Add The New York Post on Google Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg rallied with the Democratic candidate in New York’s key battleground district on Wednesday — with the pair painting the election as a referendum on President Trump.
Buttigieg was in Tarrytown, Westchester County, to help boost Democrat Cait Conley in her race against Republican Rep. Mike Lawler though neither Democrat mentioned former President Joe Biden by name.
“Our political system is broken, now it’s time to start acting like it isn’t,” Buttigieg, who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for President in 2020, told the crowd of roughly 500 people packed into the Tarrytown Music Hall.
The nearly hour-long rally focused on the goal of flipping the House of Representatives in November for the second half of Trump’s second term in office to break up a Republican monopoly on the federal government.
“I know a lot of people who believed the president when he said he was going to drain the swamp. How did that go?” the former bigwig consultant turned South Bend, Indiana mayor snarked to the crowd.
At one point, several attendees began chanting “lock ‘em up” in response to remarks about Trump and Republicans in a strange echo of a favorite chant at Trump rallies a decade ago calling for then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment.
Conley, a West Point graduate who worked for the Pentagon under Biden after serving six tours in the Middle East, framed November’s midterms as an existential fight against Trump.
“These are not normal times, these are not normal stakes,” Conley said.
She railed against Republicans’ efforts to claw back funding for New York’s expanded Medicaid eligibility threshold, tariffs, the Iran war and data centers.
“Corrupt politicians are selling us out to billionaires and corporations and special interests,” she said.
Lawler spokesperson Ciro Riccardi blasted Buttigieg for signing off on Hochul’s congestion pricing plan that imposed a toll on all drivers in midtown Manhattan, launched in the waning hours of the Biden administration.
“Pete Buttigieg is a failed Presidential candidate who forced the Transportation Department to sign off on New York City’s congestion pricing scheme,” Riccardi said.
“Cait Conley can explain to the firefighters, teachers, nurses, cops, EMTs, and union workers who drive into the city every day why she’s campaigning with the man who raised their taxes by thousands of dollars a year,” Lawler’s spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Post.
Buttigieg, a US Navy veteran, didn’t, however, miss the opportunity to tout some of Conley’s bona fides such as her cybersecurity expertise and their shared military service.
“As a Navy guy of course I’m honor-bound to acknowledge she joined the second-best branch,” he joked.
