PHOTO: Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) talks with constituents at Haverstraw Village Hall on Feb. 22, 2024. Peter Carr/The Journal News
Lawler, 38, was an RNC delegate for DJT at the 2016 GOP convention and later worked for a DJT super-PAC. Trump won 86% of the GOP vote in Tuesday’s primary, yet Lawler remains AWOL from the MAGA bandwagon. What’s up?
By David McKay Wilson | The Journal News
It seemed like a softball question for U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, the telegenic freshman Hudson Valley Republican running for re-election to Congress during the 2024 presidential year.
Who would Mike be voting for in the April 2 Republican presidential primary?
After all, on the ballot was the nation’s 45th president, Donald J. Trump, who’d dispatched his opponents in the winter scrum for GOP delegates. Trump stood tall as his party’s presumptive nominee for the November election, all the while fending off criminal trials in four jurisdictions up and down the East Coast.
That softball question on his presidential favorite turned out to be hard for the Pearl River Republican to answer. There’s history.
Lawler, 38, the highest-ranking elected official in the new generation of Hudson Valley Republicans, was a Republican National Convention delegate for Trump in 2016.
A Republican political strategist by trade, Lawler was executive director of the New York State Republican Committee in the early 2010s and has worked for the Trump political operation.
He was a principal in the consulting company, Checkmate Strategies, when it landed a $4 million direct-mail deal from a Trump-aligned political action committee to attack Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign cycle.
On Tuesday, Lawler wouldn’t say if he’d voted for Trump in the New York presidential primary, or if he voted at all. And by Friday, he still wouldn’t say.
Trump, who cleared the field in the early primaries, won 86 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s Republican primary in the 17th Congressional District. Only five percent of Republicans voted in the primary.
Nonetheless, it revealed a split between diehard Republicans voters, who were all-in on Trump’s third run for president, and Lawler, who was AWOL from the MAGA bandwagon.
When the presidential primary results crystalized on Wednesday, I reached out by email to Lawler campaign spokesman Chris Russell, of Checkmate Strategies.
I asked what Lawler had to say “to the Republican faithful in the 17th District who turned out to support Donald Trump by such a large margin.”
Russell declined comment.
Democratic political consultant Jon Tomlin said Lawler’s reluctance to say if he backed Trump reflects the difficulty Republican candidates face in 2024, even with a New York Times Siena College nationwide poll in late February showing Trump leading Joe Biden by 48% to 43%. .
“It’s a no-win situation for Lawler,” said Tomlin. “There are people who like Trump, and there are people who don’t like Trump. Asking Lawler who he voted for was a simple question, with a very difficult answer. Voters deserve to know where he stands.”
Dan Pagano, who chairs the Cortlandt Republican Town Committee in the 17th District, acknowledged that Lawler finds himself squeezed with Trump atop the ticket. Pagano understands how unpopular Trump is among Hudson Valley Democrats, now preparing their attacks ads for this summer.
“Mike tries to be a reasonable guy, but we are in a polarized political world, where your opponents take no prisoners,” he said.
Lawler’s national profile: moderate suburbanite
In a district where there are 80,000 more enrolled Democrats than Republicans, and Trump has long been a lightning rod, Lawler has kept an arms-length from the party’s presumptive nominee. And it’s only three months before Republicans convene for their convention in Milwaukee.
Lawler’s reluctance to embrace the candidate who will lead the GOP ticket in November reveals a problem for New York Republican candidates in 2024.
While Trump remains popular with most New York Republicans, his multiple indictments, impending trials, and the fallout from the repeal of Roe v. Wade — thanks to Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court — remain prominent in the public sphere.
Instead of coattails at the top of ticket, headwinds are blowing down ballot in the 17th.
Lawler’s dilemma unfolds in the 17th Congressional District, which comprises Rockland and Putnam counties, and parts of Westchester and Dutchess.
While Democrats outnumber Republicans, voters are famous for straying from the party line, as they did in 2022 when Lawler ousted five-term incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-Cold Spring.
During his first term in Congress, Lawler has crafted a national profile as a moderate suburban Republican who works across the aisle on domestic and international issues, especially for the broad spectrum of cable television news programs. He appears regularly on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.
Backing Donald Trump on April 2 did not neatly fit that profile. ##