Nassau County, one of America’s first suburban counties and one of the wealthiest, is perhaps as good a place as any to begin to understand the current political mood.
When I was growing up there in the 1970s and ’80s, the country’s postwar social mythologies were still anchored in enviable realities. On Long Island’s South Shore, lawyers and dentists lived alongside plumbers and secretaries in split-levels and modest colonials. The political discourse was civil, the culture wars barely existent. Everyone sent their children to the same excellent public schools and on to college and in many cases to the Ivy League. My own graduating class produced two of the country’s most prominent neurosurgeons.
But as it did elsewhere, the reality changed, and the myth began to fade. Between 2010 and 2020, the Federal Reserve’s income inequality index for Nassau County was more or less graphed as a shot straight upward. The median home price is roughly twice the national figure. Until it swung for Donald Trump last week, Nassau County had not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1992.
By most predictive measures, Laura Gillen should not have defeated the Republican incumbent, Anthony D’Esposito, in Nassau’s Fourth Congressional District — even if he was in the news for putting both his fiancée’s daughter and the girlfriend he was cheating with on his payroll. Mr. Trump had visited the district in September, packing Nassau Coliseum and blaming New York’s Democratic leadership for “horrible, disgusting, dangerous, filthy encampments” and the “squalid and unsafe” conditions of the city’s subway system, however many commuter-rail miles away. He asked his audience: “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Ms. Gillen had a lot to lose. She not only faced possible defeat but also the humiliating prospect of being beaten by the same opponent twice. Mr. D’Esposito won two years ago, when Democrats lost the House with failed efforts in five competitive New York races. Before running to represent the Fourth District, Ms. Gillen was the Hempstead town supervisor, the first Democrat to hold the office in 112 years. That should give you some sense of the strength of Republican influence in the area. Although registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Nassau County, the G.O.P. machine that had dominated local politics for decades had been revived in recent years.
Liberalism was decidedly not the prevailing fashion. During the summer of 2020, for example, Merrick, an affluent town that is 87 percent white, gained national attention as the ugly site of a racist counterprotest aiming to shut down a small Black Lives Matter march. A year later, Laura Curran, a Democrat, who served as Nassau’s first female county executive, lost a re-election she was expected to win handsomely. She had been a casualty of progressive criminal justice policies, like bail reform, that were passed in Albany. Although she had opposed them, it “was not enough,” she told me. “The mood had shifted so much.”
The politics in this part of the world have long resisted reductive interpretation. Laura Gillen’s narrow victory seemed like another expression of this. How she succeeded and whether there were applicable lessons for other Democrats seemed like the sort of questions that would preoccupy strategists for a long time.
We spoke over the phone this week while she was in Washington for a congressional orientation. “When I became town supervisor, lots of folks weren’t happy to see me there,” she told me. Most of the members on her town board were Republican, and she was not in a position to impose any singular political vision.
“The town supervisor is a weird position; you’re an executive without a tremendous amount of executive power,’’ she said. She worked with the board to lower certain taxes and to pass ethics reform and sexual harassment legislation. She found municipal contracts that hadn’t been put out to bid for decades. “These contracts were just handed out to friends and family,” she said. “We were rewarding friends and family without much public scrutiny.”
This kind of small-bore government work doesn’t reward a political identity built on vibes. District Four is made up of more than two dozen Nassau County towns and villages, with different demographics and personalities. Waterfront communities on the South Shore may have little in common with those in the center of the island, where more Latinos have settled over the years. Democrats have been losing Latino voters, which the presidential election reaffirmed. The Gillen campaign was intensely focused on reaching them.
What kept coming up over and over in discussions with these voters, Ms. Gillen said, was the rising cost of health care, particularly insulin. Hispanics, according to federal data, are 1.5 times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to die from diabetes. The Gillen campaign was responsive. The candidate pledged to work on enlarging the class of drugs subject to government price controls. Two weeks before the election, she wrote an op-ed in El Diario, the prominent Spanish-language daily newspaper, in which she committed to the unsexy support of the bipartisan Emergency Access to Insulin Act, expanding access to Medicaid and creating more community health centers.
Various direct mail ads were sent out in Spanish, Punjabi and Creole, the last to speak to the significant Haitian community in Elmont. In one television ad, delivered in English, Ms. Gillen stood in Elmont right on the Queens-Nassau County line. “I’m here at the border,” she said, a cheeky pretext for recitation of her views on immigration. “We’re 2,000 miles from Mexico, but we are feeling the migrant crisis every day.” She promised to work “with anyone from any party” to end it.
Ms. Gillen seemed to understand that something had fundamentally shifted among the electorate, that if New York City had once — and for so long — been a beacon of creative and professional aspiration for so many suburbanites, it was now often enough seen as a contaminant leaking its pathogens eastward. Both candidates in the race spoke to their constituents’ fears about crime; but Mr. D’Esposito lost despite having spent 10 years as a detective in the New York Police Department. If analysis eventually reveals that voters turned against him because of corruption claims (he maintained that he had done nothing unethical), that too would indicate a certain inversion of trend, given that studies, as well as reality, tell us again and again that corruption rarely guides the decisions voters make.
The return of some congressional seats to Democrats in New York was not enough to secure a Democratic majority in the House. Before Mr. D’Esposito’s win, the fourth district seat was held by the Democrat Kathleen Rice for eight years and by Carolyn McCarthy, another Democrat, from 1997 to 2015. But clearly these voting patterns are not immutable. Past performance, as the saying goes, is not indicative of future results.
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