Carhartt Politics
Carpetbagging, chutzpah, the death of localized politics, and the political convenience of homecoming
There is a new political archetype showing up in rural swing districts all over the country that is often decried as a carpetbagger, but which has just enough plausible deniability as to where I’d like to propose an entirely new term for them: carhartters. I shall focus on the Hudson Valley as it remains the main interest of my writing, but I encourage you to think about it in the context of your own region, particularly if you come from an unglamorous economically depressed part of the country as I do.
A (brief) history of Hudson Valley carpetbagging
Carpetbaggers as we tend to think of them are hardly new to the Hudson Valley, and in true Hudson Valley fashion their stories are often absurd. I remember in elementary school when corporate lawyer Sean Patrick Maloney moved from Manhattan into a 7,000 ft2 hillside mansion overlooking my native town of Cold Spring. As you can imagine, the one-term wonder he ran against (herself a transplant to the Hudson Valley) had a field day with it.
Maloney, while not outright denying that claim, qualified it with the fact he had a “country home” in Sullivan County where his boyfriend was an interior designer. Rapidly gentrifying Sullivan County, where the median family made $43,578 and over 20% of the population lived below the poverty line. He would win that race, and a few years later I remember Secret Service in town guarding Hillary Clinton at his wedding. He’d go on to chair the DCCC (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the arm of the House Democrats that fundraises for and disperses money to various congressional campaigns) and would lose re-election in 2022, though not before cutting fellow Democratic Congressman Mondaire Jones out of the race.
Another man who eyed that race was 25-year-old Sean Eldridge, the husband of billionaire Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Profiled in a Times piece called “Young, Rich and Relocating Yet Again in Hunt for Political Office," the couple went as far as to purchase a $5 million dollar 80-acre property in New York’s 18th, before promptly scuttling their plans and downsizing to a mere $2 million dollar home up the river in the 19th, on the DCCC’s target list as a swing district in 2014.
What followed is so downright absurd, I can only encourage you to research it yourself and decide if I am presenting it fairly. The fairest I can put it is that Sean Eldridge and his tech industry buddies tried to buy him a congressional seat. I will not even pretend to hide my ire of the concept that one could inject personal cash into our dead economy and buy the votes of all us uncultured rural hicks, who would be oh so grateful to have a little bit more to put towards the rent or groceries. Some situations demand digging into my Yiddish, but to say he had chutzpah still feels like an understatement. Nothing in my vocabulary is strong enough.
Chris Gibson, the Republican incumbent and a Purple Heart recipient, lived in a small house down the road from his childhood home. Eldridge, a native of suburban Ohio, would set up “Hudson River Ventures,” a venture capital firm which provided cheap loans and lines of credit to local working-class businesses. He would then turn around and proclaim this as his experience, he was now apparently a job creator in our region. His team of high-paid consultants refused to allow him to be interviewed for the Politico piece that brought it to national attention.
Gibson would be re-elected in this swing district by 30 points. A relative of mine, who had voted once in his life for a Republican (Nixon in ‘72), pulled the lever for Gibson. They set millions of dollars on fire to keep their candidate in a lakeside mansion the entire cycle and blow a winnable race by an incomprehensible margin. Rightfully disgraced, the couple would buy a townhouse in Greenwich Village the next year. Perhaps they’ve kept their country home.
These two are hardly the only examples of this, unmentioned for the sake of time is Zephyr Teachout’s run for this same district the next cycle, Alessandra Biaggi’s campaign in 2022 for the 17th, Mondaire Jones’ reverse carpetbagging to Brooklyn, and a slew of others. I only wish to give background for what happened next.
Enter the carhartters
Democrats smelled blood in the water in New York’s 19th in 2018 and for good reason. Teachout would only lose the district by 8 points in 2016, closing the gap massively from Eldridge’s disastrous bid. Andrew Cuomo and Kirsten Gillibrand would be at the top of the ticket and were each expected to dominate their races, pulling other candidates downballot across the finish line with them. Gibson had retired and the new incumbent Republican John Faso had a far less moderate voting record.
What followed would be a crowded seven-person Democratic primary including two candidates I would like to pay special attention to in the context of this article: Antonio Delgado, a corporate lawyer from the cliffside suburb of Montclair, NJ and Pat Ryan, an executive of a data mining firm from Brooklyn.
What distinguished Delgado and Ryan however from the carpetbaggers of prior cycles is that their connection to the district was not totally spurious. Delgado was raised just outside the district in Schenectady and Ryan in Kingston. They both were born upstate, went to high school upstate, college upstate, but then spent the entirety of their careers far away. Regardless of this, unlike the transplant liberals that preceded them, their backgrounds allowed them to not sound like they were just running to be a congressperson, but to be our congressperson. They had a fundamental understanding of local issues that classical district-shopping carpetbaggers did not, yet still chose to make their lives elsewhere until opportunity arose.
Carhartting needs to be understood in the context of the Democratic Party’s “Fortress Fairfax” strategy, terminology I borrow from Princeton’s Dr. Matt Karp whose article coining it I implore you to read. Immortalized by the 2016 DNC words of Chuck Schumer: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
That is to say, refashion the Democratic coalition around highly-educated wealthy suburbanites who don’t want the boat rocked at the cost of the multiracial working class, who would most benefit from transformative change. NY-19, a collection of exurbs, farmland, and the 164th most wealthy district in the country, hardly fit the bill. With that said, if one were to find a corporate lawyer or executive who went to high school here, they may be able to parachute him back in clad in a Carhartt jacket and sell him as Joe Rural, all while his legislative philosophy aligns with that of the more moderate suburban coalition. Candidates of such backgrounds are darling recruits for the DCCC, which pours money into such races.
Delgado and Ryan each raised the highest amount of money in the primary cycle, $2.7M for the former and $1.7M for the latter, much of it during their exploratory committees prior to them actually campaigning. Delgado’s largest contributor would be his former employer, the lobbying law firm Akin Gump, which gave $412,587 over the course of his career. He would win the primary with Ryan taking second, at 22.1% and 17.9% of the vote respectively. Delgado’s campaign took more out-of-district money than any of the hundreds of other Democrats running for Congress that cycle.
I would be remiss to not mention the third place finisher, Gareth Rhodes. Raised in the communal Bruderhof Anabaptist community in Rifton which he left penniless at the age of 18, 29-year-old Rhodes took leave from Harvard Law to campaign in each of the district’s 163 towns in a 1999 Winnebago he bought on Craigslist. He knocked my door in Trump +20 Beekman and talked to 15-year-old me about our apple orchards, the closure of rural hospitals, even getting infrastructure money for a local bridge. My mother wasn’t home, so there were no votes to be found, yet he probably spoke to me for 20 minutes. He received most labor backing and was unexpectedly endorsed by The New York Times, finishing with 17.7% of the vote, all while the only public poll of the race showed him at 4%. There was no blanketing of the airwaves or consulting firms on retainer, just someone that knew the issues because he had lived them knocking on doors.
The DCCC would spend $1.6M dollars on the general election race, one which was marred by race-baiting ads against Delgado, who is Black. Delgado would go on to win the general election by five points, which he would expand to ten points the following cycle. After Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin was indicted on corruption charges, Governor Hochul chose Delgado to succeed him, setting up a special election for the same district in August 2022.
While not winning the 2018 primary, Ryan remained in Ulster County. A bone was thrown to him in 2019 when County Executive Hein resigned and Ryan was picked at an impromptu convention to be the Democratic candidate for Executive. He won that race, and in 2022 would be picked at yet another closed-door convention to be their candidate for Congress. Pat Ryan would win the first primary of his life the same night he was on the ballot to complete Delgado’s term. He would win the Democratic nomination against two low-profile competitors and while doing six points worse than Delgado also managed to be elected to the seat.
The 2022 cycle saw a particularly chaotic redistricting, where the courts declared the legislature approved maps gerrymandered and had new ones drawn. The 19th lost all of Dutchess County, much of Ulster County, the exurbs of Albany, and gained some counties in the Southern Tier, notably the cities of Ithaca and Binghamton. Ryan, drawn out of this district, sought re-election in his new home district. This new 19th meanwhile kept Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro on the Republican side, who had lost the special election to Ryan, and a man named Josh Riley on the Democratic side, who while initially running in the 22nd was drawn into the 19th.
Josh Riley’s story will be a familiar one. Raised in Endicott, he left for college in Virginia and by all accounts didn’t come back until renting an apartment in Ithaca for his campaign, attending Harvard Law and working at the D.C. office of corporate law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, which would be his campaign’s largest donor at $306,075. His second largest donor was Jenner & Block, another firm he worked for. The reshuffling of redistricting resulted in cries of carpetbagging on both sides, as Molinaro’s house was drawn about five miles outside of the district. He would quietly move to Catskill just up the river.
More than any of the other candidates I have and will mention, I must confess that Riley’s campaign did the most to trigger this piece. Ads from this period show the attorney whose filings reveal a family income of $369,320 and a net worth around $4M clad in plaid flannels, jeans, and Carhartt, clinking beers in a dusty bar, spliced with shots of decrepid abandoned buildings and other sights of our region’s rust belt decline. After beating a local candidate, the DCCC spent $2,333,767 on this race, which Riley lost by two points. He is currently seeking the Democratic nomination in the same district in 2024.
Back in Pat Ryan’s district, carhartting is beginning to become a bipartisan phenomenon. Alison Esposito, Manhattan resident, Lee Zeldin’s pick for Lieutenant Governor, and a former NYPD deputy inspector, has announced a run for NY-18. Esposito was raised in Highland Mills and has had a home in Orange County since 2005, though she maintained her voter registration and primary domicile at an apartment in the city. Esposito has already been decried as a carpetbagger by the DCCC, and no doubt her residency will be component of the race. There are other factors that make Esposito’s candidacy of interest, she would be the first lesbian Republican elected to Congress for one, so expect me to write more on her campaign in the future. For now: glass houses.
Candidacies of convenience
This piece is not intended to be a personal condemnation of these four candidates or even the more classical carpetbaggers I named, though my scorn for their methods is obvious throughout. I have personally met most of them, and while I find the aesthetics tacky I imagine much of the working class cosplay is more a result of overzealous overpaid political consultants than genuine bad faith. What I instead intend to do today is identify this phenomenon, put a name to it, give some examples, and perhaps trigger some discussion. Can you apply this term to candidates in your region of the country? How permissable are these kinds of campaigns for us as local voters?
I think it is no coincidence these candidacies are most common in the Democratic Party, which has in the past few cycles dramatically realigned itself towards the interests of affluent suburbanites and professionals. In the ancestrally Republican and economically depressed Hudson Valley, people with those kinds of opportunities are the ones most likely to leave. I know as I’m one of them.
The irony is not lost on me that I write this as an undergrad halfway through a Computer Science degree at a school in Boston with a 5.6% acceptance rate. If not for awareness of the arbitrary last-minute forces that propelled me to this position, I am sure the political issues where I am from would not enter my mind again except in the individualistic abstract of “what I overcame.” I am not damned to the asphyxiating lack of economic opportunity my cousins and most of my childhood friends are, though I spent most of my life with no reason to believe I wasn’t. The median outcome in my life at this juncture is that I am to have an upwardly mobile career in one of our country’s major cities making money I couldn’t fathom as recently as high school. It is difficult when lucking into such an opportunity to dwell on your roots without a sense of survivor’s guilt. With that said, I promise not to come back to run for Congress.
Congressional races have nationalized dramatically in the past decade. Ticket splitting is down, campaign spending is up, and as this nationalization continues the focus in midterms turns to the darling “swing seats” and organizations like the DCCC ensuring that they all have a cookie-cutter perfect candidate make it through the primary, at least in the eyes of Washington. In the midst of all of this outside spending and national hubbub from people who have never stepped foot here, we lose something fundamentally important to the process: ensuring that the candidates nominated don’t just have their eyes on being a footsoldier in a theoretical House majority, but also intimate knowledge of local issues and the will to fight tooth-and-nail for them. As I see it, that necessitates actually spending one’s life here.
I think you should come back and run for Congress, personally.