Latimer Defeats Bowman in Contentious New York Primary

The district, currently held by Brandon Williams, a Republican, is widely considered one of the Democrats’ best opportunities for a pickup in the nation.

In 2022, Mr. Williams, who has been a vocal champion of former President Donald J. Trump, was narrowly elected by just under one percentage point. Since then, the boundaries of the district have changed to favor Democrats, with the northern part of Herkimer County traded for more of the Finger Lakes region. Cook Political Report labels the seat “leans Democratic.”

A former public-school teacher and union representative, Mr. Mannion was elected in 2020 to the State Legislature, where he leads the Senate Committee on Disabilities. His congressional bid was bolstered by the state teachers’ union and the AFL-CIO’s New York chapter.

The race was colored by 11th-hour accusations from former staff members of Mr. Mannion who claimed that he had created a hostile workplace. Mr. Mannion vehemently denied the claims, which are being investigated by the State Senate.

At the state G.O.P. convention in Salt Lake City in the spring, Mr. Cox, who is in his first four-year term after having served as lieutenant governor, failed to secure the party’s endorsement for his re-election bid. At the event, the crowd booed Mr. Cox, who was forced to be on the defensive about his Republican credentials.

Despite party frictions, Mr. Cox was widely popular among Utahns in his first term, and his nomination makes a second term all the more likely. Republicans have controlled the Utah governorship since 1985.

Mr. Cox will face the Democrats’ nominee, State Representative Brian King, a former minority leader of the State House, in the November election.

Mr. Lyman, a former county commissioner, is known for an illegal ATV ride that he staged in 2014 to protest a federal decision banning motor vehicle use in a local canyon. Mr. Lyman and his supporters viewed the protest as an act of civil disobedience, and Mr. Trump pardoned him in 2020.

Though Mr. Trump did not weigh in on the governor’s race, Mr. Lyman emphasized his support for the former president throughout his campaign.

Mr. Curtis, 64, is perhaps not the fresh-faced successor Mr. Romney, 77, had imagined. But Mr. Curtis, a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and a leader of Republican efforts to address climate change in Congress, is a clear heir apparent to Mr. Romney’s centrist style of politics.

Unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Curtis is not a vocal critic of Mr. Trump. Mr. Romney, who voted twice to remove Mr. Trump from office during the former president’s two impeachment trials in the Senate, had pleaded with his fellow Republicans to unite behind an alternative to the former president for 2024.

While Mr. Curtis declined to support Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, he largely backed his agenda once he was elected to Congress. But he refused to support Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In the midst of this year’s Senate primary race, and seeking to polish his conservative bona fides, Mr. Curtis defended the former president’s vow to prosecute his political enemies if elected president.

“I think it’s just human nature to feel the way that President Trump has expressed himself,” Mr. Curtis said during a debate ahead of the primary.

Still, he faced attacks from his main primary opponent, Trent Staggs, the mayor of Riverton, Utah, for not being sufficiently supportive of the former president. Mr. Trump had endorsed Mr. Staggs, describing him in a video last weekend as “a little bit of a long shot” but “MAGA all the way.” For months, polls showed Mr. Curtis leading the race by a wide margin.

Mr. Curtis began his political career as a Democrat. He unsuccessfully ran for the Utah State Senate in 2000, and then served for a year as the chair of the Democratic Party in Utah County. He ran for mayor of Provo as a Republican in 2009, and served in that position until 2017.

That year, when Representative Jason Chaffetz, the influential chair of the House Oversight Committee, abruptly retired from his House seat in eastern Utah, Mr. Curtis jumped into the race, winning the Republican primary with 40 percent of the vote and defeating his Democratic opponent in the special election in a landslide. Mr. Curtis has since cruised to re-election to three full terms in the House.

His critics, including his opponent, Nancy Goroff, used his recent move to the area to suggest that he was out of touch with locals, but he won more endorsements from party leaders and local elected officials than did Ms. Goroff, a retired chemistry professor who ran in 2020.

Mr. Avlon will now face Representative Nick LaLota, the Republican incumbent, in November. While President Biden eked out a 0.2-point win in the district in 2020, Mr. LaLota cruised to an 11-point victory two years later. The Democratic House Majority PAC has characterized the First Congressional District as “one of the most competitive districts in the country,” while the Cook Political Report has called it “likely Republican.”

“Anxieties and emotions hang around this election, but we know that action is the best antidote to anxiety, right?” Mr. Avlon said to his supporters on Tuesday. “The real work — you all know — it starts right now.”

Ms. Goroff had seemed to be the presumptive Democratic candidate until Mr. Avlon announced his candidacy. Mr. Avlon said he felt compelled to enter the race because of the partisan division in the country, and referred to the district as a “majority maker.”

In the waning weeks of the race, Ms. Goroff and PACs that supported her tried to emphasize Mr. Avlon’s past ties to the Republican Party, particularly Rudolph W. Giuliani, for whom Mr. Avlon worked as a speechwriter and adviser. Mr. Avlon has previously said he worked for Mr. Giuliani “when he was sane.”

“We proved that the positive defeats the negative,” Mr. Avlon said in his speech on Tuesday. “We are fighting the good fight together, side by side and unafraid.”

It began last fall when Mr. Bowman stepped forward as one of the leading critics of how Israelis were carrying out their war with Hamas. But the contest grew into a broader proxy fight around the future of the Democratic Party, exposing painful fractures over race, class and ideology in a diverse district that includes parts of Westchester County and the Bronx.

Mr. Bowman, the district’s first Black congressman and a committed democratic socialist, never wavered from his calls for a cease-fire in Gaza or left-wing economic priorities. Down in the polls, he repeatedly accused his white opponent of racism and used expletives in denouncing the pro-Israel groups as a “Zionist regime” trying to buy the election.

His positions on the war and economic issues electrified the national progressives, who undertook an 11th-hour rescue mission led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. But they ultimately did little to win over skeptical voters and only emboldened his adversaries.

A super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby, dumped $15 million into defeating him, more than any outside group has ever spent on a House race.

Mr. Latimer, a moderate with a loyal local following, offered voters a return to more traditional Democratic politics. Centrists and Jewish voters flocked to him. Mr. Bowman alienated others with his far-left views and a string of embarrassing gaffes he struggled to explain, most notably the decision to pull a false fire alarm in a House office building last fall.

The result was not close. With 88 percent of the votes counted, Mr. Latimer was winning 58 percent to 42 percent.

Given the district’s overwhelming Democratic makeup, Mr. Latimer is expected to easily win the general election. At 70, he would be among the oldest House freshmen and most likely would provide a reliable vote for party leaders.

Addressing supporters in suburban White Plains, Mr. Latimer said he would fight for bipartisanship in Washington and inclusivity at home, but he also took aim at extreme viewpoints in both parties.

“We have to look at the arguments of the far right and the far left and say, ‘you cannot destroy this country with your rhetoric and your arguments,’” he said.

Mr. Bowman, 48, struck a defiant tone in his concession speech. He accused AIPAC and other super PACs involved in the race of spending huge sums to “brainwash people into believing something that isn’t true” and contended that “when we say ‘Free Palestine’ it is not antisemitic.”

“I would like to make a public apology for sometimes using foul language,” he said. “But we should not be well adjusted to a sick society.”

The election result was an excruciating blow for the left.

The movement once held up Mr. Bowman’s upset win in a Democratic primary in 2020, just two years after Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, as proof of the left’s ascent. Now, with the pendulum swinging back toward the party’s center, he is the first member of the House’s “squad” of young, left-wing lawmakers of color to lose a seat — and may not be the last.

AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups are already targeting Representative Cori Bush of Missouri ahead of an August primary, and progressives fear that the groups’ show of force in New York will chill criticism of Israel in Congress as the war grinds on.

A former middle school principal representing one of the nation’s most Jewish districts, Mr. Bowman was an unlikely partisan in a conflict 5,600 miles away. Four years ago, he actually criticized his opponent, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, for spending too much time on issues so far from his district.

But after the war’s outbreak, Mr. Bowman threw himself into the Palestinian cause, framing it as an extension of his work for children and racial justice at home.

Though he repeatedly condemned Hamas, Mr. Bowman was among the first lawmakers to call for a cease-fire, just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack; to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza; and to call for the United States to cut off all funding to its ally.

His supporters saw a valiant humanitarian stand and argued Mr. Bowman was speaking for the Black and Latino voters who make up roughly half the district’s population.

But at home, many Jewish voters, including some who eagerly helped elect him in 2020, felt betrayed.

Mr. Bowman did not visit a synagogue in the weeks after the Oct. 7 attack and has spoken since in terms that some saw as antisemitic, as when he suggested “the Jews” in his district had intentionally chosen to live apart from other people.

Mr. Latimer, a more traditional supporter of Israel, entered the race in December at the urging of local rabbis and a Westchester County Democratic establishment that never moved past grudges from 2020.

“After Jamaal Bowman really denied the Jewish experience — and more specifically the Israeli experience — after Oct. 7, I sort of realized: ‘This guy is not willing to see reason, and he’s got to go,’” said Raphael Rosen, a kidney doctor from New Rochelle.

He added: “A lot of strong Israel supporters supported him in 2020, and I’ve heard all of them kind of say that that was a big mistake.”

AIPAC’s involvement further inflamed the race. A bipartisan group dedicated to advancing Israel’s interests in the United States, it has taken an increasingly active role in electoral politics lately to try to stamp out growing skepticism for Israel among Democrats, particularly young progressives.

Mr. Bowman presented not only a vulnerable target, but an opportunity to send a message.

The group bundled $2 million in contributions directly to Mr. Latimer, while its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent seven times more than Mr. Bowman’s allies combined.

The ads almost never mentioned Israel itself, instead attacking Mr. Bowman as a disloyal Democrat for voting against President Biden’s landmark infrastructure bill and a bipartisan deal to avert a debt crisis.

Mr. Bowman and his allies spent the race’s final weeks trying to discredit AIPAC. It culminated on Saturday in a rally in the South Bronx, miles outside Mr. Bowman’s district, in which he hurled curses at AIPAC, calling it a racist Republican front undermining the democratic process. The super PAC receives considerable funding from Republican donors.

On the ground, though, even some of Mr. Bowman’s allies conceded that his campaign was in trouble long before the group got involved, hamstrung by unforced errors, staff churn and strategic missteps.

The biggest took place last fall when Mr. Bowman, in a hurry to get to the Capitol, pulled the fire alarm. He later apologized, but he was charged with a misdemeanor, and the timing, just a week before Oct. 7, could hardly have been worse.

Opposition researchers turned up old blog posts dabbling in 9/11 conspiracy theories and publicized video of Mr. Bowman calling reports that Hamas sexually abused Israeli women during its attack “propaganda.” (He later apologized.)

Relatively few Democrats in the area stepped up to defend him. Some explained that in four years in office, the congressman had rarely shown interest in getting to know their communities.

Mr. Latimer campaigned as Mr. Bowman’s stylistic and ideological opposite. He favored unflashy campaign stops at train stations and senior centers. He stressed the need to work with Republicans, though the bitterness of his criticism of Mr. Bowman, calling him a showboat chasing social media stardom, surprised some supporters.

Mr. Latimer repeatedly got himself in trouble by using language that his opponents called race baiting. He charged that Mr. Bowman did not ever “mention people who are not Black or brown” and later accused him of trying to “play the ethnic game.”

He also refused to answer questions about Mr. Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza or criticize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, effectively staking out a position well to the right of his party.

His supporters, though, did not seem bothered.

“Everybody’s not perfect, but what I like most about him is he just comes out for real,” said Mercedes Humphry, a Black retiree in Yonkers, Mr. Bowman’s hometown. “You can feel that he cares about you.”

Reporting was contributed by Shayla Colon, Claire Fahy, Molly Longman and Bernard Mokam.

An outspoken right-wing lawmaker, Ms. Boebert first won her seat in 2020 after upsetting an incumbent Republican in a primary. She made a name for herself with strong pro-gun views, packing a Glock on her hip and encouraging staff at her now closed restaurant to openly carry handguns. In Congress, she has become known for her strident MAGA views and has become entangled in a series of personal scrapes, including being ejected from a Denver theater in a lascivious episode that was caught on closed-circuit camera.

Facing a strong Democratic threat in the sprawling western Colorado district where she was first elected, Ms. Boebert chose to relocate to eastern Colorado to give herself a better chance of remaining in the House — and it appears to have worked.

The seat was vacated earlier this year by Ken Buck, a Republican who left Congress before the end of his term and will be replaced temporarily by Greg Lopez, a Republican former mayor of Parker who won a separate special election on Tuesday. Ms. Boebert did not run in the special election, since that would have required her giving up her current seat, cutting into the thin Republican majority.

Former President Donald J. Trump endorsed her, and her national profile helped her raise significantly more money than her five primary opponents, who split the anti-Boebert vote and enabled her victory despite claims that she was carpetbagging by suddenly changing her residence.

Ms. Boebert narrowly won re-election in her original district in 2022 by just over 500 votes and would have again faced a challenge from Adam Frisch, a Democrat who made the race close two years ago with little outside help. This go-round, he was drawing strong financial support from Democrats who saw a chance to oust Ms. Boebert.

Now, with Ms. Boebert gone, Democrats are hoping to pick up the seat she now holds in the conservative district, which includes high-end ski resorts as well as energy facilities and working ranches. Democrats boosted a right-wing conservative in a crowded primary there, gambling that a far-right Republican might be easier for Mr. Frisch to defeat in November.

But the effort came up short when Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction lawyer, won the Republican nomination on Tuesday, giving the party establishment the candidate it preferred against Mr. Frisch.

Among other races on Tuesday, Representative Lauren Boebert, a far-right Republican who switched districts in Colorado to avoid being ousted from the House, won a crowded primary, according to The A.P., all but guaranteeing that she will defeat her Democratic challenger in November in the conservative Fourth Congressional District.

In Utah, Representative John Curtis, a relative moderate, defeated a Trump-aligned candidate, Trent Staggs, in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat that Mitt Romney is vacating, according to The A.P. Also in Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox repelled a challenge from State Representative Phil Lyman, a pro-Trump conservative who had the state party’s backing, according to The A.P.

Here are the details:

• The seat in Ms. Boebert’s new district was vacated earlier this year by Ken Buck, a Republican who left Congress before the end of his term and will be replaced temporarily by the winner of a separate special election on Tuesday. Ms. Boebert did not run in the special election, since that would have required her giving up her current seat, cutting into the thin Republican majority.

• At the state G.O.P. convention in the spring in Salt Lake City, Mr. Lyman won the party’s endorsement over Mr. Cox. But Mr. Cox was still widely popular among Utahns in his first term, and since Republicans have controlled the state’s governorship since 1985, he is all but certain to win a second term.

• Mr. Curtis has portrayed himself as a moderate workhorse in the image of Mr. Romney, who announced his retirement from the Senate in September. Mr. Curtis has sought to polish his conservative bona fides by defending Mr. Trump’s vow to prosecute his political enemies if elected president, but he faced attacks from Mr. Staggs, the mayor of Riverton, Utah, for not being sufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump.

• John Avlon, a former CNN political analyst who helped found the centrist political group No Labels, prevailed over Nancy Goroff in the Democratic primary in New York’s First Congressional District, according to The A.P., less than five months after he entered the race. Mr. Avlon will face the incumbent, Nick LaLota, in November.

Grace Ashford, Maggie Astor and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

Just after 7 a.m. in Yonkers, Jennifer Chalmers, 70, arrived to vote for the congressman somewhat grudgingly. After Mr. Bowman was charged with a misdemeanor for pulling a fire alarm in a House office building in October, Ms. Chalmers began to question his composure, she said.

The alarm created chaos while Democrats attempted to stall a vote on a Republican-written stopgap spending bill intended to avert a government shutdown; Mr. Bowman was accused of pulling the alarm in an effort to delay the vote.

“I thought: ‘What a little boy that is,’” Ms. Chalmers said, before adding: “He’s doing something good — or close to good.”

Others were more enthusiastic toward Mr. Bowman, expressing support for his stances on gun violence and the Israel-Hamas war. Vaughn Holloway, a voter in the Bronx, said he believed in Mr. Bowman and his message, referring to him as a “hometown guy.” He said he had followed Mr. Bowman since the congressman was the principal at the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, the school that he founded. Mr. Holloway added that Mr. Bowman had visited his mosque several times.

“He came out, and that meant something to me,” Mr. Holloway said.

Further north, in Scarsdale, the fire alarm debacle continued to haunt Mr. Bowman in territory that was already more friendly toward Mr. Latimer. Sandra Altman, 63, said the incident made her dislike her representative. She planned to vote for Mr. Latimer, she said.

“He’s making the party look really bad,” she said of Mr. Bowman. “He’s on the fringe doing all kinds of stuff.”

At the Scarsdale Public Library, Christa Mruz, 53, said she voted for Mr. Bowman in 2020, but decided to vote for Mr. Latimer because of his record serving the county.

“He’s done great for Westchester and he’ll continue to do so on a higher level,” she said. “We need more people who will work together instead of being separate for their own agendas.”

Several voters expressed weariness with the deluge of campaign advertising, much of it negative, that has characterized the race. Justin Avila, 18, a first-time voter in Yonkers who supported Mr. Latimer, called both candidates’ ads “childish.”

Polls are open until 9 p.m.