The first race we have to win is the Democratic Primary which is held on June 25th. Currently, the only other announced candidate is Josh Riley, a corporate lawyer who moved from Washington D.C. to Ithaca prior to the 2022 election. Mr. Riley lost to Congressman Molinaro by several thousand votes despite having raised more money, more volunteers, and had the full backing of the Democratic establishment. The purpose of this piece is to explain why Mr. Riley lost last November, and why we need to move in a new direction if we’re going to win in 2024 and beyond.
Back in November of 2022, I was out knocking on doors for then-democratic nominee, Josh Riley. Although my health had severely declined and just the act of driving to the campaign office in Endicott was extremely difficult, it was important to me that the Democratic party keep the House. Not just because of the threat posed by the extremist members of the Republican party, which had already tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (one of the reasons that I am still alive today), but to continue the progress that was made under the first two years of the Biden administration. I wanted Josh Riley to win that year as much as anyone else because of that. He was ultimately unsuccessful.
And when I began to prepare my own campaign in the months following his defeat, not knowing that he was going to run a second time, I wanted to look at why exactly he lost, and what it was about his campaign that made voters reject him when so many other Democrats overperformed across the country.
And what I discovered was really a campaign that was doomed from the start. Plagued by a generic, overly manufactured message and a candidate too afraid to take a stand on tough issues or go out of his comfort zone, the Riley campaign lost a race that should have been a slam dunk for Democrats. If we as a party are going to win in 2024 and beyond, we have to be willing to examine what went wrong and why, and have the courage to move beyond what is familiar in order to embrace what works.
Let’s start by examining the central message of the Riley campaign, taking on the “corrupting influence of money in politics”. A message that has more or less become standard in the Democratic party, an anodyne statement that everyone generally agrees on. He’s attempted to paint himself as something of a crusading outsider who’s going to clean up the system, frequently mentioning how he doesn’t take corporate PAC money and that this is a campaign about standing up for the underdog. So, if you’re going to take such a holier-than-thou stance when it comes to who funds your campaign, you better be squeaky clean yourself right? Let’s take a look at who has made the biggest investments in the Riley campaign:
At the top of the list are a couple of multi-billion dollar law firms whom Mr. Riley has worked for. Boies, Schiller & Flexner have represented clients such as Theranos and even Harvey Weinstein while Mr. Riley was working there. While he himself was not a party to those clients, he chose to stay with the firm long after many of his colleagues left in protest. One client that Mr. Riley did represent was the big tech company Palantir, which you can read about here:
The TLDR of the article is that Josh Riley helped a big tech company secure a massive contract to sell weapons systems to the Army. It should be noted that the company in question, Palantir, was cofounded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel who spent millions to defeat a number of Democratic Senate candidates in 2022, notably Tim Ryan’s loss to J.D. Vance in Ohio. Palantir also profits off the surveillance of people at the southern border, rooting out and deporting undocumented migrants, and their technology was used in ICE’s child separation policy during the Trump Administration. Mr. Riley has also taken a bizarrely anti-immigrant position and is outspoken about how he wants to “secure the border”. I think he should tell us whether his former client and donors would profit off such a policy.
Josh has also represented some of the other big corporations you can see listed here such as Apple, as well as Google’s parent company Alphabet. Now, putting aside conversations about the military-industrial complex, ICE, and coziness with Big Tech, does this sound like someone who is free of the “corrupting influence of money in politics”? Does this sound like someone who is always “fighting for the underdog”? Are the millionaires in Washington D.C. and Silicon Valley who contributed to the Riley campaign doing so because they’re so passionate about fighting the “corrupting influence of money in politics”? Especially considering it’s their own money in question? Or are they expecting to get something in return? Are they investing in someone that they know has their interests at heart because he has time and again represented them?
Josh has been asked about this in the 2022 campaign and the response he gave was that he has a “really strong and proven track record” *sigh* somehow sounding more like a career politician than the actual career politician he ran against.
So why is Josh in this race, what is he trying to do? A common refrain of his is that he’s “running to represent the working-class families I grew up with right here in Endicott”. Except that’s not exactly true either, is it? When Mr. Riley first announced his campaign for Congress, his intention was to run in the district encompassing Syracuse and Ithaca, a far easier race for a Democrat to run in than the one that included his hometown. So instead of moving back home, he moved to Ithaca. But after redistricting, Ithaca was moved to the 19th. Suddenly the man that was so passionate about protecting the Finger Lakes and reducing poverty in Syracuse is rebranding himself as “Broome County’s own!” Playing up his blue-collar roots and talking about bringing back manufacturing jobs while finding a way to insert “I grew up on Birdsall Street in Endicott” in every interview.
I think the fundamental flaw of the Josh Riley candidacy, why he lost in 2022 and would probably lose again in 2024, is just the blatant phoniness. The way he undercuts everything he says by trying to be something he’s not. He’s not a political outsider who’s going to change things, he’s been just as part of that corrupting influence as anyone. He’s not a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth factory worker, he’s a Harvard-educated corporate lawyer who has lived a much more luxurious life than many of us could dream of. Putting on a flannel jacket and filming a video in a bar or taking a picture in front of a cow isn’t going to convince anyone otherwise. People can sniff out a lack of authenticity a mile away, and they are not going to be inclined to vote for you if they feel like they’re being deceived. When people say that the Democratic party is out of touch with working people and that both parties are the same, I think this is what they’re referring to. If people don’t find you to be authentic, if they don’t think they can trust you, nothing you say is going to matter. No amount of ham-handed pandering or overly used clichés is going to persuade anyone.
The evidence before us leads us to believe that this candidate is guided by political expediency rather than concrete principles. A fickle politician that doesn’t really have a clear vision on what he wants to accomplish or why he’s running. The way he has decided on what policy positions to take is by consulting the polls and repeating the messages that test the best. Now, you may ask isn’t that a good thing? Don’t we want our elected officials to do that? I would say not always, and here’s why:
Let’s take Ukraine as an example. If public polling starts to turn against support for the Ukrainians, will Josh Riley stand with them? Will he stand on the principles of democracy and freedom, or will he do what the poll says and vote against the aid? On that topic, I can’t actually find any evidence that Josh Riley explicitly supports aiding Ukraine. On his website and social media, he makes no mention of it, the only time I could actually find him speaking on this topic was during the debate with Jamie Cheney where he said he had serious concerns about “lighting money on fire” by sending it to a bunch of “corrupt oligarchs” in Ukraine.
In that same debate, Josh Riley was asked about doing away with the Jim Crow-era policy that prevents farm workers from receiving overtime pay. To me, this is a moral issue. How can you deny farm workers what is owed to them when almost every single other job protects your right to receive time and a half for working over 40 hours? How can anyone say “all labor has dignity” but then say, “except for those people”? The response that Riley gave was a long-winded attempt to dodge the question, and when the moderator pushed back on him he said that he would have “serious concerns” about paying farm workers overtime. The reason he said this was because a significant amount of farm workers are not citizens and can’t vote. So if he can’t get their vote or fundraise off them, what good are they to his campaign? He has more to fear from incurring the wrath of Big-Ag than he does to gain from helping migrant workers get what is owed to them.
So if a healthcare bill comes before Congress, will Josh Riley do the right thing for “the people”? Or will the pharmaceutical lobby bully him into submission? If a climate change bill is in danger of failing in the House, would Josh Riley save it or would he be too worried about how many ads the oil companies would run against him? Would Josh Riley lead the anti-trust fight against Google and Apple considering that he’s taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from them?
What credibility do you have to call your opponent a carpetbagger when you yourself only moved here specifically to run for Congress? How can you take such a holier-than-thou stance on campaign contributions when you’ve taken so much money from silicon valley? And how are you running to “change politics as usual” when you can’t get behind something as fundamental as ending the filibuster?
Adding on to this issue is the obsession with coming off as “bipartisan” and a vague promise to “get things done in Washington”. The 2022 election was devoid of any real substance, with Riley and Molinaro competing to “out-moderate” each other, each trying to sell a message of “aw shucks I’m just a down-to-Earth normal guy trying to do good things to help people” without really elaborating on what those things were. Now, I am not against bipartisanship. If it works that’s great, but is this really the standard by which to determine if a policy is good or not? My chief concern is not whether the millionaires in Washington are getting along and are chummy with one another, it’s whether the policy is bringing us closer to the values that I’ve centered my campaign on: liberty, democracy, equality, health, and happiness. Because you know what was popular and bipartisan before it was passed? NAFTA. The ’94 crime bill. The Iraq war. The Patriot Act. The war on drugs. It goes on and on, disastrous policy after disastrous policy.
So the biggest question that we all face in this primary, that is inextricably linked to policy and strategy, is what kind of leadership do we want to have? One of my favorite quotes by Dr. King, that I’ve taken to heart, perfectly contours this debate:
“I’m not a consensus leader and I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or by kind of taking a look at a gallop poll and getting the expression of the majority opinion. Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a succor for consensus but a mold of consensus. And on some positions cowardice ask the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question is it politics? Vanity asks the question is it popular? The conscience asks the question is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politics nor popular but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”
The type of leader I aspire to be, is the leader of conscience. It is the only true leader in my view. Dr. King said this as a response to a reporter that more or less asked if he regretted speaking out against the war in Vietnam, and if he could be expected to reverse his position given all the blowback that he had received. He could not, because his conscience would not allow him to. It did not matter that it was not popular, that the politics might be against him, it was a moral imperative. As a leader he saw it as his duty to build support for the position he believed in. Not to abandon the position or his values, but to persuade until it was popular, until it was policy.
It might be the safe option to avoid taking a stand on Ukraine or Palestine. It might be the politically savvy option to avoid drawing the wrath of the pharmaceutical companies or oil industry. It might be the option of vanity to demagogue immigrants and ignore the plight of the disadvantaged. But those would be options derived from cowardice, expediency, and vanity. And if I chose to give in to those temptations, those weaknesses, what would be the purpose of my candidacy? How can I, for example, say that “all labor has dignity”, call myself a union member, and only champion the white working class to the detriment of the black worker, or the migrant worker, or the foreign worker half a world away?
These conversations need to be had if we stand any chance of preserving this democracy. It is not my intent to tear anyone down or demean, but to state the situation as I see it. I think the Riley campaign is unfortunately the embodiment of all the worst instincts of the Democratic establishment in New York State. An establishment that doesn’t understand its electorate and far too often puts forth out of touch candidates running on sterile, consultant-created messages who too often blow easily winnable races. Molinaro, someone who didn’t even live in this district, should not have come anywhere close to winning. You can blame the loss on the governor, or redistricting, or being a first-time candidate, but that isn’t the reason why we lost. And how in the world does anyone let someone like George Santos win and not do any amount of due diligence in that race?
This is a party “machine” that can’t even protect its own members in elections. Joe Crowley was the 4th most powerful Democrat in the House, and was still blown out by a 28-year-old bartender in 2018. And there’s certainly no more damning indictment of their ineffectiveness than the defeat of Sean Patrick Maloney in 2022. The reason for that is because Maloney was in charge of running the Democratic House campaigns and couldn’t even win his own election! And even when the campaigns are successful, what kind of elected officials do we end up with? A decade of Andrew Cuomo who we can thank for the maps being the way they are in the first place.
Is there any reason to believe that a second Josh Riley candidacy is going to end any differently than the first? Does anyone believe that people are going to be excited by the prospect of a rematch between a corporate lawyer and a career politician? Does the Riley campaign excite, inspire, or lead you to believe that things will finally change for the better?
I understand that what I’m asking many of you to do, myself included, is to move on from a candidate you’ve previously supported. But there’s no way I could just sit on the sidelines, watch the same exact movie play out for a second time, and not offer a better alternative. When you think of the groups that the Democratic party needs to win: young people, workers, people in rural areas, who do you think they are going to be excited to vote for? The 25-year-old warehouse worker from the Catskill Mountains, or the wealthy lawyer from Washington D.C.? Do we want to be the district that elects the first ever rank-and-file member of the Teamsters union? The first Gen-Z Congressman in New York State and second in the entire nation? Or another corporate lawyer to add to the 170 that are already there? Someone that will add to the revolving door of Washington insiders that Mr. Riley is supposedly running against?
Considering that this is going to be one of the most closely watched races in the country, we have a unique opportunity to do something incredibly powerful. If we are able to pull off this upset against a well-funded corporate Democrat and go on to defeat Congressman Molinaro in the general, it will send shockwaves across the country. It will show other people of modest backgrounds, other union members, other members of this generation, folks with chronic illnesses, that not only is it possible to win, but that the country is yearning for this kind of representation. It will reinvigorate the ideas that people like Dr. King died for, bringing back a much needed heart to politics, a humanity and authenticity that has been absent for far too long. That is the future on the ballot in June, if we are bold enough to seize it.