In what has somehow been nearly a decade and a half spent as a political journalist, I’ve encountered a lot of election cycle twists. But the one thing I never quite expected was for my boss to run for Congress.
Perhaps I should have. After all, if there is anyone who was born to be a political candidate, it is my former editor at the Daily Beast, John Avlon. As a speechwriter for then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Avlon painstakingly composed the eulogies of first responders who died on Sept. 11. He went on to become a centrist columnist and co-founded the fledging post-partisan political organization now known as No Labels. He was well-dressed, articulate, and telegenic. To most people around the office, he was just “John”—but to those who knew him from his past at Milton Academy or Yale, he went by “Fip.”
Avlon played a formative role in my career in journalism. In fact, I feel comfortable saying that if it were not for him, I might be pursuing a more rational and lucrative kind of work. I never intended to become a reporter. But through a series of coincidences and odd luck, I ended up in the New York newsroom of the Daily Beast in the winter of 2012 when America was transfixed by a vicious Republican primary, mostly a battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.
Avlon was a columnist then, coming in and out of the newsroom in a Frank Gehry building on West Side Highway to appear on something called Daily Beast TV, which was before its time in providing little-watched online video-news segments where reporters and contributors pontificated on the headlines. (Long before other newsrooms spent millions of dollars pivoting to video, only to fail and pivot back, Daily Beast editor-in-chief Tina Brown was ahead of the game.) I gained Avlon’s attention as a workhorse, going through sheets and sheets of precinct numbers, trying to see if Ron Paul’s anti-war message had helped him among Arab American voters in Dearborn, Michigan. (It hadn’t.) But Avlon was impressed by devotion to some of the basic spadework of political journalism at a time when flash and celebrity were a big part of the game.
I then got laid off by the Daily Beast but was eventually rehired, thanks to Avlon, who rose in rank to run the publication for half a decade. I embarked upon a role as his factotum in Washington. I wrote, I edited, and I managed personalities during a Wild West period for the publication as it transitioned into the scrappy online tabloid it remained for many years. Avlon, an editor of two collections of “America’s greatest newspaper columns,” cherished the idea of a publication that was “non-partisan but neutral,” in the spirit of New York journalism legends of the craft (like Jimmy Breslin), and was fixated on “scoops, scandals and stories about secret worlds.” These mantras were so important to him that he had them painted on walls in the New York office.
Before Avlon announced that he was running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 1st Congressional District against first-term incumbent Republican Nick LaLota, he had long since left the Daily Beast for a television career on CNN as an earnest centrist pundit. His appearances were billed as a “Reality Check”: He spoke about the news of the day soberly, using history to “make sense of the present.” (He is also the author of books like Lincoln and the Fight for Peace and Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations.)
His new move is ambitious: The district at the tip of Long Island that he is campaigning to represent has been trending MAGA. And Avlon is campaigning from his house in the wealthiest enclave of the district—the Hamptons, where he has established residency. Because Avlon also owns a duplex apartment in Gramercy Park, LaLota has repeatedly attacked him as a carpetbagger. (LaLota, for what it’s worth, does not actually live in the district, but just outside of it in Amityville.)
But Avlon isn’t without his bipartisan credentials. Not only had he worked for Giuliani in City Hall but his wife, Margaret Hoover, is a Republican descendant of Herbert Hoover and the host of the revived PBS show Firing Line. She and Avlon regularly appeared in television segments as a nonpartisan couple. (There was a certain accord. She could criticize Donald Trump but he could never criticize Herbert Hoover.)
They made an appealing pair. He was roughly one notch left of center. She was about one and a half to two notches right of center. The two could civilly debate the issues of the day while cheerily disagreeing with each other—serving as a model of bipartisan debate and domesticity. But being famous for being comfortable with bipartisanship on TV only goes so far in a political campaign in 2024.
Avlon’s race is not the most heated congressional campaign of 2024—let alone in New York. The state has seven competitive races in the very narrow battlefield to determine which party has the majority in the House of Representatives. But the 1st District race is one of the quirkier ones. The district includes both the Hamptons and lower-middle-class neighborhoods where residents are far more likely to be found tailgating a New York Islanders game at Nassau Coliseum than on a private beach near Montauk.
Ideologically, three things distinguish Avlon as a politician: his fundamental disgust at Trump and Trumpism, his roots in a very particular New York good-government tradition, and his profound belief in an earnest, almost technocratic brand of politics. (Avlon may have worked for Rudy Giuliani, but his politics owe far more to the influence of John Lindsay types; he is befuddled by what happened to the Giuliani he knew who Avlon recalled as a “pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-immigrant, pro-healthcare mayor who endorsed Mario Cuomo.”) But none of these qualities exactly make for good 30-second ads.
The result is that, as a candidate, Avlon is not far removed from any of the other swing-district Democrats running this cycle. He calls Trump a unique threat to democracy—suggesting that, if not for the former president, he would never himself have run for office. Avlon urgently wants to protect abortion rights, warns about the dangers of Project 2025, and bemoans the fact that Donald Trump put the kibosh on a bipartisan border security bill. (There is a New York–specific wrinkle, however—like his opponent, Avlon is an ardent advocate of restoring the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, a major issue in the high-tax Empire State.)
LaLota’s messaging is not much different from anything that swing Republicans use in other competitive districts, save, of course, for his repeated attacks on Avlon as a ”Manhattan liberal.” LaLota paints himself as a centrist who wants to protect Medicare and crack down on illegal immigration and crime. The Naval Academy grad also emphasizes his military service and, while Donald Trump does not appear in his television ads, LaLota has not shied away from campaigning with the former president.
The race recently captured some national attention when Avlon trashed LaLota in a debate over his refusal to condemn Donald Trump after Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, alleged that the former president had praised Adolf Hitler. LaLota responded by attacking Avlon’s journalistic credentials.
“John Avlon will claim that he’s a journalist. A good journalist, an independent, honest, trustworthy journalist, would verify the fact before he spewed some sort of rhetoric hearsay. That has not been confirmed. The (Trump) campaign denied that, as it should.”
I met Avlon at a diner in a strip mall close to SUNY Stony Brook on a crisp early-fall morning where he was every bit as polished and focused as the television commentator he once was, speaking with the precision that one would have expected if he were facing a teleprompter, not a reporter.
For him, the transition from journalist to candidate was entirely natural, rather than a stark break. “I’ve always sort of put my personal analysis, opinions, and policy prescriptions at the forefront,” he said.
“Ideally, journalism and public service are two sides of the same coin, right? It’s because you care about civic debates, you care about your country or community,” Avlon said. “You want to talk about ideas, advance ideas. And obviously there’s a natural tension between the two (jobs), but I also think, ideally, they’re complementary. And so for me, there’s total continuity of purpose. It’s not stepping into a totally different arena. It’s just a different facet of the same fight.”
He went on to argue that the United States is an anomaly in how rarely journalists become politicians—pointing to examples from earlier in American history when this transition was commonplace, including the case of Arthur Vandenberg, the longtime Republican senator from Michigan during the first half of the 20th century. He winced when I brought up a more recent example—Jesse Helms, the hard-right senator from North Carolina who was a television pundit before winning election in 1972. “Oh God, that’s dark,” said Avlon.
Avlon also argued that his background in journalism gave him unique experience that would be invaluable on Capitol Hill. “We could probably use people who run a digital news media organization, because they actually understand algorithms,” he said.
Now that Avlon has made the transition out of journalism, he’s left with criticisms of how the media covers politics. He noted that when he was at CNN, he repeatedly pitched “more of a focus on solutions journalism,” to no avail. He went on to bemoan the emphasis on the coverage of polls in campaigns. “After an election, we do very little deep analysis of the actual vote and what actually happened. Like, that’s a 72-hour story, but we’ve spent months talking about polls which are ephemeral and often false.” It’s worth noting at this point that an internal Republican poll leaked to the New York Post the day before we spoke had Avlon losing. Needless to say, the candidate dismissed it. (He argued that the act of leaking an internal poll to a friendly publication—as LaLota’s camp had done—was “a sign of weakness.”)
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The former Giuliani aide also said he was shocked by the cynicism of political campaigns in the 21st century. After all, journalists may be jaded—but at least in Avlon’s estimation, they have nothing on political consultants.
“I’d say one difference between being a journalist running for office is that I actually care about facts. And I’m amazed how many consultants have gotten used to ‘Of course that’s a lie. It doesn’t matter.’ ”
As an example, he said that his opponent had falsely claimed that Avlon supported government benefits for undocumented immigrants. He went online to find out what the citation for this was. As the author of four books and countless columns, Avlon has argued for plenty of ideas over the years that he might regret, but he didn’t think this was one of them. (A casual search of his columns for bad takes found one from 2013 where he suggested that Shaquille O’Neal’s 2013 endorsement of Chris Christie’s reelection bid provided a successful blueprint for the future of the Republican Party.)
“I was curious, so I actually clicked through on the link, and it’s an article from Minnesota that I’m neither cited in, quoted in, nor wrote,” he said. It left him perplexed and saddened—an almost surprising display of naivete from someone who had spent so much time in newsrooms. Political consultants and campaigns “take advantage of the fact that, you know, newsrooms are strapped and they’re not doing the fact-checking,” he said.
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Of course, being a journalist, Avlon couldn’t help but name-drop other journalists he’d been reading. In particular, Avlon cited Matt Yglesias’s recent work on “the abundance economy.” Yglesias argues that Democrats need to focus on increasing the supply of goods like housing and energy rather than using regulations like price controls to help consumers.
“I completely think that approach is correct,” Avlon said.
There may have always been a politician lurking within Avlon, waiting for the right opportunity to emerge. The question is whether there is a congressman inside him, too. It’s not just that the district is Republican-leaning. It’s that if Avlon somehow manages to win, he’ll immediately be a top target for Republicans in 2026 and living the life of a vulnerable incumbent. He’ll have to relentlessly raise money, spend countless hours voting on, say, naming post offices, and deal with a grueling weekly commute back and forth from Long Island. It’ll be a lifestyle where he’ll be as likely to appear on the negative ads between news segments than on the news itself. But no one said going from checking facts to passing bills would be easy.
