Democrat Mondaire Jones is trying to reclaim the New York congressional seat he represented until the 2020 election, but a third-party "stealth" candidate could spoil his effort to unseat incumbent Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), a new report claimed Thursday.
Jones lost his old seat when New York adopted new congressional districts ahead of the 2022 election, and he returned to the Hudson Valley this year to challenge Lawler for his old seat.
But a minor party says Republican operatives snuck into the system to put a third challenger, Anthony Frascone, into the mix, reported Salon.
“As we learned about who he was, we also learned about how he got on the ballot," said Ana Maria Archila, the co-director of the New York Working Families Party. "Which was through a stealth operation with a set of Republican operatives in Rockland County who registered 200 people."
Frascone won the third party line, but does not have the endorsement of the progressive party, and Archila says he was recruited to spoil the election for Jones, who is trailing Lawler by a point, 44 percent to 45 percent, while the Working Families Party challenger is polling at 3 percent.
“Despite our efforts to contact all the real Working Families Party registrants we did not get enough of them to show up, and Anthony Frascone won that primary against Mondaire Jones,” Archila said.
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The Cook Political Report changed the race’s rating from “tossup” to “lean Republican” a week ago, although registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district 227,000 to 140,000, in part due to Frascone's presence in the race, which Jones hopes to make a referendum on Donald Trump's MAGA movement.
“In his own words, [Trump says] he wants to terminate the Constitution and be a dictator in day one, neither Donald Trump nor Mike Johnson, a House speaker Lawler says he proudly voted for, have committed to accepting the legitimate results of the 2024 presidential election,” Jones said. “Donald Trump says he wants to jail his political opponents despite all of these things and more, Mike Lawler is supporting him for the third consecutive presidential election cycle.”
Jones called Lawler a "mini-fascist" for agreeing to rally with Johnson, who spoke at Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden that drew comparisons to a German American Bund pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939.