Sean Patrick Maloney Concedes to Mike Lawler in Loss for Democrats

Jesse McKinley and

• Nov. 9, 2022Updated 3:17 p.m. ET

Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the powerful Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, conceded defeat on Wednesday in his bid for a House seat in New York City’s northern suburbs to a Republican state assemblyman, Mike Lawler, a stinging and symbolic loss for Democrats.

The concession came shortly before The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Lawler.

“I don’t like to lose, but my opponent won this race. He won it fair and square. That means something,” Mr. Maloney said in an emotional statement delivered via Zoom from D.C.C.C. headquarters in Washington. “The right thing to do is say the other guy won and wish him well.”

On a day when the Democratic Party seemed destined to lose control of the House, but nonetheless outperformed most expectations, Mr. Maloney's loss served as a dubious distinction: He becomes the first chairman of either party’s House campaign committee to lose a race for re-election since the early 1990s.

Even before Mr. Maloney’s concession, Republicans were already celebrating his defeat, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, who gleefully cited it early Wednesday as part of gains the party had made in New York, a normally liberal state where his party performed surprisingly well.

Mr. Maloney said he could not “with 100 percent certainty” predict who had won the majority, but he said Democrats’ had “stood our ground across the country” even if Republicans ultimately win a slim majority.

Mr. Lawler, a first-term assemblyman, had run a vigorous and sometimes vicious campaign against Mr. Maloney, the chair of the powerful Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, characterizing him as out of touch with local residents by mocking his international travel.

Like many Republicans in New York and nationwide, Mr. Lawler also kept a consistent focus on crime, as well as the economy and inflation, issues of import in the 17th Congressional District, where many suburban communities are combating high property taxes. He was also helped by an infusion of some $6 million into the race by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with the Republican congressional leadership.

Mr. Maloney was first elected to serve the neighboring 18th Congressional District a decade ago, but after a state judge tossed out previous maps earlier this year — calling them partisan, and ordering them redrawn — Mr. Maloney opted to run in the 17th, further to the south, in a slightly more Democratic area. In doing so, he effectively displaced another, less-senior Democratic lawmaker, Mondaire Jones, leading to some criticism from other members of his party.

Mr. Jones, who has mostly kept quiet about the race for his old district, issued a one-word statement on Twitter after Mr. Maloney conceded: “Yikes.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, one of Mr. Maloney’s biggest boosters in recent years, was more gracious. “Our chairman took an arrow for us,” she said.

With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Lawler led Mr. Maloney by 1.2 percentage points.

Mr. Maloney survived a primary challenge, but had been scrambling to adapt to the contours of a new district. And as the general election race progressed this fall, Mr. Maloney’s fortunes seemed to falter, leading to the very committee he leads pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaign ads in the closing weeks.

It did not work, as Mr. Lawler rode a wave of discontent and traditional midterm strength by the party out of the White House into a major win. The race in the 17th District was one of three in the Hudson Valley region that were considered competitive, despite New York being a deeply liberal state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.

Republican congressional leaders in New York, including Representative Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, have been pushing the state party to the right, embracing some of the policies and rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Lawler ran a somewhat more moderate campaign — distancing himself from the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, for instance, and rejecting false conspiracy theories about a Trump win in 2020 — apparently aiming to lure independents and conservative Democrats. Both candidates also sought to court the Orthodox Jewish community in the newly redrawn district, including in Rockland County, home to several large Hasidic communities.

Mr. Lawler is a longtime Republican political operative, who previously worked for Rob Astorino, the former county executive in Westchester. He now runs his own political consulting firm, which worked on his congressional campaign. He has also worked as a lobbyist on behalf of behalf of an interest group pushing a new natural gas pipeline in New York.