Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inboxGet our free Inside Washington email
When Mondaire Jones is asked if he’s running to take back his old congressional seat in 2024, the former New York one-term representative lets out a laugh.
“I have not made any such announcement. But stay tuned,” he told The Independent during an interview late last month.
While he may be coy about his plans, Politico reported earlier this month that he’s preparing to launch another campaign this summer to take back his old seat in New York’s 17th District.
The process to hire campaign staff has begun and plans are being made to put the focus on his voting record being in line with the mainstream of the Democratic Party instead of its more progressive grouping.
Following years of legal work, including a period as a law clerk at the US District Court in the Southern District of New York, Mr Jones won his home congressional district in 2020.
After redistricting last year, the then-chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Sean Patrick Maloney, chose to run in Mr Jones’s former district. Mr Jones ran in the 10th District, losing in the primary to Representative Dan Goldman.
Mr Jones left Congress when his term ended at the start of this year.
In the fight to take back the 17th District, Mr Jones may be going up against Liz Gereghty, the sister of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in the Democratic Primary.
During Mr Jones’s term in Congress between 2021 and 2023, he represented about three-quarters of the current district.
The seat, which is now in the Republican hands of Representative Mike Lawler after Mr Maloney’s midterm loss in 2022, is an important comeback opportunity for Democrats in their fight to take back the US House of Representatives, which is currently narrowly controlled by the GOP.
Some members of the Democratic Party were outraged when Mr Maloney decided to run for Mr Jones’s seat, in the end leading to both of them being ousted from Congress.
“I think what happened last year with redistricting, and the behaviour of some Democrats in Washington was a national travesty, felt most acutely by the residents of my district in the Hudson Valley. And that is an injustice that I look forward to correcting,” Mr Jones says.
Mr Jones is now a commissioner on the US Commission on Civil Rights and a CNN political commentator. He grew up in Spring Valley, north of New York City, with a single mother who worked several jobs to make ends meet.
Even as he won’t say if he’s launching a campaign to take back his home seat, Mr Jones makes clear that he believes he needs to be back in the House of Representatives.
“My absence from Congress this term I think is glaring given the work that’s not being done … and look at what happened in Uganda,” the commissioner says, speaking to The Independent on 31 May.
An anti-gay bill was signed into law on 29 May by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. The law includes the death penalty for what’s referred to as “aggravated homosexuality” – meaning those having sex while being HIV positive, those having sex with minors or others considered to be vulnerable.
Under the law, an indiual found guilty of “attempted aggravated homosexuality” can be sent to prison for 14 years.
“As the nation’s first openly gay, Black member of Congress, I’d be in that body, leading the charge to get Uganda to reverse that law that was just enacted, and pushing the United States to do what it could to protect the lives and livelihoods of the LGBTQ+ community in that country, including, but not limited to economic sanctions,” Mr Jones says.
In 2020, Mr Jones became the first openly gay African American elected to Congress alongside fellow New York Representative Ritchie Torres, who also became the first openly gay Hispanic member.
“As someone who’s Black and gay, I’m uniquely situated to speak to the experience of the Black LGBTQ+ community in an African nation like Uganda,” Mr Jones says before criticising what he calls an “assault” on democracy and LGBT+ rights by the US Supreme Court.
“I understood that an assault on multiracial democracy and on LGBTQ+ rights, and on the rights of racial and ethnic minorities are things that are urgent because I live those experiences,” he adds.
Mr Jones, who’s expected to announce his campaign to return to the House sometime this summer, says that the fight for LGBT+ rights is far from over. “I think people historically have felt that so long as the LGBTQ+ community get marriage equality and protections and federal anti-discrimination law, which we still don’t have fully, that that really is the policy arc for the LGBTQ+ justice movement in the United States, and nothing could be further from the truth.
“We have to deal with equity. And that’s why I raised issues like homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth and the student debt crisis.”
The stakes are simply much higher for someone like Mr Jones compared to his former colleagues in the chamber, he says.
“The matters that Congress focuses on or should be focused on are matters of life or death for people like me.
“And it is absolutely the case that being a member of one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, that being the LGBTQ+ community, was one of many factors in my desire to enter Congress and fight harder than many of the Democrats I had been seeing in Congress were fighting at the time under the Trump presidency.”
Politico reports that Kunal Atit is set to be Mr Jones’s campaign manager for the 2024 race. Mr Atit oversaw the 2022 re-election campaign of Representative Matt Cartwright in a tight Pennsylvania district. JJ Balaban is set to make Mr Jones’s ads.
President Joe Biden won the 17th District by 10 points in 2020, but the GOP’s Mr Lawler managed to grab it from the Democrats last year.
Politico notes that the Jones team is planning on fighting back against claims that he’s too progressive – he was a member of the progressive caucus while in Congress – by putting the focus on his voting record.
Progressive New York Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, voted against the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure package, while Mr Jones supported it.
Mr Jones may also emphasise his votes on appropriations bills that funded police training and equipment.
There’s a substantial group of Hasidic Jewish residents in the district, to whom Mr Jones may note that he voted in support of the funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system last year. The former representative has said that he’s a “pro-Israel progressive”.
The Republicans and his primary opponents may argue that he’s too progressive by pointing to his expression of support for defunding the police during his 2020 campaign. The district was much more Democratic before redistricting in 2022.
Mr Jones has also expressed support for the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all. The prospective candidate will reportedly not walk away from his stances that the base of the Democratic Party supports but will emphasise his congressional voting record to woo possible swing voters.
