Why Republicans Won in a New York County Where Democrats Outnumber Them

It wasn’t Nassau County’s high taxes or recent changes to New York’s bail laws that led Lizette Sonsini, a former Democrat, to vote Republican this year.

Their reasons were wider.

“I don’t like the president and the Democrats are spending too much money on things like infrastructure when we really need politicians to bring more money back to this country,” said Ms. Sonsini, 56, of Great Neck.

“When the Democrats see us vote in these local elections,” she said, “they may see that we are not happy with how things have gone.”

Democrats across the country saw a violent backlash on election day as the party suffered heavy losses in Virginia and many suburban communities such as Nassau County, where Democratic leaders were ousted by Republicans – despite the number of registered Democrats around 100,000 was superior.

Democratic district leader Laura Curran followed her Republican opponent Bruce Blakeman by more than four percentage points; Mr Blakeman declared victory, but Mrs Curran did not give in.

The race for the prosecution, which has been occupied by a Democrat since 2006, was won by Republican Anne Donnelly, a 32-year-old prosecutor with little previous political experience. She achieved a 20-point victory over Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic senator and former federal attorney. And the race to replace the outgoing Democratic auditor went to a Republican, Elaine Phillips.

Off-year elections are often difficult for the incumbent president’s party, but the results contradicted the candidates’ expectations and reinforced arguments that President Biden’s unpopularity and the grueling Democratic struggles undermine its viability in the suburbs.

“It’s almost like being temporarily stepped back to the 1960s and 1970s,” said Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, referring to a time when Republicans ruled Nassau County . “The real question is how long will that take?”

Four years ago, Nassau County’s Democratic voters viewed the 2017 election as an early referendum on President Donald J. Trump. They staged postcard-writing campaigns and held fundraisers in the living room, and an energetic electorate urged Ms. Curran to become only the third Democrat in 80 years as a Nassau district chief.

This year the roles were reversed: the county has more than one million registered voters; 264,000 showed up and they overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, apparently ousting Ms. Curran after one term.

“There has been a wave, no doubt about it, even for an uncompromising business-friendly public safety Democrat,” Curran said in an interview with reference to himself.

Speaking to more than a dozen Nassau County voters this week, they cited their general disapproval of the president, dislike of vaccine mandates, and fears that funds would be diverted from the police to vote Republicans. Concerns about Mr. Biden’s dealings with Israel also came up on several occasions.

Among the Republican voters was Audrey Alleva, a 64-year-old Garden City resident with family in the military, who cited the president’s performance as a factor in her decision.

“I don’t like the way President Biden has dealt with the country leaving Afghanistan,” said Ms. Alleva.

Sam Liviem, a 70-year-old Great Neck resident, cited other recent Democratic advances as reasons to cast his vote for Republicans.

“When liberals try to invalidate the police, when they try to destroy statues of people from the past, when they want to erase history, you are returning to the law of the jungle,” said Liviem.

Nassau County was recently named the safest county in the United States by US News and World Report. But the Nassau Republican Party took advantage of crime fears to drive voters to the polls, particularly in the case of Mr Kaminsky, who supported changes to state bail laws blaming Republicans for the recent spike in gunfights in the county that happened during the course across the country have increased the pandemic.

In 2019, New York State cut bail on many non-violent defendants who otherwise might have been on custody for failure to pay. However, law enforcement officials argued that the law was too broad, criticizing the fact that it did not give judges greater discretion in detaining defendants who they perceived to be a threat to public safety.

Mr. Kaminsky supported the original bail reform law. And in a 2019 Senate trial video widely circulated by the Donnelly campaign, Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris expressly thanks four senators, including Mr. Kaminsky, for their support. This vote followed Mr Kaminsky during his election campaign.

Though Mr Kaminsky widely spent Ms. Donnelly on advertising trying to portray him as a badass former prosecutor – her campaign spent more than $ 800,000 on television and online advertising, according to the state election committee, while he spent about 1.3 Million dollars from mid-October – the Donnelly campaign message got stuck.

In an ad, the Donnelly campaign recruited the mother of a Syracuse shooting victim. “Senator Todd Kaminsky helped write the law that would free my daughter’s killer,” said mother Jennifer Payne, who also appeared in an ad in 2020 for Rep. John Katko, a Republican from downtown New York.

In another Donnelly commercial, ominous music and the mustached face greeted viewers of John Wighaus, president of the Nassau County Detectives Association, who blamed Mr. Kaminsky for the release of “murderers, rapists and violent thugs.”

“I think everyone was talking about crime, I think everyone was talking about bail reform,” Ms. Donnelly said in an interview. She noted that Nassau had concerns about New York City crime that supported Eric Adams’ election as mayor.

“It’s a regional problem,” said Ms. Donnelly. “It’s a national issue.”

Ms. Donnelly will become the district’s first Republican prosecutor originally elected a Republican since William Cahn in the 1960s, said Joseph Cairo, the district’s Republican chairman. (Denis Dillon, who served as Nassau County’s district attorney for three decades, was elected a Democrat before joining the Republican Party in the 1980s.)

Ms. Curran argued that fear of criminal law issues seeped into her race as well.

“This bail reform issue was very motivating for voters,” said Curran, who attempted to distance herself from bail legislation by appearing on Fox and Friends to denounce the new law as a violation.

When state and national political issues sparked the debate in Nassau County, local issues also proved effective.

Findings from the 2021 elections

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The democratic panic is increasing. Less than a year after taking power in Washington, the party faces a bleak immediate future as it struggles to motivate voters and continues to lose news wars to Republicans.

Ms. Curran’s opponent, Mr. Blakeman, focused his campaign almost entirely on county taxes, even including “Nassau tax cuts” in the URL of his campaign website.

Her predecessor had frozen asset assessments for tax purposes for eight years before Ms. Curran was promoted to district executive in 2018. After taking office, Ms. Curran initiated a process to revise a tax system that she described as “corrupt”. But after the reassessment, 65 percent of Nassau County’s homeowners saw higher taxes, according to a report in Newsday, and Ms. Curran’s opponents grabbed anger at those tax increases.

“We’ve got some terrible news in the mail: It’s your school tax bill,” Mr. Blakeman said in an ad. “Laura Curran’s reassessment resulted in property taxes skyrocketing two years in a row. Curran’s tax hikes will take another three years unless we stop them. “

“A lot of people have raised their school tax bills by thousands and thousands of dollars, and I think that was a big problem,” Blakeman said in an interview.

Even in the Democratic bastion of North Hempstead, which has seen an influx of more politically conservative Iranian Jews in recent years, Republican candidate for a seat in the county legislature, Mazi Melesa Pilip, led Democratic incumbent Ellen Birnbaum with more than 15 points. The North Hempstead City Warden could also soon be Republican.

That said, the Democrats continued to flee the idea that they were part of something bigger than themselves, a Republican flood of unusually far-reaching proportions.

“What happened in Nassau County happened in many places – Suffolk County, Upstate New York, Virginia, New Jersey,” said Jay Jacobs, chairman of Nassau County and State Democrats. “What happened was that Republican voters were dramatically outperforming and Democratic voters were underperforming.”

But Jovanni Ortiz, the founder of the South Shore Democrats, blamed Mr. Jacobs just as much.

Mr. Ortiz argued that Mr. Jacobs failed to mobilize voters – especially in the colored parishes of Nassau County, in part by failing to vote on Democratic ballot issues that would have made it easier for New Yorkers to vote would have. He has asked Mr. Jacobs to resign.

“He relates it to national issues and I agree that this is part of the reason for some of the results,” said Mr Ortiz. “But not realizing for him that part of it is on top of him is a little crazy.”

Chantee Lans contributed to the coverage.