By Biddle Duke
The Express News Group: The Southampton Press, The East Hampton Press, The Sag Harbor Express
Down but not out, John Avlon wants to be part of reversing the democratic — and Democratic — recession in America.
His ideas, heavy on unity and the promise of “economic abundance,” free of revenge and insults, and light on blame and political recrimination, feel like they’re from another era in this time of chaos, corruption and cruelty.
Little wonder, seeing as the media personality, author and recent Democratic congressional candidate is also a historian who spends some portion of his days examining America’s leaders in our darkest days to know how to step out and lead amid this existential national fight.
“This moment could not be more dire for our country, for democracy itself,” he said in a recent conversation.
I reached out to hear what Avlon had learned from losing Suffolk County’s congressional race (New York Congressional District 1) to the Republican incumbent, Representative Nick LaLota, in 2024, and to ask what he is up to six months later.
The former CNN anchor, journalist and writer, who calls Sag Harbor home, has recently been crisscrossing the district, holding forth at gatherings across the county, getting the kind of in-person face time with Suffolk County voters that LaLota has been criticized for avoiding as a sitting congressman.
Avlon says he is considering another run for the congressional seat in 2026. But his 2024 campaign has already firmly secured his role as a leading county Democratic figure.
In the past month, he’s attended and spoken at rallies in Riverhead and Sag Harbor and at a packed town hall-style gathering organized by the Smithtown Democrats. His schedule is packed with speaking engagements and contacts with the voting public.
Avlon became a Sag Harbor resident a few years ago, recognizing New York’s 1st Congressional District as flippable. Long a purple district, the seat has gone back and forth for decades, with Democrat Tim Bishop holding it for 12 years, until Republican Lee Zeldin defeated him in 2014. It has been Republican ever since, with LaLota succeeding Zeldin in 2022.
Many Democrats and even some polls gave Avlon a realistic shot last fall, right down to the wire. Turnout was huge, the biggest in the district’s history. Prevailing political wisdom has it that turnout by undecideds in presidential election years favors candidates on the presidential party line. This election was no exception.
Ultimately, it wasn’t close. LaLota won 55.2 percent to Avlon’s 44.8 percent, with Avlon basically capturing every registered Democrat in the district (his tally was 183,540) and LaLota drawing every Republican, plus another 30,000 undecideds and Conservatives (some 226,385 votes in all).
Yet, Avlon took hope and energy from the results. He polled two points ahead of Kamala Harris while LaLota polled two points behind Trump, which Avlon takes as a sign that a few thousand (and key) undecideds embraced his message. Winning more of them, he reasons, just will likely take more boot leather, messaging persistence and money.
Avlon sees the first three months of Trump’s presidency as opening the door wider for challenges by centrist Democrats to stalwart Trump Republicans like LaLota. With the president proudly and brazenly building an autocracy by defying the judiciary and demanding “ring-kissing fealty”; by waging a chaotic tariff war with the world on the backs of American consumers; by pushing self-serving tax cuts for American billionaires, like the president himself, even as he advances a budget that threatens to gut Medicaid and Medicare, and spending cuts that threaten Social Security; by insulting our closest allies and destroying America’s reach and ability to extend our goodwill around the world, which is critical to our security and economy; by crushing leading American universities that, until now, have been magnets to the greatest minds in the world, the seedbeds of innovation, and a primary source of our economic success as crucibles for the most important advances in technology, medicine, finance and more; by trashing measures to protect Americans from pollution and chemicals in our environment; by gutting established regulations to protect nature and endangered animals — the president’s every furious, vengeful step runs counter to building a healthier, safer, more economically secure America.
“Just wait,” the president’s supporters are saying, “everything is going to be great.”
Wait?
As a journalist and writer, Avlon has long seen himself in public service. But suggesting solutions to civic problems is one thing; now, he keenly wants to implement them.
“We need a broad, unifying, optimistic message. We need to end the Democratic recession with a return to empathy, humility and an ideology that is welcoming, culturally and politically,” Avlon told me. “We need a patriotic message of abundance and strength.”
He will decide about a 2026 run sometime this year. The decision hinges largely on persuading the Democratic National Committee and local Democratic leadership that New York’s CD1 can be flipped — and flipped by him. To do that, he needs to avoid a money-draining and divisive primary.
Avlon outspent LaLota in last year’s race, but much of Avlon’s money went to defeat Nancy Goroff in the primary. Subtracting his spending on the primary, Avlon actually significantly trailed LaLota’s general election spending.
What’s more, the Democratic primary was hard-fought, leaving Avlon just four months to win over undecideds and middle-of-the-road Republicans. Without a primary distraction, a Democrat like Avlon has a realistic chance at taking New York’s CD1 seat.
Avlon gets much of his ideas and inspiration from history. He’s written books on two presidents who led in moments of national crisis and imminent collapse, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and he is working on another now about Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt believed that to be American was a profoundly political act, a lifelong responsibility. Clearly, Avlon agrees.
Although urged to run for a third term, which he likely would have won, Washington knew the future of the nation depended on the succession of power, that another should lead — and then another, and another. Anything else would be absolutism, dooming democracy.
Remember that as Trump gloats about a possible third term.
Our first president foresaw other perils, all too familiar to us now. In his Farewell Address, he offers warnings relevant today: that hyper-partisanship, excessive debt and foreign wars could spell America’s collapse.
To succeed as a nation, he urged citizens “by birth or by choice” to unite. He called for religious pluralism. He argued for public education as a democratic keystone.
Lincoln, of course, famously saved the nation from fracturing by fighting in the belief that there is more that unites Americans than divides us. That remains an open question.
Much of all this sounds like Avlon himself on the stump and in his media work. But can humility, prudence, honesty and calls for unity prevail against vengeful greed, hypocrisy and dishonesty?
“We are all afraid …” Alaska’s senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, said recently.
Yes, we are.
Which is why we need leaders like Avlon: “I get energy from the challenges we face.”
Hallelujah.