On April 15, 2025, more than a hundred people packed the United Steelworkers Local 1000 hall in downtown Corning, New York. At the front of the room they set out a chair for their congressman.

He didn't come. He never answered the invitation.

Nick Langworthy has not held a single in-person town hall since he took office in 2023. Three years. NY-23 covers Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Chemung and Tioga counties plus parts of Erie, Niagara, Schuyler and Steuben — nine counties, and not one public meeting where a constituent can stand up and ask him something to his face.

The empty chair

The organizer, Dora Leland of the grassroots group Citizens for a Better Southern Tier, described what happened when they asked him to come:

"We told him we had many, many constituents that would really appreciate having a meet and greet with him, especially since half of his telephone town halls get canceled last minute. And we got absolutely no response."

People at the microphone asked about Social Security, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, and the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador. One attendee, Jim Ferdell, asked the empty chair directly: "Congressman, what are you going to do about POTUS defying a Supreme Court order?"

Langworthy's response, sent to WSKG, was to say the whole thing was fake:

"I will not participate in this nationally driven leftwing charade of fake town hall meetings being called together under mysterious, new organizations that all fall under the umbrella of the Indivisible network - a George Soros funded movement."

Two problems with that.

First, WSKG checked. Citizens for a Better Southern Tier says it is not part of the Indivisible Project and gets no money from it — it describes itself as "an independent organization with no formal affiliations with other groups."

Second, the group is not new and not mysterious. It was founded in 2017 by constituents of Tom Reed — the Republican who held the seat before him — because they couldn't get him to listen either. Leland's account of the origin: "We had a lot of frustration going to [Reed's] office, getting him to listen. Particularly, he was voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act."

Langworthy's defense was that he does monthly telephone town halls, dialing out to 100,000 numbers. That's real, and it isn't nothing. But a call you control — where staff screen which questions get through, and which, per Leland, gets canceled at the last minute half the time — is not the same as a room where anyone can stand up.

Then the press

Here is the part that makes this more than a fight with activists.

On February 20, 2026, WRFA-LP, the community radio station in Jamestown, published a piece with a headline that is itself the story: "Rep. Nick Langworthy Repeatedly Fails To Inform WRFA About News Conferences Being Held In Chautauqua County."

Their account, in their words:

"The 23rd Congressional District representative has held several press events in Chautauqua County in the last year, the last one most recently this past Wednesday in Ellicott, but has failed at every opportunity to notify WRFA so that we may report on the events and ask questions of our elected official in Washington."

The station says it wrote to both his Washington and Jamestown offices, and spoke to his staff in person. It says no staff member ever explained why the invitations stopped, or offered to fix it.

WRFA also notes two other things. His Jamestown office is closed — the station says it was shut over alleged threats. And his two Republican predecessors, Tom Reed and Joe Sempolinski, both held regular group media calls with district reporters. Local outlets asked Langworthy to keep that up. He declined.

The station's closing ask is not partisan. It is:

"We ask that Congressman Nick Langworthy stop leaving local press off contact lists and be accountable to his constituency by making himself available in person to answer the many questions we all have."

That's a low-power community station in a small city asking to be told when its own congressman is holding a news conference a few miles away.

What he isn't being asked about

A member who never takes an unscreened question never has to explain anything on the record. And Langworthy has a lot on the record worth explaining in NY-23.

• The nonpartisan Joint Economic Committee estimates the health cuts in Trump's budget bill will cost 30,817 people in his district their coverage — 28,317 losing Medicaid, 2,500 losing Affordable Care Act plans.
• 44,269 households in NY-23 — about 13% of every household in the district — rely on SNAP for groceries.
• He joined the congressional DOGE Caucus and told a Jamestown audience in February 2025 that DOGE's cuts were only "scratching the surface" of government waste, calling the federal government "too big, too fat, out of shape."
• On the House Rules Committee, he voted twice to keep the Epstein files bill from reaching the floor before voting yes once passage was assured.

Every one of those is a question somebody in Corning or Olean or Jamestown would ask. None of them get asked at a telephone town hall he controls.

The man in the empty-seat crowd is now on the ballot

There's a coda to the Corning meeting.

That night, a Cattaraugus County resident stood up and told the room he was thinking about running. "I'm Aaron Gies. I drove over from Olean and I'm exploring a run against Nick Langworthy." He's a professor of theology and Franciscan studies at St. Bonaventure University, and he'd never run for anything.

On June 23, 2026, Gies won the Democratic nomination in NY-23 with 71.6% of the primary vote. He faces Langworthy in November.

Langworthy skipped the room. The room produced his opponent.

We deserve better.

Source

Natalie Abruzzo, "Frustrated constituents hold 'empty seat' town hall, wanting to hear from Rep. Langworthy," WSKG, April 18, 2025. Photo: Natalie Abruzzo / WSKG News.