Josh Riley is the Democratic incumbent representing New York's 19th Congressional District, covering the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region. He won the seat in 2024, narrowly defeating Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro after losing to Molinaro in the same district two years earlier, and ran unopposed in the 2026 Democratic primary.

A fifth-generation Upstate New Yorker, Riley was born and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Endicott, where his family worked for generations at the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Corporation and IBM before those jobs moved overseas. A graduate of Union-Endicott High School, he earned a bachelor's degree from the College of William & Mary in 2003 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2007, where then-Dean Elena Kagan presented him the Dean's Award for Community Leadership. He began his career as a policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Labor, later clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and represented low-income children in a landmark civil rights case to expand healthcare access.

Riley went on to serve as general counsel to Senator Al Franken on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he worked on bipartisan legislation to protect survivors of domestic violence and combat the opioid epidemic. As an attorney in private practice, he championed an effort in federal court to ratify the federal Equal Rights Amendment, helped veterans cut through red tape to access earned benefits, and filed Supreme Court briefs on immigration and domestic-violence protections. He lives in Ithaca with his wife, Monica, and their two sons, and has pledged never to take corporate PAC money in Congress.