Democratic Nassau County Legislator Laura Curran pulled off a tight 51-48 victory against Republican Jack Martins, a former New York state senator, to win the executive office this large Long Island county. The once dominant Nassau County Republican also suffered a shocking loss in the race to lead Hempstead, a town with a population of 760,000 that was once the center of the powerful GOP machine. Attorney Laura Gillen unseated Supervisor Anthony Santino 51-49 to become the first Democratic supervisor of Hempstead in more than a century. However, the Republicans maintained a narrow edge on the county legislature.
The GOP ran things here for decades, and the Nassau party had a huge influence over New York Republican politics. However, corruption and infighting gradually helped weaken what was once one of the most powerful Republican parties anywhere. (For more, check out Steve Kornacki's excellent 2011 article). In 2001, Democrat Tom Suozzi broke the GOP's stronghold on the county executive's office, and won re-election four years later. But in 2009, with the Great Recession hurting Democrats nationwide, the local GOP unexpectedly regained control over Nassau when Ed Mangano unseated Suozzi by 386 votes. Not only did almost no one forecast a Mangano win, but Suozzi himself had $1 million left in his war-chest that likely could have saved him.
The state seized control of Nassau’s finances in 2011 and when Suozzi kicked off his comeback attempt against Mangano two years later, he initially looked like the man to beat. However, Suozzi lost 59-41, another defeat that foreshadowed the national Democratic Party's problems for the following year. But last year, Mangano was indicted on federal corruption charges. The county GOP made it very clear that they didn't want Mangano as their nominee again and they consolidated behind Martins, who had lost a congressional race in 2016 to none other than Tom Suozzi.
Corruption, unsurprisingly, was a major issue, though Curran focused more on tying Martins to former state Senate Leader Dean Skellos (whose own corruption conviction was vacated last month by an appeals court) more than to Mangano. Martins has seized on the issue, though he emulated Ed Gillespie in Virginia and launched a racist mailer targeting Curran that featuring Latino gang members. In the end, it wasn't enough, and Curran will become Nassau County's first female executive and only the second Democrat in decades.
Over in Hempstead, the forces that Kornacki described that helped tear the Nassau County GOP down at the end of the 20th Century repeated themselves.
Santino fought with two prominent fellow Republicans, Town Board members Erin King Sweeney and Bruce Blakeman over their calls for ethics reforms in public meetings that often resulted in shouting. The two took issue to a Santino proposal to restrict board members from taking more than $125,000 in outside income. While Santino denied it, the two attorneys argued that it was an attempt to throw them off the board. And they very much did not keep their criticisms to themselves.
Blakeman, a longtime Long Island politician who lost the 2014 race for New York's 4th Congressional District 53-47 and sounded interested in seeking the GOP nod for county executive, ended up crossing party lines and backing Gillen. King Sweeney publicly called the supervisor a bully before the election and also endorsed Gillen. King Sweeney's well-known father, Rep. Peter King, also decried what he called Santino's "cowardly attack" on her. Allegations of cronyism and nepotism, many coming from his fellow Republicans, also dogged Santino.
Santino had won re-election 60-40 against a Democratic opponent just two years ago. Gillen entered the race as a political unknown, and despite everything, few seemed to give her a chance. However, Gillen's win put a cap on what may have been the worst election night in the Nassau GOP’s long history.
