Josh Riley

Josh Riley is running to flip a seat in the 19th Congressional district.

Riley was born-and-raised in a working-class neighborhood in Endicott, New York. His family emigrated to the area to work in the local factories–making shoes and boots at the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Corporation and circuit boards at IBM.

Riley graduated with honors from the College of William & Mary and Harvard Law School, where he was presented the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership by then-dean Elena Kagan.

Early in his career, Riley was a Fellow on U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy’s Labor & Pensions Committee staff, where he worked on legislation to raise the minimum wage and fought back against big corporations that tried to weaken the Family & Medical Leave Act. Riley served as a staff assistant to former Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), as policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Labor, as clerk on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, and as general counsel to former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

Riley has a pro-democracy platform that includes protecting access to the ballot, ending gerrymandering, and stopping big money influence on elections. He supports common sense gun legislation, including stronger background checks and keeping weapons out of the hands of domestic abusers. He backs women’s right to make their own healthcare decisions.

In his first run for office in 2022, Riley lost against the current Republican incumbent by less than 5,000 votes. The district spans areas of the Catskills, Hudson Valley, Southern Tier, and Finger Lakes regions, and includes agricultural areas as well as Cornell University and the city of Binghamton. Biden carried NY-19 by 4 percentage points in 2020.