NY-1 · House

The district, in brief

New York's 1st district is based on the eastern end and North Shore of Long Island, including the Hamptons, the North Fork, Riverhead, Port Jefferson, Smithtown and Shelter Island, all in Suffolk County, on the map first used in 2024. The text gives no presidential results; the facts record a 2024 presidential baseline on these lines of -10.2 points (two-party margin for the Democrat) and a two-party House margin of -10.43 for the Democrat in 2024.

The incumbent is Republican Nick LaLota, re-elected with 55.52% of the vote in 2024, who also runs on the Conservative Party line and is the only Republican the text lists. The Democratic nominee is Chris Gallant, an air traffic controller, who won the primary with 62.9% (12,492 votes) over Lukas Ventouras. John Avlon, the 2024 Democratic nominee, declined to run and endorsed Gallant, as did Pete Buttigieg, former assemblymembers Steve Englebright and Fred Thiele, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the Working Families Party. LaLota's listed endorsements are the American Federation of Government Employees and the Log Cabin Republicans. As of June 30, 2026 LaLota had raised $3,795,307 with $3,329,857 on hand; Gallant had raised $647,598 with $172,217 on hand.

Decision Desk HQ (July 14, 2026), the Cook Political Report (February 6, 2025), Inside Elections (March 7, 2025) and Sabato's Crystal Ball (September 18, 2025) each list the seat as R. One district poll is recorded: Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm (December 10–11, 2025, 579 voters), had LaLota 41%, Gallant 38%, undecided 20%.

A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.

The facts, each beside its sentence

Not in the source: The model's basis says no district polls, but the text carries one district poll (Public Policy Polling, December 2025) that the model does not use.; The text gives no presidential results for the district; only the facts' presidential baseline is available.; No ratings finer than 'R' are given (no Lean/Likely/Safe); Silver Bulletin is not listed.; A second endorsement block (Center for Freethought Equality PAC, Track AIPAC) has no attributed candidate in the text.; No Republican primary result is given; the text lists only LaLota.

Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as cfb3d3b04173; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.

Who holds the seat now

Nick LaLota (Republican), in this chamber since 2023, 2 terms. Committees: House Committee on Appropriations; House Committee on Homeland Security.

From the congress-legislators dataset (CC0), archived as ae8cb9477c48. For a Senate race this lists both of the state's senators; the one whose term ends in the election year holds the seat on the ballot. For a House district redrawn for 2026 it is the member elected under the old lines with this number, who may be running elsewhere; the dossier above names who is running here.

How it has voted for president

A shift of 0.3 points toward the Democrats from 2016 to 2024. county returns placed on the current lines by 2020 block population; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.

Who are the voters?

Of about 544,068 adults 25 and over. In 2020 the district voted 49.1% Democratic (two-party) for president. With the same preferences and a 2022-style midterm turnout, it would vote 49.9% Democratic: the midterm electorate alone moves the margin 1.6 points toward Democrats. Group shares are estimated from how results vary across the state's census tracts (ecological inference, anchored to Pew's 2020 validated-voter figures) and calibrated to this district's actual 2020 vote; turnout is the Census survey's state rate by race and national rate by education, whose state samples carry margins of several points.

Not answered here: how each group will vote in 2026. These are 2020 preferences; this profile is description, not yet an input to the forecast.

The money

FEC bulk candidate summaries through June 30, 2026; no independent expenditures reported for or against any candidate, which usually means nobody outside the district thinks it is in play.

The district in numbers

ACS 5-year 2023, the Census Bureau's own tabulation of this district (118th Congress lines). Unemployment is the BLS county series placed on the district by block population, not seasonally adjusted, so changes are same-month comparisons. Income, transfers and jobs are BEA county accounts placed the same way, compared with the average district. Every other figure is a named column of a named table in the Bureau's summary file, archived before it was read. This is what a reader knows about a district before looking at a poll; the model does not yet use it, and whether it should is a registered question.

Who is favoured, and by how much?

The 90% interval runs from -21.9 to +5.9 points, D-R. It is wide because this district has never been polled.

What is this built on?

A model trained on every contested House race 2012-2024 predicts this district's lean from its own record: presidential and House results on the current lines, incumbency, both candidates' prior offices, outside and party money before 1 October, demographics and public-assistance shares from the Census release before the election, local unemployment and income, and religious tradition. The national margin comes from presidential approval, the economy, the midterm penalty and the generic ballot corrected for its measured lean. Draws share national and state errors, so the seat total and this district come from the same simulation.

Not answered here: district polls, which are not yet folded in.

Why does the model say this?

Each figure is how far this district's predicted lean moves when that one feature is set to the typical value across 2026 districts, everything else held: PAC money balance: 1.3 pts toward the Republican; experience gap (-4 levels, D minus R): 1.0 pts toward the Republican; median hh income ($134,010): 0.9 pts toward the Republican; presidential trend 2020-24 (R+2.4): 0.8 pts toward the Democrat; asian share (5.4%): 0.6 pts toward the Democrat.

How sure is it, and of what?

Total sd 8.51 points, made of the seat's own volatility 88%, correlated polling error 12%. The decomposition is stored with the forecast rather than reconstructed, so a probability whose dominant input is a placeholder is visibly that.

Not answered here: a nowcast. 'If ballots were cast today' needs something that observes today, and for a House district nothing does. Publishing the election-day figure under both labels would make one forecast look like two.

How was this number made?

Run 6f211e6f-2bdc-4dda-8f72-81fc628dab0b, house_district_prior/0.2.0, as of 2026-10-02. Promoted by a pre-registered gate: on 2016-2022 its Brier score was 0.036 against 0.049 for the previous method, and on a single 2024 run 0.023 against 0.032 (experiments/district_gate_result.md, with an independent review).