New York Democrats are defending the offices of county executive and district attorney this November in Nassau County, a populous region on Long Island where once-dominant local Republicans are hoping to score some high-profile wins ahead of next year’s midterms.
After a century of GOP pre-eminence, Nassau began consistently voting for Democrats at the top of the ticket starting in 1992, capped by a 54-45 victory for Joe Biden last year—the party's best performance in two decades. But the county remains a fertile battleground, and both parties remember well how Republicans won the executive post in a 2009 upset and decisively held it four years later.
It wasn't until 2017 that Democrats reclaimed the job, when Laura Curran prevailed in a close race, and now she’s up for another four-year term next month against Hempstead Councilman Bruce Blakeman, a longtime local Republican politico. The open-seat special election for district attorney, meanwhile, is a battle between Democratic state Sen. Todd Kaminsky and his Republican rival, prosecutor Anne Donnelly.
We’ll start with the latter contest, which looks to be the more competitive of the two. A special election became necessary after incumbent Madeline Singas resigned in June to join the state’s highest judicial body, the Court of Appeals; acting District Attorney Joyce Smith, whose ascension made her the first Black person to hold this post, is not competing in the race for the final two years of Singas’ term.
(In an unusual aside, regularly scheduled elections for the DA's office used to take place at the same time as those for county executive, but when Singas' predecessor, Democrat Kathleen Rice, was elected to Congress in 2014, that reset the schedule for prosecutorial races in the county. After getting elevated to the top job after Rice left, Singas won a special election in 2015 and then a regular election four years later.)
We’ve seen no public surveys so far, but state Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs recently told City & State’s Zach Williams that his internal polling shows Kaminsky only “slightly ahead” even as Curran leads by at least 10 points. Kaminsky did, however, hold a massive $1 million to $42,000 lead over Donnelly as of Sept. 27, but as Williams details, Republicans are hoping that Donnelly’s opposition to cash bail reform will help her overcome that deficit. Donnelly has made the issue the centerpiece of her campaign, which has included lies claiming the 2019 criminal justice reforms passed by Kaminsky and his colleagues in the legislature have resulted in the release of people accused of negligent homicide.
Nassau County has a low crime rate, and U.S. News & World Report even ranked it as the safest community in the country in both 2020 and 2021, but the GOP has a long history of successfully exploiting fears of increasing crime in suburban areas like this. Indeed, Nassau County Republican Party Chair Joseph Cairo touted Donnelly’s prospects by telling Williams, “The craziness of bail reform, it's right there. That's how she's gonna win.”
But while Kaminsky, a nephew of the legendary comedian Mel Brooks, voted for the 2019 bill, he hasn't positioned himself as a reformer and in fact joined a group of lawmakers who successfully worked to scale back some of the changes to bail policy last year. He’s also emphasized his time as a federal prosecutor and argued that he’d be harsher on “drug kingpins” and “gang leaders” than Donnelly.
Curran appears to be in stronger shape, though again, we're hampered by a lack of poll data. In late September, Newsday’s Dan Janison wrote, “Polling by both parties shows Curran, generally well-liked by voters, with a lead somewhere between large and enormous.” Curran also ended Sept. 27 with a wide $1.3 million to $552,000 cash-on-hand lead against Blakeman.
Just as in the DA race, local Republicans have tried to portray the Democrat as weak on crime. The county legislature, where the GOP enjoys an 11-8 majority thanks to a Republican gerrymander, passed a bill over the summer that would have listed first responders as a protected class under the local Human Rights Law, which would have allowed them to sue protestors and others for “discrimination.” Curran vetoed the legislation, arguing, “There is no consensus among elected officials and the public that this current legislation is necessary, carefully crafted and without negative consequences.”
Blakeman, meanwhile, earned unwanted headlines last week after City & State reported that, according to a 2017 memo, two of his staffers accused him of making them carry out personal tasks, including at odd hours and on weekends. One of those former aides also said that, after he refused, Blakeman retaliated by assigning him to janitorial services in a park. Reporter Jeff Coltin wrote that “it is not clear if the allegations were ever discussed publicly or whether Blakeman was ever reprimanded.” Blakeman’s camp responded to the story by dismissing the allegations as “part of some bad blood and not something that had merit.”