When the midterm election rolls around, midway through a presidency, most Americans ignore the 434 House seat elections that don’t affect them directly.

But a handful of races garner national attention. Maybe because they’re seen as bellwethers for the electorate as a whole. Maybe they’re a reflection of closely watched demographics. Or they’re seats that always seem to be battlegrounds.

Which brings me home.

I live in New York’s 17th Congressional District. Its southern boundary is less than 10 miles north of New York City, but it reaches all the way up the Hudson, on both sides, for about an hour’s drive north.

Two of the counties in the district – Rockland, where I live, and Westchester – are among the most affluent in the nation. Bill and Hillary Clinton – the 42nd and should-have-been 45th Presidents of the United States – live in Chappaqua, in the heart of the district.

This year, the race is a donnybrook. The Republican incumbent is Mike Lawler, a former political operative seeking a third term. The challenger is Cait Conley, a 16-year military veteran and the former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council.

Polls go both ways in this one. Some show Lawler ahead, although there is some skepticism about the tilt of the polltakers. Others show Conley in the lead. Five points either way would be a landslide here.

The economic issues causing Republicans to cower across the country hit this middle-to-upper class district hard. The price of gasoline is well over $4 a gallon, with some $5 readings in isolated parts. Utility bills surged in the wake of the COVID outbreak and never really came down. Food prices in the New York area rank among the highest in the country – and these parts are no exception.

So that would make you think that this district is ripe for a flip. But there’s a catch.

That catch is the Bloc.

Western Rockland has one of the largest Hasidic and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States. Hebrew is as common as English, if not more so.

The area’s voting patterns are so bizarre that national Democrats thought they had proof of voter fraud in 2024. They didn’t. One precinct in the town of Ramapo, where these folks live, came in Trump 512, Harris 0. For Congress, it was Lawler 505, Democrat Mondaire Jones 1.

Those are Mayor Daley/Boss Tweed type margins. And the thing is they’re not fake news. People in these precincts vote in a monolith.

Which is why Lawler, unlike other embattled Republicans this year, brought Trump to the district. His audience was in the Hasidic area and they got to hear what they wanted – a ringing endorsement of Trump’s buddy Benjamin Netanyahu and support for Israeli actions in Gaza.

The war in Gaza and Trump’s support of Netanyahu is the wild card in New York-17. It’s why Lawler and local Republicans try to spread an image on their New York bogeyman, Zohran Mamdani, as an anti-Semite who endangers Israel and Jews everywhere.

For the rest of the district, Lawler tries to present himself as a reasonable moderate. Hell, he’s got a beard, how could be MAGA?

One of the things he’s trying to sell is the idea that he fought to raise the property tax limit that homeowners can deduct from their federal income taxes. One of Trump’s first punitive moves against states that didn’t vote for him came when his Republican buddies enacted the SALT (state and local taxes) cap at $10,000 a year. The states where property taxes are that high are reliably blue: New York, Massachusetts, California.

Lawler claims he got the cap raised to $40,000, which would alleviate the tax bill for the lower  income end of the population. What he doesn’t advertise is that the boost is limited to three years – it’ll go back to $10,000 about the time Lawler gets interested in trying to unseat Chuck Schumer in the Senate.

What’s hilarious is the signs that say “Thank you Mike Lawler for SALT.” That ignores the fact that SALT itself is a bad thing, that his Republican colleagues are hoping to get back to draining blue states as soon as they can.

Conley wasn’t my first choice to run against Lawler. She’s a little too conservative. For example, she supports restoring much of what was cut from the Affordable Care Act, but she does not support Medicare for All.

But I liked the way she handled herself in the Democratic primary debates. The early favorite came across as mealy-mouthed and a traditional local hack. This race needed a fighter – and despite my vote for a more progressive candidate, Conley won.

She’s rewarded Democrats with a social media-worthy debate performance against Lawler. When the issue of violence against women – in the wake of the Cornell gang rape allegations – came up, Lawler tried to talk over Conley as she advocated strong sexual consent laws.

“I do not need you to mansplain to me what domestic abuse and sexual assault against women is and the appropriate response,” Conley warned Lawler. “Don’t start. Sit over there.”

I think she fights pretty well.

Since I moved here in 1987, most of the House races haven’t been close. For the first 14 years, Republican Ben Gilman dominated. He was what we in New York call a Rockefeller Republican – somewhat moderate. In 2026, assuming he didn’t bend the knee to Donald Trump, he’d be called a RINO – Republican in name only.

Then, after the 2000 census, the redistricting left us with a Democratic stalwart, Nita Lowey. She won relatively easily until she retired in 2020.

Mondaire Jones won in 2020. But in 2022, another census redistricting caused a shift that put Jones in the same district as another Democrat, Sean Patrick Maloney. That caused Jones, a promising Democrat, to shift to an ill-fated New York City race, and left us with Maloney, who represented the Democratic establishment. Lawler beat him by less than 3,000 votes.

So those are all the reasons why this race is the center of attention. Conley and Lawler both make national TV appearances – Lawler is unlike a lot of other Republicans in that he embraces the non-right wing networks because he thinks he can seem like a reasonable member of his party.

I’d love to be confident that Lawler is going down. I’m not. Not at all. I could see a scenario where Democrats take a big majority in the House, capture the Senate – and we’re still stuck with Smarmy Mike.

Early voting starts Saturday. The only way I, the other democracy savers in New York-17 and the other democracy savers from Maine to Alaska can make what we want happen is to vote. As soon as we can. In numbers that can’t be denied.