Former CNN political analyst John Avalon hopes his nice guy persona could flip a New York congressional seat.
New York Magazine writer Shawn McCreesh summed it up like this in a recent profile on Avalon:
He is running in the Democratic primary on June 25, positioning himself as the best hope to flip this district, currently held by a first-term Republican named Nick LaLota. Avlon’s (earnest) pitch is essentially this: After years of our politics being warped by polarization and showboat extremism, it’s time for a return to something like “the third way” of the 1990s, when President Clinton was successfully triangulating (Avlon volunteered for Clinton’s campaign) and the not yet so obviously nuts Mayor Giuliani was “cleaning up” New York (Avlon worked for him as a speechwriter).
Avlon, a Donald Trump critic, is married to Margaret Hoover, the host of PBS’s Firing Line, a fellow CNN commentator and a former Republican strategist and staff member of the George W. Bush Administration.
Avlon is a co-founder of the nonpartisan No Labels movement — which is under suspicion by anti-Trumpers as an political organization whose ultimate goal is to split the presidential vote to help Trump — has railed against the lunatic fringes of both major parties.
He was also the editor-in-chief and managing director of The Daily Beast from 2013 to 2018.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.
