{"id":16497,"date":"2025-12-10T19:02:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T19:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/bellwether-suburban-countys-red-shift-is-now-at-the-center-of-both-parties-future-identities-in-new-york\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T19:02:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T19:02:20","slug":"bellwether-suburban-countys-red-shift-is-now-at-the-center-of-both-parties-future-identities-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/bellwether-suburban-countys-red-shift-is-now-at-the-center-of-both-parties-future-identities-in-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"Bellwether suburban county\u2019s red shift is now at the center of both parties\u2019 future identities in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

ALBANY, New York \u2014 The statewide blue wave<\/u><\/a> in which New York Democrats made big gains in nearly every corner of the state this November had one glaring exception: Nassau County.<\/p>\n

While Empire State Democrats scored one of their best election nights on record, Republicans held down America\u2019s archetypal suburb, with GOP candidates notching an 11-0 record in contested executive branch races in Nassau. In the marquee race, County Executive Bruce Blakeman improved on his 2021 performance after four years of wholeheartedly embracing President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Blakeman is hoping to ride that success into next year: He launched a 2026 gubernatorial bid<\/u><\/a> Tuesday touting his electability.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile Democrats made gains nationwide on election night, the Republican party shined bright on Long Island,\u201d the narrator of his launch video<\/u><\/a> said. \u201cNassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman won a Democrat County by 12 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether Blakeman\u2019s GOP primary opponent Rep. Elise Stefanik can replicate those numbers will be a key question facing Republican voters next June. Blakeman told Blue Light News his recent win came down to holding fast to pocketbook issues, hiring more cops and connecting with groups Republicans have ignored in the past. Others say his decisive victory might simply stem from a strong local party organization.<\/p>\n

Whatever the secret of his success, the importance of Nassau extends far beyond next year\u2019s gubernatorial race. It will also be crucial to determining control of the House. <\/p>\n

And it is not just Republicans whose future stands to be shaped by Nassau\u2019s political trends. Democrats have spent years bickering over whether party members in the county have focused too much on distancing themselves from the far left. Moderate Nassau Democrats say progressives like New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have made their jobs tougher.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the television commercials that they put up were all about \u2018Mamdani, Mamdani, democratic socialists,\u2019\u201d Nassau Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs said. \u201cTheir tagline was, in effect, \u2018Vote Republican and save Nassau County from becoming a socialist county.\u2019 That plays well with a moderate audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democratic struggles in Nassau County have become a regular through line, revisited with each election cycle. While it was at the heart of the national blue wave in 2017 and 2018, the GOP won big there in 2021 local races. Four years after a 16-point Democratic win in Nassau in the 2018 gubernatorial election, the party suffered an 11-point loss in 2022. Then in 2024, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Nassau County since 1988.<\/p>\n

How that pattern plays out next year remains an open question.<\/p>\n

Rep. Laura Gillen, a Democrat in a battleground Nassau swing district, \u201cis the number one target in the country for Republicans,\u201d said Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. \u201cThey really think they can win in that district and they\u2019re going to put an unlimited amount of money in.\u201d<\/p>\n

An effective GOP candidate at the top of the ticket would help considerably toward that end.<\/p>\n

Stefanik\u2019s team disputed the idea that Blakeman has a magic formula for electoral success, pointing to his unsuccessful bids for state comptroller<\/u><\/a>, New York City mayor<\/u><\/a> and U.S. Senate<\/u><\/a>. He last ran for higher office when he lost a congressional bid in 2014 \u2014 the same year Stefanik flipped a House seat with a 21-point victory.<\/p>\n

Yet Blakeman believes he has a solid case to make.<\/p>\n

He attributed his success this election cycle to holding true to past promises to not raise taxes and hire more police officers, while also building connections to groups Republicans haven\u2019t focused on in the past. He rattled off a long list of outreach efforts undertaken by the county in recent years, such as a Feliz Navidad celebration and a Lunar New Year festival.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also reached out to the Muslim community and talked to them about things that were important to them,\u201d Blakeman said. \u201cI appointed the first Muslim police chaplain in Nassau County history, and shortly I will be appointing the first Sikh police chaplain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump, who has become politically toxic in many New York suburbs, will undoubtedly be a factor in next year\u2019s race. On Monday, he described both Blakeman and Stefanik as \u201cgreat,\u201d and while he has not yet expressed a preference for either, that could change. And arguably no local official in the northeast has done more to associate themselves with Trumpism than Blakeman.<\/p>\n

Under his leadership, Nassau County spent more than $1 million<\/u><\/a> on police overtime hosting Trump for a campaign rally last fall. Blakeman has been New York\u2019s most visible opponent<\/u><\/a> of letting transgender girls participate in female sports and has had the county partner<\/u><\/a> with ICE on immigration enforcement efforts. In late November, he announced a wall of surveillance<\/u><\/a> on the Queens border to conduct facial recognition on visitors from Mamdani\u2019s New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never ran away from President Trump,\u201d Blakeman told Blue Light News. \u201cI supported President Trump, and I was very vocal about my support for President Trump\u201d<\/p>\n

The approach is a far cry from how Nassau County Democrats have handled Mamdani.<\/p>\n

Jacobs, who also serves as chair of the state Democratic Party, famously distanced himself from the mayor-elect in the fall, declining to offer an endorsement after Mamdani became the Democratic nominee. And he\u2019s hardly the only local Democrat who falls into that category: \u201cMamdani\u2019s reckless agenda filled with unachievable promises and contempt for certain groups threatens NY\u2019s economy and safety,\u201dGillen said<\/u><\/a> this fall.<\/p>\n

Democrats based in New York City contend this is exactly what their counterparts on Long Island should not be doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the leading Democrats in the county are telling everyone that the Democratic Party sucks, it\u2019s hard to convince voters to vote for your party,\u201d said state Sen. Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris, who heads the Senate Democrats\u2019 campaign arm. \u201cThey should start looking inside themselves and start trying to make a positive case for Democrats, or I think they can expect this to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike in Nassau, Long Island\u2019s neighboring Suffolk County showed significant signs of the pendulum swinging back to the left this November. Democrats grew their share of the vote by 10 or more points in four of the five top town races, and they flipped seats in places like Shelter Island and Riverhead.<\/p>\n

Democrats haven\u2019t been completely without hopeful signs in Nassau either.<\/p>\n

They won a victory last month in a newly-drawn county legislative district, denying Blakeman\u2019s allies a supermajority and giving them the ability to put their foot in the door during budget talks. In 2024, Tom Suozzi broke the Republicans\u2019 hold on four congressional seats by winning a special election. Gillen won another seat later that year, thanks to a two-point victory in a district that favored Democrats by 11 points as recently as 2020.<\/p>\n

But even the good Democratic vibes in the 2024 congressional races underscored a long-standing issue in the county \u2014 winning back the seat in Suozzi\u2019s special election would not have been necessary if local Democrats had done opposition research into the now-disgraced former Rep. George Santos before the 2022 election.<\/p>\n

The failure to do so illustrates another reality in the area. After decades of controlling Nassau, Republicans built a well-oiled machine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe relative strength of the organizations \u2014 it\u2019s just not even close,\u201d said Levy, who likened the GOP\u2019s political operation to that of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. \u201cAt a time when all over the country, political organizations are shrinking in influence for a variety of reasons, Nassau still has an old-fashioned Daley machine-like operation that can get a vote out in ways that the Democrats can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Democrats didn\u2019t do much to end that structural disadvantage when they won power in 2017.<\/p>\n

\u201cArguably the Democrats could have, should have done more to leverage the patronage opportunities to raise money and create more foot soldiers to work politically,\u201d Levy said. But any steps they made in that direction were halted when the political winds started to shift: \u201cAnything that happened before the pandemic almost doesn\u2019t count.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacobs, who said his party was outspent by a more than four-to-one margin in the county executive\u2019s race, didn\u2019t disagree with the characterization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey raised and spent $15 million. That\u2019s an extraordinary amount of money,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was supplemented by both county mailings and town mailings that, in my judgement and other peoples\u2019 judgement, were campaign-like pieces paid for by the taxpayer.\u201d<\/p>\n

That onslaught of ads built off years of tying local Democrats to policies like bail reform or high-density housing or candidates like Mamdani, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Kathy Hochul. The Democratic brand \u201cis really doing poorly\u201d in the area, Jacobs said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople \u2014 even at the doors when you\u2019re collecting petitions, even when they\u2019re Democrats \u2014 are upset with our party,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s been driven by a really well-funded consistent campaign by Republicans to set the narrative that all Democrats are either wild extremists themselves or so afraid of them that they bend to whatever the far left in our party wants. Neither of which is true, but too many people believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nassau Republicans, meanwhile, aren\u2019t shying away from a president whom the opposition characterizes as an extremist.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a county with 110,000 more Democrats, to win by 35,000 votes is something that is very special,\u201d Blakeman said. \u201cYou have to be true to your values, and not a phony.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALBANY, New York \u2014 The statewide blue wave in which New York Democrats made big gains in nearly every corner of the state this November had one glaring exception: Nassau County. While Empire State Democrats scored one of their best election nights on record, Republicans held down America\u2019s archetypal suburb, with GOP candidates notching an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}