When New York Democrats recently emerged from the scrum of redistricting with a map that largely did not tilt in their favor, there was one spot of consolation: a Republican-held district in Central New York that was redrawn broadly to the Democrats’ benefit.
The first-term incumbent there, Representative Brandon Williams, was already facing a dogfight: He had prevailed in 2022 by fewer than 3,000 votes.
But Mr. Williams has now become a distinct underdog in his new district, one that President Biden would have won by 11 points in 2020.
Mr. Williams, a conservative Republican who has praised former President Trump and celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is the only House Republican whose race is listed as “lean Democrat” by the Cook Political Report.
As Election Day draws closer, the increasingly personal race between Mr. Williams and his Democratic challenger, State Senator John Mannion, in New York’s 22nd Congressional District remains critical for both parties, with the balance of the Republican-led House in play.
Mr. Williams has received help from the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which the ad tracking firm Ad Impact says plan to spend more than $3 million on ads painting the moderate Mr. Mannion as dangerously liberal on issues like immigration and crime (one of them features John Walsh, the creator of “America’s Most Wanted”).
But party operatives on both sides of the aisle view the race as the Democrats’ to lose. Indeed, one Democratic PAC called the 314 Action Fund just withdrew roughly $250,000 in planned ad spending, Syracuse.com reported, in light of internal polling showing that Mr. Mannion had a generous lead.
Enthusiasm among Democrats was high Friday morning in Utica, when the House minority whip, Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, joined Mr. Mannion on the campaign trail.
“This is how we win. This is how we reclaim our country!” Ms. Clark told a roomful of party loyalists gathered to cheer Mr. Mannion, whose State Senate district partly overlaps with the congressional district he is running to represent.
Mr. Williams, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has struggled to distinguish himself in his first term, serving against the backdrop of a Republican majority marked by infighting and dysfunction.
And while he has lived in the region for over a decade, at one point operating a truffle farm near Skaneateles with his wife, Mr. Williams has nonetheless been dogged by the perception that he is an outsider without ties to the district — a perception that is exacerbated by the fact that a majority of his donations come from out of state.
But the Democrats’ greatest advantage this year by far is the district itself.
In 2022, when Republicans harnessed voters’ concerns about crime and inflation to flip seats across the state, Mr. Williams won his seat by less than one percentage point. That was under the former lines, when the district reached north to contain all of rural Oneida County, including the Republican-leaning city of Rome, N.Y.
After the redistricting process, Rome became part of Representative Elise Stefanik’s sprawling North Country district, and was replaced with part of the eastern Finger Lakes region.
The newly drawn district — which still includes Syracuse and Utica — presents a challenge for any Republican, let alone a firebrand like Mr. Williams, who once derided bipartisanship as “politics as usual.”
Mr. Mannion has accused his opponent of being a “MAGA extremist” in ads that claim that Mr. Williams will help pass a national abortion ban without any exceptions. (Mr. Williams has pledged not to support a national ban, though it is not clear if he would support further restrictions to abortion access. During a debate on Tuesday, Mr. Williams implied that he believes abortion should be available only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.)
But by far the most biting ads are the ones involving accusations of workplace harassment.
Both candidates have been accused of improper behavior with staff — Mr. Mannion in an anonymous letter accusing him of berating employees and Mr. Williams in a video that captured him threatening to “end” his campaign manager over accusations of blackmail. And while the details of the situations varied significantly, some observers wondered whether the ugliness of both matters might keep them buried during the campaign.
The answer was no.
The first blow was struck by a Republican super PAC, which resurfaced the accusations against Mr. Mannion that first arose during the Democratic primary, running ads that called him an “Albany abuser.” The State Senate investigated and dismissed the allegations without taking any enforcement action against Mr. Mannion.
Mr. Mannion soon struck back. “It’s Brandon Williams who abused his employees,” a recent attack ad says, before playing a clip of Mr. Williams screaming at a former aide at a holiday party.
The ad concludes: “John Mannion is a good man.”
Mr. Mannion, a former high school biology teacher who has earned the backing of numerous local labor groups, said the attacks cut to the heart of not only his campaign but the reputation he has built over nearly 30 years as an educator and two terms in the State Legislature.
The attacks by his opponent are “a way to deflect away from the issues, and his record, and his lack of presence in the district,” Mr. Mannion concluded. “He really has nothing else.”
For nearly a decade, the region was represented by Representative John Katko, a moderate Republican who voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump for his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021. When Mr. Katko retired, party leaders backed Steve Wells, a local Republican official who refused to say whether he would endorse Mr. Trump in a hypothetical 2024 race.
That opened the door for Mr. Williams, a vocal supporter of the former president, to clinch the support of the party faithful. He further stamped himself as a conservative through his opposition to abortion and to corporate welfare, singling out the deal New York State gave Micron to build computer chips just outside Syracuse.
Since being elected, Mr. Williams has moderated many of these positions: He has come to embrace the Micron deal, describing himself as a “strong champion of the project.”
In this campaign, Mr. Williams has sought to reintroduce himself as a traditional conservative, focusing on issues like government spending, support for law enforcement and energy policy.
“The approach that I’ve taken since being in Congress is really a common-sense approach,” Mr. Williams said in his first debate, highlighting his support of the bipartisan Social Security Fairness Act.
This attempted reinvention has done little for voters like Bill Perrotti, however, who lives with his wife in Clinton, N.Y., a village about nine miles west of Utica, and counts the climate among his top issues.
Where most of the attendees at Mr. Mannion’s breakfast event in Utica on Friday were energized by the rhetoric on the importance of preserving abortion rights and democracy itself, Mr. Perrotti was unmoved — even anxious.
The Democrats’ messaging clearly resonated with women and other Democrats, he said, but he wasn’t yet sure how it would do with independent voters.
All of the Democratic signs in his village were stolen last week, he said, something he regarded as an bad omen for Democrats and a signal that Mr. Mannion’s victory was less than assured.
“It’s at best a purple area,” he said.
