The gloves were off.
Hudson Valley Rep. Mike Lawler ripped his Democratic challenger Cait Conley over her support for sanctuary state policies and portrayed her as a phony New Yorker in their final debate.
The two candidates for New York’s hotly contested 17th Congressional District came out swinging in the Wednesday night televised showdown on Pix11, trading barbs over ICE and immigration policies.
In one particularly feisty exchange, Conley accused Lawler of “mansplaining” when they were asked about the Cornell University gang rape case.
Early on in the deabte, Lawler, the Republican incumbent seeking his third term, said the high-profile ICE shooting last week in the Big Apple could have been prevented if local law enforcement were able to cooperate with federal immigration officers.
“[Gov.] Kathy Hochul’s disastrous new law — which Conley supports — prohibits cooperation,” fumed Lawler.
“We’re talking about a gangbanger who came into this country illegally,” Lawler said, referring to Oscar Belgal, the Dominican Republic native and alleged Trinitarios gang member shot by ICE agents in The Bronx as he tried to evade arrest.
“You want accountability, so do I. Let’s start by actually enforcing the law in this country,” Lawler said.
He argued that Belgal’s prior arrests on robbery charges should’ve triggered deportation proceedings, but New York’s lax bail laws paired with local and state policies that discourage law enforcement from working with ICE allow them to slip through the cracks.
He further attacked Conley, saying she “ran around” a question at their previous debate posed by the parents of Sheridan Gorman, a Yorktown Heights 18-year old college freshman killed by an illegal migrant in Chicago.
“What happened to Sheridan Gorman should never have happened,” Conley replied after Lawler repeatedly pressed her.
“He should’ve been deported. He should’ve been turned over to federal immigration officials,” Conley finally conceded, referring to Gorman’s killer.
But while she maintained that law enforcement should have the ability to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement to go after “violent” criminals, she also expressed support for Hochul’s legislation that would bar counties from entering agreements with ICE to do so.
“I do not believe that our local tax dollars funding our local law enforcement should be going to doing the federal government’s job,” Conley told reporters afterwards, dancing around getting into specifics about what anti-ICE restrictions she supports and doesn’t.
Conley repeatedly tried to connect Lawler to the president, saying he “votes with Donald Trump 100% of the time.”
Lawler countered by dismissing the 100% figure as bogus and touted bipartisan accomplishments as well as endorsements from Democrats such as outgoing Maine Rep. Jared Golden.
But Lawler unsurprisingly tried to pin Conley to her party’s respective radical bogeyman – Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“Last debate, Cait was given four opportunities to condemn Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism and she refused each time only for him to issue the most vile antisemitic statement on Oct. 7,” Lawler said once again demanding she condemn the lefty mayor.
Conley, who distanced herself from the Democratic Socialists of America, was bullied into denouncing Mamdani’s statement last week appearing to fault Israel for the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack.
“Yes I do denounce Mamdani’s statement on October 7th,” she said.
The incumbent also tried to paint Conley — who grew up in the greater Hudson Valley, attended West Point and then moved out-of-state with the Army — as a carpetbagger.
“I know you just moved here from Virginia,” Lawler sniped during one of many snide digs the two exchanged.
Conley returned to New York after living and working in Washington, DC, in national security after serving in the Army.
Conley owns homes in Alexandria, Virginia, and Sanford, North Carolina. She now leases a house on Inningwood Road in Ossining, which is in the district.
It was just one of many quick witted attacks between the two, who came off as polished and largely unflustered amid the scrap.
The two got particularly spirited when sparring over the topic of sexual harassment – asked about the role congress could play in preventing another incident like the alleged gang rape of a woman at Cornell University in 2024.
While the two both agreed in substance that congress could address Title IX statutes to prevent breakdowns like critics allege allowed the Cornell case to go unprosecuted, Lawler tried to call Conley out for accepting donations from former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was caught participating in a prostitution ring, though never faced charges
“You refuse to return those funds. You refuse to denounce him in any way?”
“I don’t need you to mansplain to me what domestic abuse and sexual assault against women is and the appropriate response, don’t start, sit over there,” Conley retorted, wagging her finger at Lawler as he called her “disgraceful.”
“I do not need you to mansplain to me, Mike,” she added.
The candidates are neck and neck going into the debate, with recent polls finding them separated by a mere two points — and Conley was leading, 48% to 46%, per PIX11’s survey conducted by Emerson College.
That tight spread meant the stakes of Wednesday’s debate were higher than ever, with Emerson College Polling finding 7% of voters undecided — more than enough people to sway and tip the scales for a win in a district Lawler carried in 2024 despite it going for Kamala Harris, the Democrat.
New York’s 17th district covers Westchester County from the White Plains border as far north as Hopewell Junction as well as Rockland and Putnam Counties.
The district was tightly contested in the 2024 election, too, with Lawler winning by a close 52% to 45% — and a razor-thin 50.3% to 49.7% against then Democratic National Congressional Committee Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney in 2022.
Election Day is Nov. 3.
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