The Fortress Mindset
Stray thoughts on the Republican dominance of Long Island
Last night was, in the view of most pundits, good for the Democrats. Ohio codified abortion rights in their state constitution. The Virginia Senate didn’t flip. Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor in red Kentucky, won re-election. Joe Biden might be deeply unpopular, but the Democrats do fine enough when he’s not on the ballot. This is the second year in a row where a low turnout election cycle was good for them. The way Republicans dominated in off-year cycles when Barack Obama was president seems like a distant memory.
None of these trends, though, matter on Long Island. The eastern suburb of New York City, home to almost three million people, is now as Republican as it was a half century ago. For the first time since the early 1970s, Republicans have won every city and town in Nassau County, along with the county executive and district attorney’s offices. In Suffolk County, Ed Romaine will become the first Republican county executive in 20 years. Republicans control the DA’s office there as well. More consequentially for those who care about national politics, all four House seats on Long Island are held by Republicans.
This was not supposed to happen. Long Island has always been of interest to me because I graduated from Stony Brook University, a state school located in Stony Brook, a hamlet on a northern chunk of Suffolk. Growing up in Brooklyn, I knew almost nothing about the suburbs, but I met and befriended several Long Islanders once I went to college and spent a significant amount of time there. In some sense, Long Island is like any American suburb. Homeowners reign supreme. Owning an automobile is a necessity. White backlash politics built the towns—the cheap, postwar housing was largely not available to Black families—but they are more diverse than imagined by outsiders. There is a large and growing Latino population. Blacks form a majority in certain areas. Racial segregation is very real, as are discriminatory housing policies. Still, the counties are hardly as white as they were 60 years ago. What hasn’t changed much is the physical reality of the place. Towns furiously fight new construction and apartment housing is scant. If you’re under 40 and you haven’t inherited a home—and you can’t afford real estate that goes for a half million or more—you’re probably going to leave. Most of the Long Island friends I met in college no longer live there.
When I went to college, Obama was elected president and Democrats were ascendant. On the night of Obama’s election, ever the contrarian, I decided to go to the Suffolk County GOP headquarters for the Stony Brook Press, the alternative college newspaper. Held in some ballroom off some highway, it was a tableau of despair. An elderly, long-serving Republican state senator, to the shock of the room, had been defeated. The Democratic congressman for Suffolk County, Tim Bishop, was easily re-elected. The future, to Democrats and Republicans alike, was obvious: Long Island was going to become more like New York City. As the counties became less white, Republicans would wither. Could Democrats win all the little towns? Put a stranglehold on the county executive offices? Sweep every House seat? On that night, it all seemed possible.
Much has been written already on Donald Trump’s popularity on Long Island, how his brawling, bridge-and-tunnel ethos speaks to the voters there. I’m less interested in Trump as a phenomenon because I think what’s happened on Long Island is independent of his presidential campaigns, as psychologically impactful as they might have been for certain Republicans. Long Island, broadly, has taken on what I’ve termed the fortress mindset—a close proximity to liberalism that has only driven them further rightward. Last year, a few months before a red wave swamped New York and nearly landed Long Islander Lee Zeldin in the governor’s mansion, I wrote an essay on the racial and ethnic politics of Canarsie, Brooklyn, in the 1970s. Jonathan Rieder’s fascinating account of the period, published in 1987, offered me a window into our contemporary mood. Rieder spent several years embedded in the neighborhood, a little suburbia in a big city, and tracked how both the influx of Black residents and the rising crime of the late 1960s rapidly altered the worldviews of the area’s Jewish and Italian middle class. The Jews voted Democrat more than the Italians, but both had been part of the New Deal coalition that was, by that period, fraying. Fears of crime—genuine, in a period where the murder rate would start to skyrocket—mingled with the openly racist view that a new people were bringing new problems with them. Many Canarsie homeowners refused to sell to Black families and physically threatened those who considered it. Eventually, Canarsie did shift, becoming what it is today—a stable, middle class Afro-Caribbean community, its vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
Long Island is close enough to New York City. Nassau borders Queens, and it can be hard to tell the two counties apart in the eastern reaches of the city. It is no surprise that northeast Queens, which shares a cultural mindset with Nassau, has a furious Trumpist for a councilwoman, and she won re-election last night. Westchester County, New York’s northern suburb, has not shifted to the right like Long Island. The relative urbanization of Westchester—it contains Yonkers and New Rochelle, small cities with office buildings, condos, and high-rises—has helped Democrats there. During the red wave year, Westchester’s Democratic county executive won another term. The district attorney of the county is also a Democrat.
Westchester doesn’t quite have the fortress mindset. Long Island plainly does. Fears of crime and migrants are driving the current rightward shift. To live in Nassau and Suffolk, to some extent, to feel like the supposed ills of the big city will soon infect suburbia and alter, forever, the character of the place. Character is a nebulous term, and not entirely racial. Black, Latino, and Asian homeowners with lawns, driveways, and backyards do not crave new apartment buildings down the street. White homeowners may have been most openly furious about the governor’s well-meaning plan to force new housing construction on suburban localities, but it wasn’t as if the few nonwhite Democrats on Long Island supported the idea of upzoning their towns. Class is a better means for discerning attitudes. Some Long Islanders are rich, but many do not feel that way because property taxes are perpetually high. These taxes fund the schools and it’s notable even the wealthy on Long Island, unlike New York City, are willing to funnel their children into the local public schools; property taxes, though, do not explain the rightward lurch as much as crime because Democrats were winning plenty of elections in Nassau and Suffolk when taxes were high.
What is it about crime? You might not know from watching television, but shootings and murders are significantly down in New York City this year. Were Eric Adams not so embattled, this would be a success story he could effectively tell. The feeling about high crime, however, has not changed. For some, especially those who live in poorer neighborhoods where the threat of gun violence is real, that is understandable. But why would a Long Islander in a largely white, middle class town—one with quiet streets and well-funded schools—care so much about crime? Perception is powerful, as is the imagination. Consider the subway. I ride the subway several days a week and I can tell you, firsthand, there are more homeless people there than there were before the pandemic. I can tell you that, in general, it is good to be on alert and to take seriously those who are afraid of crime. But I can also say—and the statistics support this—crime is down on the subways, and not very common. Not common in the sense that you will enter the subway and there is an overwhelming chance nothing will happen to you. You will board at one station, disembark at another, and go on with your day. The subway is crowded enough at all hours. New York nightlife has returned and you won’t find empty cars in the evening.
Consider the Long Islander who doesn’t ride the subway. Maybe they used to commute to the city and now work remotely. Maybe they never went to the city at all. I know people, both in the city and on Long Island, who haven’t taken the subway in decades. If you live in Massapequa or Baldwin or Seaford, you aren’t walking the streets of Forest Hills or Hell’s Kitchen or Crown Heights every day, every week, or even every month. You might never go there. Perhaps you ride the Long Island Rail Road to see a Rangers game and complain about the homeless in Penn Station. When you aren’t in New York City, your perceptions form through media. Newsday is rather staid, but local TV less so—if it bleeds, it leads. Social media is more powerful. You can watch a viral clip of a screaming homeless man or a CVS getting shoplifted and decide this city really is lawless. You can spend time in a diminished Midtown without setting foot on Flatbush Avenue or Austin Street and decide, yes, New York is dead. You can shut yourself in your two-bedroom at night and feel you’ve got the last safe harbor in the world.
Migrants aren’t streaming into Nassau and Suffolk. They’re staying at shelters and hotels in select New York City neighborhoods. They’re leaving, when they can, for other states. If they were allowed to relocate to Long Island, what would actually change? The reality of living in New York City with a migrant influx is that it’s almost impossible to notice unless you walk by a shelter. The city is just too big for any of it to matter in a visceral sense—budget cuts are relevant, but the apocalyptic rhetoric from the Adams administration should be treated with skepticism—and the same would probably be true on sprawling Long Island, where towns can be separated by thirty or forty minute drives. It is true that Long Island lacks the infrastructure to properly handle a migrant wave, but this is more indicative of how little housing there is for anyone. The fierce opposition to urbanization has built the fortress walls ever higher—and chased a growing number of youth out of suburbia altogether.
Next year, it’s possible Democrats win back some of their Long Island turf. Presidential years tend to benefit them. George Santos will be driven from office one way or the other, and the old Democratic congressman who abandoned his North Shore seat, Tom Suozzi, could take it back. Democrats might have a chance at retaking the South Shore district too, which they had traditionally held. Suffolk County looks more daunting. The Democratic Party there is remarkably weak, its leader content to preside over a dying machine. The county legislatures and town governments, with serious effort, aren’t going to elect many Democrats again. Republicans own the present, and they might own the future. The fortress is secured.
I grew up on Long Island in Hewlett (Nassau) and my dad grew up in Syosset (Nassau). I have been urging media to cover the political landscape on Long Island for years -- it is an extremely complex area. I am a lawyer and have witnessed firsthand the joke that is the justice system in New York. While judges are "elected," voters are not presented with a choice. A judicial candidate cannot simply enter the race -- years of dedicated cronyism is literally a prerequisite (as it is in NYC). For federal and state legislative and executive elections, it is vital to consider that New York is a power-sharing state for all intents and purposes -- meaning, the two parties do not actually have many differences when it comes to policy. The corruption runs deep within both parties. The elected leaders on Long Island exist on a separate plane from the people who live here. Kathleen Rice, a Democrat, was my representative for several years. In 2020 or 2021, she voted "no" on a bill that would have lowered prescription drug costs. I still have her responses to my emails on the topic, both of which merely bash the GOP. Of course, it isn't coincidence that she received PAC money from pharmaceutical companies. I also still have the emails that the head of the NYS Democratic Party sent in 2020 following gains in the state legislature by Democratic Socialists -- you would think they were sent by the GOP. In short, like this country, Long Island has been a one-party region for as long as I can recall. It is a party of deeply ingrained corruption and crime. This is not limited to Long Island -- one only need look to India Walton's election in Buffalo, which she won, only to be overtaken by the state Democratic Party in the general election, wherein they apparently disapproved of voters' primary choice and reran their preferred corporate candidate as a write-in (who did win).
I am 34 years old and cannot speak to NYS and Long Island politics before a certain point. However, my dad is of the mindset -- he has lived here for his entire life. Moreover, my mother's uncle was the chairman of the NYS Commission of Investigation in the 1960s and 70s. I have read and saved all reports and reporting on their findings, which did include elected officials on Long Island. For context, the Commission investigated Fred Trump as part of a major investigation into NYC government corruption. Despite the Commission's extensive findings of criminal activity, it cannot be said that any action was taken to prevent the Trump family from continuing to benefit from their ties to the powers that be. If you look at the history of the Commission, up to and including the Moreland Commission, there is a glaring trend of the state defunding the Commission -- the only semblance of governmental check that I am aware of.
Long Island cannot be viewed as an electoral democracy to the extent that the party in power represents the actual political leanings of its citizenship -- we have never been presented with a choice. Even when a candidate running on change does manage to slip through the cracks, the NYS Democratic Party has and will continue to make sure that candidate does not succeed. There is no local independent media to speak of, which has opened to the door to decades of unchecked corporate propaganda from both parties. There is a New Yorker profile from 2020 about then-County Executive Laura Curran's "successful" response to Covid in Nassau County, a piece that one would expect to run on Fox News had she been a Republican. I find it difficult to imagine a future for Long Island where voters actually have a say in who is on their ballot and who is ultimately elected without major structural changes that the official Democratic Party is not willing to accept.
I think there's a class conflict in the crime issue as well. Not in an upper vs. lower class way, but a feeling that the merchant class (whether it's a huge chain store or a mom-and-pop operation) is being victimized while the culture class (e.g. writers, social media activists, politicians) either ignores these problems or even secretly enjoys them. The merchant class can be roughly defined as having lots of money but little cultural power, while the culture class is vice versa (unless you're some big superstar). The merchant class generally sees the culture class as self-absorbed snowflakes while the culture class sees the merchant class as soulless boring money-grubbers, so there's a natural antagonism built into their relationship.