SYRACUSE, N.Y. – In the two years since U.S. Rep. Brandon Williams won election by just one percentage point in central New York, the state's Democratic leaders have done what they could to make him the most endangered Republican in Congress.
The legislature changed the boundaries of his district, taking out rural areas that strongly favored Donald Trump and adding the college town of Cortland, resulting in a new territory where voters favored Joe Biden by 11 points in the 2020 presidential election.
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The seat, which includes the city of Syracuse, is now seen as a vital pickup opportunity for Democrats as they seek to control the House in November. While national attention has been focused on districts closer to New York City as holding the key to the balance of power in Congress, the Democratic Party has dedicated significant resources to this central New York race, sensing one of its best chances this fall.
John Mannion, the Democratic state senator trying to beat Williams, will tell you he's no shoo-in.
Syracuse, he notes, has been represented by Republicans in Congress for about a decade now and has a Republican county executive. Voters in the district narrowly favored a Republican candidate for governor just two years ago.
“We have a conservatism around us and sometimes that is reflected in our voting, so our independents really do shift conservative in many ways,” Mannion said in an interview. “We’re just a down-the-middle district."
In Mannion, a former school teacher and two-term state senator who is known as a moderate in Albany, Democrats have a candidate they're betting can appeal to swing voters. He has substantial support from labor unions, opposes abortion restrictions and has staked out a centrist position on changes to the state's bail laws.
Williams, meanwhile, has sought to frame Mannion as a liberal masquerading as a centrist.
“He has all of the credentials of the far left, but he’s going to pretend to be a Republican here for a couple of weeks, and with a wink and a nod and hoping that the Democrat base either forgives him or doesn’t notice,” Williams said.
Williams, who grew up in Texas, served as a U.S. Navy submarine officer, then was a tech entrepreneur before starting a truffle farm in central New York, has spent much of the campaign trying to recapture the dynamic that helped him win a close race in 2022.
That year, Republican candidates in New York outperformed their national colleagues by capitalizing on a public backlash against changes in the state's bail laws. The changes restricted the practice of requiring many people accused of nonviolent crimes to pay money in order to get released from jail while they await trial.
Mannion was not in office when those bail changes passed, but he did back legislation that subsequently gave judges more discretion on whether to jail a person before trial, a change many progressives resisted but that moderates argued was necessary.
The race between Mannion and Williams started off mostly cordial but has become increasingly caustic in the final stretch.
A Republican super PAC has aired ads centering on allegations from an anonymous complaint published online this summer accusing Mannion of verbally abusing his state Senate staff. Mannion’s campaign has dismissed the allegations as a political smear and said an independent Senate investigation cleared him of wrongdoing. The authors of the anonymous complaint have not responded to requests for comment left at an email address in their online post.
Mannion’s campaign put out an ad that shows a video of Williams yelling at one of his own former staffers at a holiday party last year. The video was widely circulated in political media around the time it was shot and shows Williams pointing in a man’s face, telling him “I’ll end every relationship you have.” Williams later said in an interview that he was angry because the former aide had threatened to publicly reveal that his adult daughter had a presence on a website where people pay to view sexually explicit content.
Perhaps Democrats' biggest reason for optimism is the degree to which the district rejected Trump. In 2020, Biden beat Trump in an old version of the district by about 7 points. Now, under the district's new boundaries, Biden's margin of victory would be in double digits.
In 2022, with Trump not on the ballot, Williams had a very tight race but ultimately defeated Democrat Francis Conole, a U.S. Navy Reserve captain, by about 2,600 votes to win the seat.
Republicans can also point to positive past election results. The district backed Republican Lee Zeldin, a former congressman, when he was running for governor of New York in 2022.
“Every election here is up for grabs," Williams said.
Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, called it a “fundamentally moderate district,” even though on paper it looks like it should favor Democrats.
“In some ways, you almost have two generic candidates running, one more conservative and one sort of more mainstream. And you’ve got a district that just seems more built for people who are closer to the center, in either party,” Reeher said.
Rahzie Seals, 41, a community organizer in Syracuse who has become a stay-at-home parent since recently adopting a child, said at a campaign event for Mannion in Syracuse that they were “still up in the air” about even voting this year but noted that one thing was clear in the district.
“A lot of people are excited to vote against Trump,” said Seals.