by Michelle Celarier
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Croton-based journalist Michelle Celarier in her Substack newsletter “Michelle Celarier on The Billionaire Class.” It is republished here with permission.
SOON AFTER EFFIE Phillips-Staley finished an interview with political podcaster Hasan Piker on his Twitch livestream, Democratic Party officials in New York went on the attack.
Democrats are desperate to take back the House in this year’s midterm elections, but the party elite is facing negative approval ratings even among their own base. It might seem bizarre, then, that they chose to lambast someone like Piker, who is increasingly popular among Democratic voters and the public at large. Millions of people watch his livestream, which makes it a tempting stop for politicians like Phillips-Staley who are looking for votes—and grass roots donations.
But Piker is an anti-Zionist leftist, and the establishment is freaking out. That explains why several Democratic leaders chastised Phillips-Staley, a soft-spoken, nonprofit executive and elected official in the suburban village of Tarrytown, New York, who is in a crowded primary race with five other Democrats vying to take back the House seat that has been occupied by Republican Mike Lawler since 2022. A Democratic victory here—in New York’s 17th Congressional District—is seen as an important step in turning the House blue.
Expressing their “deep disappointment” with Phillips-Staley, four Democratic county chairs in New York said her appearance on Piker’s livestream “represents a dangerous and unacceptable step toward legitimizing rhetoric that has no place in this district, in mainstream Democratic politics, or in any serious political discourse.”
The uproar over the interview, which went viral, has managed to elevate Phillips-Staley’s visibility at a time when she needs all the attention she can get.
“While I don’t align with every word Hasan Piker has ever said, we must recognize the massive value of a platform that engages millions of young people in the democratic process,” she said in a statement on social media. “We win when we grow the movement—not when we cut people out of it.”
Hasan, an American Muslim of Turkish background, has been called the left’s Joe Rogan, and a number of Democrats have appeared with him, either on or off his livestream. They include Senators Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, California Rep. Ro Khanna, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
When asked by a CNN reporter at the most recent “No Kings” rally in New York City to respond to the criticisms that he’s “too extreme and antisemitic,” Hasan laughed. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a heinous smear first of all. I’ve spent my entire professional media career combatting antisemitism . . . I just happen to also be an avowed anti-Zionist” who believes Zionism’s “racist ideology . . . has caused the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of Israel and also the United States of America.”
But because the issue of Zionism is so impossible to address on moral terms, he says, he gets labeled an antisemite: “You can’t have a discussion on where the party’s moral center is.”
People like Staley-Phillips are trying.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERS are still firmly behind Israel, but the rest of the country is not, which is galvanizing primary battles in New York and elsewhere. A recent NBC poll found that 67 percent of Democrats are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis—a huge change from just two years ago. Only 17 percent support Israel. Even when Republicans are added to the totals, only 32 percent view Israel favorably. And two-thirds of Americans also oppose the war in Iran, which many blame on Israel’s outsize influence in US politics. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been begging American presidents to start a war with Iran for 40 years.
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The shifting sentiment has made it easier for Phillips-Staley to be more outspoken about her beliefs, which she described in some detail in the 40-minute interview with Piker:
“I will always fight for universal human rights and Palestinian self-determination, and stand firmly against antisemitism. I believe we can’t have universal human rights anywhere unless they’re everywhere.”
She talked about her immigrant family background—her mother is from El Salvador—and her horror at what she witnessed visiting the occupied West Bank in Israel recently. Phillips-Staley paid for her trip—unlike several other elected officials in Westchester County, where she is based. Last year they went on a junket to Israel paid for by the Westchester Jewish Council, a group whose members include the controversial American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“I have to say, it is appalling that our tax dollars go to support this . . . These people are living in terror,” Phillips-Staley said. After returning from the trip, she learned that four homes had been burnt down and one person had been shot in the village she visited.
When Phillips-Staley found out she had lost a local supporter because she agreed on X when someone used the term “apartheid” to describe the conditions she witnessed, she told him,
“This is what I saw. I saw it with my eyes . . . If you were here, if you actually went to the West Bank, you would see it too, because it’s undeniable.”
Her campaign is similar to the one that helped Mamdani become the mayor of New York City. And, like Mamdani’s, it isn’t just about the thorny Israel-Palestine issue, although that is what she says most people want to talk about. The campaign is also about policies for basic needs—housing affordability, universal childcare, Medicare for all, immigration reform. “All the things we could pay for if we weren’t dropping $1.8 billion a day in the war in Iran,” she told Piker.
Phillips-Staley has been also been interviewed in major media outlets, like Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, and received endorsements from the Working Families Party and several local elected officials in Westchester County. She has also been endorsed by former congressional representative Jamaal Bowman, who introduced her to Bernie Sanders at a recent “Tax the Rich” rally in the Bronx.
Bowman represented a neighboring Westchester suburban district until AIPAC spent more than $14 million to oust him because he called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Bowman lost the primary to Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who also was endorsed by Bowman’s former congressional ally Mondaire Jones. A Democrat, Jones ran against Lawler in 2024 but lost. While voters in the district backed Kamala Harris, many progressives who had helped elect Jones in 2020 abandoned him after he endorsed the AIPAC-backed Latimer and refused to speak out about the suffering of the Palestinians at the height of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Jones lost in a district that had been a Democratic stronghold until it flipped Republican in 2022 after redistricting changed its demographics and brought in more conservative voters. As redrawn, the district represents the lower Hudson Valley, which includes most of northern Westchester, portions of Dutchess and all of Putnam and Rockland counties. (Full disclosure: I live in this district.)
Jewish voters make up 12 percent of NY17, but they aren’t a monolithic voting bloc. A good chunk of the district’s Jewish citizens are Orthodox Jews clustered in Rockland County who are reliable votes for Lawler. And while the New York metro suburbs may not be as left leaning as New York City, it’s worth remembering that a third of the city’s Jewish voters cast their ballot for Mamdani. Phillips-Staley says many Jewish constituents encouraged her to run.
Meanwhile, she is working hard to turn out the Hispanic vote, noting that demographic is about 25 to 30 percent of the district’s electorate—and is often overlooked.
But the Democratic National Committee, which promotes candidates for local offices, has a different idea. Reclaiming this congressional seat is a top priority, and the party’s leaders believe moving to the right is the way to do it.
THE PARTY ELITE’S candidate of choice in the primary is classic centrist material: Cait Conley, a woman who is perhaps best characterized as someone whose career has been in the service of our nation’s failed foreign policy. She worked in Biden’s National Security Council and before that served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan after graduating from West Point.
The Army vet has received funding from the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, which backs pro-Israel Democrats. To many in the district, taking such money is a mark against her at a time when the changing mood of the electorate has made a number of Democrats publicly commit to not taking any money from AIPAC or its allies. They view such backing as a stigma that signals a foreign country’s involvement in American politics. (Phillips-Staley says she won’t take any corporate PAC or AIPAC money.)
Nonetheless, Conley has also received an endorsement from politicians firmly ensconced in the Democratic Party establishment across the district and state, including several mayors and county legislators who are pro-Israel even if many of their constituents are not.
For example, Emiljana Ulaj, a Westchester County legislator and one of Conley’s supporters, recently spoke at a local synagogue where she said “Israel is really trying hard to build peace,” according to a report in the Croton Chronicle. Ulaj seems to think Israel is unjustly portrayed in the media, saying that Americans were “only getting one side of the story.” That statement was made at the same time that Israel was assassinating Iranian leaders and bombing the nation’s infrastructure, not to mention renewing its assault on Lebanon and continuing its wave of terror on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But Ulaj—who went on that paid-for junket to Israel last year—has a closed mind regarding Israel, according to constituents who’ve tried to offer her an alternative point of view.
Nor does the Democratic party leadership appear to have learned from the 2024 election when Kamala Harris’s refusal to deviate from the Biden policy on Gaza was a factor in her loss to Trump, according to a study commissioned by the Democratic National Committee—the same group putting up Conley as their best hope for retaking NY17. (The report still has not been released to the public.)
During that disastrous campaign, the Democratic leadership placed its bets on swaying moderate Republicans and sought a Harris endorsement from former Bush vice president Dick Cheney, the architect of the disastrous Iraq War. Democrats even sent his daughter, Republican Liz Cheney, to stump with Harris in Michigan, a state with a huge Arab population that was so disgusted with the Biden administration’s actions in Gaza that it ended up helping Trump carry the state.
With the party’s backing, it’s no surprise that Conley was in first place in the polls as of the end of February, although Rockland County legislator Beth Davidson came in a close second. The two garnered 18 percent and 17 percent respectively.
With the undecided voters at 41 percent of those polled, the race is still wide open. The former mayor of Briarcliff Mayor in Westchester County, tech executive Peter Chatzky, had 12 percent after pouring $5 million of his own money into his campaign, while Phillips-Staley came in fourth, with 5 percent.
Chatzky’s popularity took a hit when bawdy, sexist Facebook posts of his were reported in a March New York Times article, leading Phillips-Staley to call for him to exit the race. Westchester resident Mike Sacks, the divorced father of two who recently went on Tinder looking for voters, garnered 2 percent.
Davidson, Chatzky and Sacks—all of whom are Jewish—have sought to distance themselves, albeit marginally, from the current government of Israel. Davidson, for example, said Israel should not get a “blank check” for military aid to Israel at a January forum held in the district.
Conley was the only candidate to say she opposed “withholding military assistance” to Israel because she said it would result in “more deaths on the ground.” Apparently Conley is unaware that most of the “deaths on the ground” are caused by American weapons used by Israel.
The party favorite has taken some flak after reports surfaced showing that she has ties to Palantir, Peter Thiel’s tech firm that reportedly has worked with both ICE and Israel. And a Judge Street Journal article stating that her campaign had called Davidson a “far left political operative” because Emily’s List and the state’s largest nurses union support her also created a fuss.
Meanwhile, Phillips-Staley says she supports legislation to block the Trump administration from delivering major US weapons to Israel—bombs, tank rounds, and artillery shells—that has the support of a growing number of progressives in Congress.
“I’ve always worked around social justice,” she says. “And if we don’t use our nation and its immense power for things that enable people to live their best lives, what are we doing?” It’s a question more people are asking these days.
Michelle Celarier is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New York Post, and Fortune, among other publications. A resident of Croton-on-Hudson, NY, Celarier has worked for decades as a writer and editor covering the world of finance in the U.S., Europe and Russia. Check out her new Substack newsletter, “Michelle Celarier on the Billionaire Class.”
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