WSKG reporters are interviewing candidates in some of the biggest local races heading into the November election.
This week, we look at the candidates running for New York’s 23rd Congressional District. The district is made up of eight counties in the Southern Tier including Tioga, Chemung, Schuyler and Steuben counties.
First-term Republican Rep. Nick Langworthy is running for reelection. His Democratic challenger is retired businessman, Tom Carle.
Multiple requests by WSKG to Langworthy’s campaign for a profile interview went unanswered. Here is a look at Langworthy's past and where he stands on some of the biggest issues facing voters in this election. We aired a profile on Carle Wednesday.
Nick Langworthy was born and raised in western New York and now lives with his wife and two children in Niagara County, according to his campaign and congressional websites.
Langworthy is finishing his first term as the representative of the 23rd Congressional District. He was elected in 2022 after former Republican Congressman Tom Reed resigned amid an ethics probe for allegations of sexual misconduct.
Former Reed staffer Joseph Sempolinski was elected to the congressional seat in a special election in August of 2022, while Langworthy prepared for the general election that fall.
The congressional seat is the first elected office Langworthy has sought and won. However, he is no stranger to politics. Since college, he has worked on congressional campaigns in western New York for former representatives Thomas Reynolds and Christopher Lee. Langworthy chaired the Erie County Republican Committee twice, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The last position he held before his congressional seat was as the chairman of the New York State Republican Committee. He was supported by former President Donald Trump.
Several top aides in the former Trump administration helped coordinate the effort to move Langworthy into that position, according to reporting by The New York Times.
Langworthy has been a staunch supporter of the former president and served on the 2016 presidential transition team.
Langworthy spoke in 2020 at the Republican National Convention during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our president embodies what it means to be New York tough," Langworthy said. "And when New York was facing some of its darkest hours a few months ago, our president stepped up and delivered for the people of the state of New York.“
In the first year of data collection of the SARS CoV-2 coronavirus, nearly 400,000 deaths in the U.S. and 40,000 deaths in New York were due to COVID-19 as a contributing or underlying cause according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the COVID Data Tracking Project.
On abortion
When it comes to the big issues in this year’s election, Langworthy said abortion is a state's rights issue and that New York’s law is too broad, during a debate hosted by WETM in Elmira earlier this month.
“I'm pro life, and I'm proud of that fact,” he said. “But Roe was bad law, and now it is at the state level, and you're seeing states go in many different directions on what standard they set for the time of birth. In New York, it's anything goes.“
Abortion has been legal in New York since 1970. New York’s Reproductive Health Act of 2019 made the right to abortion part of state law.
This year, a ballot measure in New York called Proposal Number One or the Equal Rights Amendment, would ban discrimination and expand protections not just on the basis of age or gender, but also reproductive health care.
In an email from the campaign, Langworthy wrote, "Prop 1 opens the door to policies that threaten parental rights, religious freedoms, and the integrity of women’s sports. This measure would undermine Title IX protections for female athletes and even allow non-citizens to vote in our elections. New Yorkers need to know: this is a Trojan Horse for an extreme agenda that would erode our freedoms and foundational rights."
There is no language in the bill that would allow non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections.
In Langworthy's first month in office, he voted for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. The bill would have required health care providers attempt to save the life of any infant born alive after an attempted abortion or face prison time.
The bill passed the House, where Republicans have the majority, but it went nowhere in the Democratic-held Senate. Infanticide is already illegal in every state in the country.
Abortions after 21 weeks make up approximately one percent of abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On energy
Langworthy voted for the expansion of energy production in 2023 with the Lower Energy Costs Act, a bill he co-sponsored. The bill would have expanded oil and gas drilling including hydraulic fracking on state and private land. During the October debate, Langworthy said there are great American energy resources that are not being used.
“Whether it's our oil reserves or the natural gas, like we have right in the Southern Tier, we have the Saudi Arabia of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale," he said. "Our state doesn't let us harness it because we've kowtowed to an extreme environmental left that has stopped that exploration.“
Langworthy’s bill passed the House but did not advance in the Senate.
New York banned natural gas capture through hydraulic fracturing in 2015, due to environmental concerns with water contamination. Earlier this year, the state Legislature passed a ban on an alternative fracking method called carbon capture using liquified carbon dioxide. It is awaiting the governor’s signature.
On immigration
The topic of immigration also came up during the October debate. Langworthy said that the Biden-Harris administration has willfully weakened the Southern border.
“We have a raging inferno at our Southern borders,” he said. “We need to finish the wall. We need to stop, catch and release. We need to reinstitute ‘Remain in Mexico’ and get serious about the Southern border.”
The policy referred to as “Remain in Mexico” is the Migrant Protection Protocols that was instituted during the former Trump administration. It was implemented to keep immigrants in Mexico while they are seeking asylum in the U.S. and waiting for their cases to be processed.
During the debate, Langworthy continued to express his dissatisfaction with current immigration policy.
“We should be at zero tolerance on illegal immigration. We need to seal the border, and then we can address immigration as a whole, legal immigration. But we're slapping those legal immigrants in the face every single day.”
Earlier this year, a bipartisan border security bill would have curtailed the influx of immigrants at the Southern border, cleared backlogs of asylum seekers and hired more Customs and Border Patrol agents. It was blocked by Republicans in the Senate after Trump came out against it.
Langworthy called that bill “absolute trash”.
Project 2025
As he finishes his second year in office, the conservative advocacy organization Heritage Action For America, which is under the umbrella of the Heritage Foundation, gives Langworthy a 70 percent score on his voting record. The average Republican scores 73 percent.
The Heritage Foundation is the architect of the right-wing policy agenda called Project 2025. Trump’s Agenda 47, a list of his policy priorities if he is reelected, parallels that policy playbook.
Project 2025 states its plans to put stricter abortion and immigration laws in place, abolish the U.S. Department of Education, and rollback climate protection policies, to name a few of the government eliminations outlined in its 900 pages.
Reporting by The New York Times shows nearly 200 people who worked with the former Trump administration contributed to the conservative policy document.
Langworthy said he was unfamiliar with Project 2025 during the debate.
“President Trump has denounced Project 2025," he said. "It is simply noise from the Democratic sound machine to try to distract you from the real issues, which is [that] they cannot live up to the record that they've laid out.“
Langworthy's campaign provided the following statement about Trump's Agenda 47 via email.
"Americans need President Trump back in the White House to restore the American Dream, secure our borders, drive down costs, and put our families first. With Trump’s leadership, we can make America safe, strong, and prosperous again."
Langworthy currently serves on the House Committee on Agriculture and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Early in-person voting in New York is happening now through Sunday. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5.