, touts her modest roots. Her mother worked for the post office; her father was a construction worker. Cait followed a different path, winning an appointment to West Point and spending 16 years in the Army, including tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and in North Africa in pursuit of the terrorists who killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Bengazi. Six of her deployments were classified. Her personal motto derives from her Army training: “You run to the sound of a gun.”

In much the same vein as former CD-17 candidate Evelyn Farkas, now Executive Director of the McCain Institute, Conley can claim a strong national security record. Post-military, she was a staff member of the National Security Council and most recently an official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, overseeing the security of the 2024 election. “These are the types of jobs,” she says, “where failure is not an option.”

Conley echoes the same critique of the Republican-dominated government, including Mike Lawler. She deplores what she calls “the DOGEing of the federal government” and asserts that “tariffs should be used as a scalpel—not a bulldozer.”

The latest Democrat to declare is Mike Sacks, 42, a graduate of Duke and Georgetown Law who spent 15 years covering the courts (including the Supreme Court) for the Huffington Post, Fox 5 News and Scripps-owned news stations. He won an Emmy for his coverage of the George Floyd protests. A single parent of two boys, Sacks lives in Croton-on-Hudson. His campaign web site says he is running “to not only tell the truth about what’s happening but to stop Donald Trump from stealing from the People’s House to make the rich richer with Mike Lawler’s help.”

There may be more. The names of two other prospective candidates are circulating among local Democrats: One is Neal Zuckerman, 54, senior partner and managing director of Boston Consulting Group, one of the “Big Three” management consulting firms. Also a graduate of West Point as well as Harvard Business School, Zuckerman is on the board of the MTA as well as that of NPR, National Public Radio, which along with its sister nonprofit Public Broadcasting System (PBS) is on Donald Trump’s short list of “leftist” media organizations he wants to abolish.

Finally, there is Tarrytown’s own Effie Phillips-Staley, 54, a member of the Village Board of Trustees and former executive director of the Foundation for the Public Schools of the Tarrytowns. Phillips-Staley, with family roots in El Salvador, also has strong ties to the county’s Hispanic community.

When pressed about their intentions, both Zuckerman and Phillips-Staley have not ruled out a run.

All four of the announced candidates concur that Mike Lawyer’s profession of bipartisanship masks his essential alignment with Trump policies; that however moderate he claims to be, when it comes to the big issues (most prominently the House budget agreement) he votes with Speaker Mike Johnson and the MAGA base.

Lawler refutes the charge that he backs major cuts to Medicaid, arguing that the word “Medicaid” does not appear once in the bill. Democrats counter that the bill as passed mathematically cannot avoid including deep cuts in Medicaid as well as Medicare.

The accusation won’t go away. Lawler recently responded to an op-ed in the Journal News, co-authored by Carolyn Martinez Class of Citizen Action New York and Jasmine Gripper of the New York Working Families Party by attacking Class’s group as “a radical far-left organization” and calling Gripper “an avowed socialist.”

Anti-Trump, anti-Lawler poster at Peekskill rally

On the substance of their case against him, Lawler asserted that he will “never cast a vote that takes Medicaid away from eligible recipients.” But he went on to state his commitment “to strengthen these programs by cracking down on scam artists exploiting them at taxpayer expense.” Lawler further decried the “billions spent on Medicaid for undocumented migrants” and endorsed “common-sense reforms like work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents.” Democrats interpret both positions as code words for budget cuts.

With the 2026 election so far into the future, political activity has been largely a reaction to Trump’s dramatic policies and manifested in numerous rallies organized by party activists. Last weekend, about 100 of them marched up Peekskill’s Division Street to the Social Security office where speakers, including Beth Davidson, engaged them in a familiar pattern of anti-Trump, anti-Lawler call and response. It will be some time before the debate engages CD-17’s political centrists who will ultimately decide whether one of these Democrats or Mike Lawler gets seated in the House of Representatives.

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