The two Democratic candidates vying to challenge Representative Nick LaLota in New York’s First Congressional District did not criticize each other, but rather were in near-total agreement and pledged to work together in the midterm election campaign, in a sedate debate sponsored by several chapters of the League of Women Voters on Monday.
Chris Gallant and Lukas Ventouras took questions on topics including immigration, health care, reproductive rights, the cost of living, term limits, and the First District’s needs. Mr. Gallant emphasized his experience in the Army and the Army National Guard, and as a volunteer fireman and union president, while Mr. Ventouras, sounding very much a populist, emphasized what he characterized as rot in the nation’s politics, assailing the Democratic Party as well as Republicans.
Asked to describe the biggest policy difference with their primary opponent, neither candidate took the bait. Though they had an opportunity for up to three rebuttals to their opponent’s responses, neither took advantage.
Young adults lacking government experience, both candidates contrasted their youth with what they described as an entrenched political class that should be subject to term and age limits. Mr. Ventouras, who is 25, was particularly scornful of a system in which it is vastly easier for wealthy people to mount a political campaign than for anyone else.
Once a true swing district, Democrats have lost the last six elections to represent the First District, which spans much of Suffolk County, in the House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report lists the district in its “solid Republican” column.
“I’ve watched what’s happening to our democracy,” said Mr. Gallant, who was an air traffic controller in the Army and is a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in the Guard, “and it’s time to actually step up and fight.”
“I’m tired of the definition-of-insanity politics, which is the Democrats doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results,” Mr. Ventouras said, detailing his work in a congressional office, for campaigns, for a civil rights lawyer, and in journalism. These experiences led him to conclude that “the working class feels left behind by politics,” he said, “and the Democratic Party needs to do what it must do to get back the ground that it has lost.”
Describing himself as a champion of the working class, Mr. Ventouras said he is in the campaign to advocate for Medicare for all, a child tax credit, and “to bring our soldiers home and stop this slush fund of money overseas spent on war.”
He did not spare his party at either the national or district level. “We don’t go into certain parts of the district that are very important and whose residents now feel like they live in ‘flyover country,’ and that they don’t matter or exist to politicians,” he said, naming Riverhead, Flanders, Gordon Heights, and Huntington Station. “They have been left behind and they’re not wrong to feel that way, and we must aggressively go after their vote, but authentically. We can’t show up there five days before an election and try and make inroads with the community.”
Mr. LaLota, Mr. Gallant said, “has a stronghold” in the district. But “he’s not well liked” by independent voters and some Republicans as well as Democrats, he said. Across the district, he added, voters’ assessment of Mr. LaLota is similar. “He doesn’t show up,” Mr. Gallant said of the incumbent. “He doesn’t want to do the job, and he’s in it just because he’s a career politician. . . . This is supposed to be about representation.”
In the district, the result of President Trump’s tariff policies is that prices are skyrocketing, Mr. Gallant said, “and affordability is really the key issue here.” The overarching problem “is that we’ve entered into a war that was a choice,” and consequently “we now have gas prices that are going through the roof.”
The Trump administration, Mr. Ventouras said, “has completely thrown farmers under the bus.” The war against Iran “has created a fertilizer shortage and a crisis for farmers.”
Both candidates spoke of the need to protect the district’s coastline and infrastructure in the face of rising sea level and extreme weather.
“The immigration system is fundamentally broken,” said Mr. Ventouras, who said that his grandfather arrived in this country at Ellis Island. He added that “we shouldn’t have a system wherein because of the situation on the ground in so many countries due to the militarization of the United States, that there is an immigration crisis where these people are now trying to come to the United States and then we make it impossible for them to live here with dignity, either criminalizing them just for existing or having a target on their back constantly.”
“Our immigration system has been broken for many years,” Mr. Gallant agreed, decrying “completely inhumane practices” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and in detention centers.
On the cost and complexity of the health care system, Mr. Gallant charged that Mr. LaLota “voted for a bill that essentially knocked 20,000 Long Islanders off their health care,” referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated funding for New York’s expanded Essential Plan and terminated premium tax credits. “We should have a single-payer system where there should be health care for all,” he said.
“We get price-gouged for drugs and treatments that we develop with our tax money at our research universities in this country,” Mr. Ventouras said. Both candidates expressed support for the right to terminate a pregnancy.
Democrats, Mr. Ventouras said, “have for far too long been on the defensive . . . and have allowed Republicans to caricature them into what we know that we are not.” Should Democrats gain a congressional majority, they must emphasize that Mr. Trump “is not just a corrupt president. This is just not the most corrupt president in any of our lifetimes. This is the most corrupt person that has ever served in any facet of American life. He and his enablers need to be treated as such, and they need to be dragged in front of Congress and made to speak for their actions.” This includes “enablers” such as Elon Musk, he added.
Members of Congress “are supposed to have the power of the purse, the power to declare war, and those things aren’t happening,” Mr. Gallant said. “The people that are currently in Congress that aren’t doing their job should be held accountable as well.”
The primary election is on June 23. Early voting begins on Saturday and continues through June 21. East Hampton Town’s early voting site is Windmill Village, at 219 Accabonac Road in East Hampton.
