Former Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York has launched a campaign for New York’s 17th Congressional District in 2024, seeking to retake the seat after being passed over by House Democratic leaders in 2022 in favor of Sean Patrick Maloney.
Jones, who served as a member of Congress for one term from 2021 to 2023, announced that he was running in a campaign video released on Twitter, where he said that he would run a campaign for “working people.” In 2022, after New York’s congressional maps were redrawn after a court ruled they were gerrymandered in favor of Democrats, Jones was denied the chance to run for election in the new district covering his old district, with Maloney receiving the blessing of party leaders to run.
Maloney, who was the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the time, allegedly used his seniority to pressure Jones to run for a seat in Manhattan instead, with Maloney eventually losing the election. Some House Democrats were incensed by the fact that Jones, who represented more of the new district than Maloney did, was passed over.
“What Sean Patrick Maloney did was bullshit. That should have been Mondaire’s seat,” said Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, while Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maloney’s primary opponent in the race. “We saw what happened the last time political elites in Washington tried to determine the Democratic nominee in the district he represented 75 percent of,” said Democratic Rep. Nikema Williams of Georgia to Politico.
Williams refers to Maloney’s loss to Republican candidate Mike Lawler in the general election, a pick-up for Republicans that was crucial to them obtaining a slim House majority of four seats.
In his video, Jones said that “Some people in my party got mad at me when I tried to block members of Congress from getting rich off the stock market. … I’ve never been Washington’s choice because I stand up to corruption.”
Jones will be running against Liz Whitmer Gereghty, the sister of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who announced her campaign in May. Gereghty has support from some of Jones’ old colleagues, such as Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan, who said that “we love her,” per Politico.
The 17th District is a top target for House Democrats in the 2024 congressional election. Lawler has noticeably taken bipartisan positions on issues in Congress, such as supporting the DIGNITY Act for comprehensive immigration reform.
Jones’ announcement video presented Republicans, by contrast, as “people trying to overthrow our democracy and take away the freedom to have an abortion.” He also expressed support for “funding the police,” an idea disavowed by the Democratic party’s left wing.
Maloney, for his part, has signaled that he will not run for the House in 2024, having accepted Biden’s nomination to be the U.S. Permanent Representative to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.
In a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation, a spokesperson for Lawler wrote that “nothing will change the fact that Mondaire Jones is a radical progressive who is endorsed by AOC and ‘the Squad’, supports the defund the police movement and New York’s disastrous cashless bail law, and voted for the reckless spending that saddled us with record high inflation.”
Geregthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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