Far From Presidential Battlegrounds, Blue States Could Decide Congress

Campaigning on a rainy recent morning, Mondaire Jones had plenty of reasons to be optimistic about his effort to unseat Representative Mike Lawler, a first-term Republican in the Hudson Valley in New York.

Democrats like Mr. Jones outnumber Republicans here by more than 75,000. The party is newly energized by the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris. And Mr. Jones, a former congressman, has stockpiled millions of dollars for a campaign centered on reminding voters that Mr. Lawler backs former President Donald J. Trump and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

“His support is largely based on an illusion of him,” Mr. Jones said, referring to Mr. Lawler’s reputation as a moderate. “Here in the Hudson Valley, you can expect Democrats to vote for Democrats.”

And yet, with just 68 days to go, Mr. Jones is struggling to translate those partisan advantages into an actual lead, setting off alarm bells in New York and Washington that the party is once again facing unusually stiff local headwinds with middle-of-the-road voters put off by the state’s leftward lurch.

Democrats have a parallel fight on their hands in what would otherwise be considered the friendly territory of the Antelope Valley in California. There, the Democrat George Whitesides, a former NASA chief of staff and chief executive at Virgin Galactic, is laboring to unseat Representative Mike Garcia, a former military pilot from the northern suburbs of Los Angeles who has coasted to re-election since he first won in 2020.

Call it Democrats’ blue state dilemma, one that has helped make New York and California, two coastal bastions far from the presidential battlegrounds, the unlikely heart of the fight for control of the House of Representatives as summer turns to fall.

In theory, the two states would seem to promise Democrats a tantalizingly straightforward path back to power in the House, where the G.O.P. holds a slender four-seat majority, putting Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, now the minority leader, in position to become speaker. Republicans in California and New York are defending the highest concentration of districts that President Biden won in 2020, including five he carried by double digits.

But on the ground, there are signs that districts from the suburbs of Long Island to the California desert are once again generating their own political weather more inhospitable to Democrats.

It was here that the party arguably lost its majority in 2022, amid a backlash against the states’ punishingly high living costs and fears about public safety, which voters blamed on the state’s Democratic supermajorities. At the same time, Democrats in New York and California were unable to capitalize on fears that Republicans would wipe away abortion access after the demise of Roe. Democrats deployed that argument successfully to woo voters in swing states like Michigan and Virginia, but it fell flat in blue states where people regard abortion rights as safe.

“The swing districts in blue states have just performed differently than swing districts in swing states,” said Dan Conston, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House Republicans’ official super PAC. “And it’s not one cycle; it’s multiple cycles.”

A recent poll of five swing districts commissioned by a Democratic super PAC found that their candidates in Pennsylvania and Nebraska were outrunning their Republican opponents, while Mr. Jones and Rudy Salas, the California Democrat who is challenging Representative David Valadao for the second cycle in a row, were trailing theirs and stuck beneath 40 percent.

Democrats insist they have learned lessons from the midterm trouncing. Their candidates in several critical races have moved aggressively to flip the script on issues like immigration, crime and the economy. In New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul was blamed for 2022 losses, the state party has set out to build a formidable turnout operation for the first time.

Top Democrats say their path back to the majority does not require them to romp to victory in either state, but just pick up a handful of seats in each. And they also believe that it will be easier to define their Republican opponents as too far to the right with Mr. Trump on the ballot.

“Democrats were experiencing a very serious brand problem with defund the police, cashless bail and other issues,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who once led Democrats’ House campaign arm. “But in a presidential,” he added, “the dynamic obviously changes, and those issues are not quite as powerful as they were.”

In California, Republicans are defending four incumbents in highly competitive seats that stretch from the Central Valley to Palm Springs, including three in districts where Democrats outnumber Republicans by wide margins. Democrats are protecting just one, an Orange County seat vacated by Representative Katie Porter.

The Republicans include John Duarte, a freshman from Modesto whose race last cycle was among the closest in the nation; Mr. Valadao, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress and has since weathered challenges from both the left and right in the Central Valley; Ken Calvert, a senior appropriator who faced an unusually close race in his Palm Springs district last cycle; and Mr. Garcia.

Both Mr. Valadao and Mr. Garcia have carved out well-known brands separating themselves from the hard-right flank of their party in Washington. Mr. Valadao and Mr. Duarte play up their past livelihoods as farmers in agriculture-heavy, majority-Latino districts. In his suburban district studded with aircraft manufacturing facilities, Mr. Garcia has leaned on his background as a naval aviator who flew combat missions in Iraq.

In an effort to allay voter concerns about rising housing costs and the levels of retail theft and homelessness, Democrats running in competitive California districts have adopted a campaign message focused not on national talking points about Republican extremism and protecting reproductive rights, but on local economic and public safety issues.

Knocking on doors on a recent sweltering Saturday in the Antelope Valley, Mr. Whitesides, who is running against Mr. Garcia, introduced himself to voters as a “moderate Democrat” who “created about 700 jobs up in Mojave,” a nod to his work at Virgin Galactic.

Mr. Whitesides said in an interview that he had continued to hear from voters that their top issues were local jobs, affordable housing and safety, not only from “smash and grabs” but from wildfires.

“Voters kind of don’t differentiate between D.C. and Sacramento, and they just want to see action taken on these things,” he said. “We have to provide good answers for the challenges that people feel locally.”

Representative Josh Harder was one of just two California Democrats who won re-election in 2022 in a district that Gov. Gavin Newsom lost that cycle to his Republican challenger, Brian Dahle. In an interview, Mr. Harder attributed his success winning crossover voters to “not by being anti-Trump or anti-Dahle, but by being pro-water, pro-health care, and pro-jobs.”

Mr. Harder said he was optimistic that voters in solidly Democratic states would feel more urgency this election cycle.

“In 2022 in blue states like California and New York, voters felt a little complacent,” he said, citing reproductive rights as an example. “They believed they weren’t under threat here the same way it was under threat in Wisconsin and Michigan. I think that complacency was absolutely misplaced. I think it’s also gone away.”

On the other side of the country, Democrats in New York say they, too, are finding a more favorable climate than last cycle, when the party was slow to respond to concerns about a pandemic-era spike in crime that dominated suburban races.

Representative Tom Suozzi already won back one swing seat for Democrats on Long Island in a February special election, giving the party reason for optimism and a playbook for overcoming a damaged brand.

Now, Democrats are eying four more potential pickups in the Empire State and one across the Hudson in New Jersey, while defending Representative Pat Ryan, their only vulnerable incumbent. (Democratic strategists believe John Avlon, a former CNN commentator, has an uphill battle in his campaign to defeat Representative Nick LaLota on the exurban East End of Long Island.)

Both parties agree that Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican who represents Syracuse, is the most likely to lose after redistricting made his seat several points more Democratic. Republicans are also battling to try to save Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a former police officer, whose diverse Long Island district voted for Mr. Biden by 14 points.

But the remaining races are tossups. Mr. Lawler and Representative Marc Molinaro in Central New York have worked hard to build reputations as the most bipartisan members of the House. After they each eked out midterm victories by a percentage point or less, they now face a more difficult challenge asking voters who overwhelmingly dislike Mr. Trump and favor abortion rights to overlook their party affiliation.

Mr. Molinaro used his first paid campaign ad to try to insulate himself.

“I believe health decisions should be between a woman and her doctor, not Washington,” he says in it. But Democrats have slammed him for voting for a handful of bills that would limit abortion access.

Several prominent Democrats in New York and Washington said they were particularly worried about their ability to defeat Mr. Lawler, a former political strategist who has made himself ubiquitous.

Mr. Jones is running this time as a pragmatist, adopting lessons from Mr. Suozzi’s special election strategy to put issues that Republicans have weaponized — including the migrant influx and high taxes — at the center of his campaign. In an interview after a recent abortion rights event, he said that his party did not “talk enough about the need to secure the border” and bragged that Democrats were “purging the extremists from our ranks.”

But he has considerable political baggage, having staked out a litany of decidedly liberal positions on immigration and crime during earlier campaigns. He also briefly left his district to run for a different House seat in New York City.

“Obviously if we lose these seats, we are losing the majority,” Mr. Lawler said in an interview.

But Democrats in New York and California still have a “fundamental problem, which is they control everything in both states,” he added. “The average person that’s living there is seeing really bad policies on a daily basis, going, ‘No, I’m good.’”