Republican Ed Romaine’s victory in an unusually high-profile race for Suffolk County executive in New York has thus far obscured what was a stark triumph for Democrats on the eastern reaches of Long Island in yesterday’s election.
Democrats swept landslide wins in East Hampton town, seem to have scored a surprise trifecta in more competitive Southampton town and appear to have fought to a standoff in Southold town on the more GOP-leaning North Fork.
The gains made in Southampton, where the parties have traded power in recent decades, are most significant. A highly energized Democrat operation succeeded in retaining the key supervisor post by a solid margin for Maria Moore, mayor of Westhampton Beach, against town councilwoman Cynthia McNamara, previously a potent vote getter. Even more telling, the wave apparently brought in young legislative staffer Michael Iasilli to the town council, displacing Republican Richard Martel, a popular figure from the sizable hamlet of Hampton Bays. Iaselli leads Martel by 219 votes with only a small number of absentee ballots outstanding.
Another candidate on the Democrat line, Bill Pell, easily finished first in the Southampton council race, assuring the party of continued dominance of the town government. Pell, however, is a trustee of the town wetlands with a broader support base–it is Iaselli’s bid that is the bigger measure of Democrat strength, along with the new supervisor Moore.
Southampton was historically a GOP stronghold, although that began to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s as anti-development sentiment and a rising population of cosmopolitan newcomers affected the politics. The parties have traded off council dominance, with stronger personalities in each holding sway, while Republicans have kept hold of the trustee spots. That much appears to have remained true on Tuesday, with wins of 3 of 5 seats.
East Hampton’s transition was earlier and more abrupt. In a 1983 election, the council turned sharply to the Democrats after early battles over land use and preservation. It has remained so for nearly all of the 40 years since, even as the town’s trustee positions were more a partisan mix till recently. Nowadays, and clearly this week, Republicans are not even in the game there–they even lost a town justice post that had been their last redoubt.
The GOP’s problems in many affluent suburbs, outside the South especially, have grown obvious. The party’s resurgence lately in much of Long Island, fueled by antagonism toward criminal-justice and immigration policies of urban Democrats, has been one of the great contrarian stories. As the battleground becomes more local in the most gilded and environmentally-conscious precincts to the east, however, the issues are different and the outcomes more akin to those of today’s U.S. Northeast. –Nov 8, 2023
Tim W. Ferguson 