Bellwether suburban county’s red shift is now at the center of both parties’ future identities in New York

ALBANY, New York — The statewide blue wave in which New York Democrats made big gains in nearly every corner of the state this November had one glaring exception: Nassau County.

While Empire State Democrats scored one of their best election nights on record, Republicans held down America’s archetypal suburb, with GOP candidates notching an 11-0 record in contested executive branch races in Nassau. In the marquee race, County Executive Bruce Blakeman improved on his 2021 performance after four years of wholeheartedly embracing President Donald Trump.

Blakeman is hoping to ride that success into next year: He launched a 2026 gubernatorial bid Tuesday touting his electability.

“While Democrats made gains nationwide on election night, the Republican party shined bright on Long Island,” the narrator of his launch video said. “Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman won a Democrat County by 12 percent.”

Whether Blakeman’s GOP primary opponent Rep. Elise Stefanik can replicate those numbers will be a key question facing Republican voters next June. Blakeman told POLITICO his recent win came down to holding fast to pocketbook issues, hiring more cops and connecting with groups Republicans have ignored in the past. Others say his decisive victory might simply stem from a strong local party organization.

Whatever the secret of his success, the importance of Nassau extends far beyond next year’s gubernatorial race. It will also be crucial to determining control of the House.

And it is not just Republicans whose future stands to be shaped by Nassau’s political trends. Democrats have spent years bickering over whether party members in the county have focused too much on distancing themselves from the far left. Moderate Nassau Democrats say progressives like New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have made their jobs tougher.

“Most of the television commercials that they put up were all about ‘Mamdani, Mamdani, democratic socialists,’” Nassau Democratic Chair Jay Jacobs said. “Their tagline was, in effect, ‘Vote Republican and save Nassau County from becoming a socialist county.’ That plays well with a moderate audience.”

Democratic struggles in Nassau County have become a regular through line, revisited with each election cycle. While it was at the heart of the national blue wave in 2017 and 2018, the GOP won big there in 2021 local races. Four years after a 16-point Democratic win in Nassau in the 2018 gubernatorial election, the party suffered an 11-point loss in 2022. Then in 2024, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Nassau County since 1988.

How that pattern plays out next year remains an open question.

Rep. Laura Gillen, a Democrat in a battleground Nassau swing district, “is the number one target in the country for Republicans,” said Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. “They really think they can win in that district and they’re going to put an unlimited amount of money in.”

An effective GOP candidate at the top of the ticket would help considerably toward that end.

Stefanik’s team disputed the idea that Blakeman has a magic formula for electoral success, pointing to his unsuccessful bids for state comptroller, New York City mayor and U.S. Senate. He last ran for higher office when he lost a congressional bid in 2014 — the same year Stefanik flipped a House seat with a 21-point victory.

Yet Blakeman believes he has a solid case to make.

He attributed his success this election cycle to holding true to past promises to not raise taxes and hire more police officers, while also building connections to groups Republicans haven’t focused on in the past. He rattled off a long list of outreach efforts undertaken by the county in recent years, such as a Feliz Navidad celebration and a Lunar New Year festival.

“We also reached out to the Muslim community and talked to them about things that were important to them,” Blakeman said. “I appointed the first Muslim police chaplain in Nassau County history, and shortly I will be appointing the first Sikh police chaplain.”

Trump, who has become politically toxic in many New York suburbs, will undoubtedly be a factor in next year’s race. On Monday, he described both Blakeman and Stefanik as “great,” and while he has not yet expressed a preference for either, that could change. And arguably no local official in the northeast has done more to associate themselves with Trumpism than Blakeman.

Under his leadership, Nassau County spent more than $1 million on police overtime hosting Trump for a campaign rally last fall. Blakeman has been New York’s most visible opponent of letting transgender girls participate in female sports and has had the county partner with ICE on immigration enforcement efforts. In late November, he announced a wall of surveillance on the Queens border to conduct facial recognition on visitors from Mamdani’s New York.

“I never ran away from President Trump,” Blakeman told POLITICO. “I supported President Trump, and I was very vocal about my support for President Trump”

The approach is a far cry from how Nassau County Democrats have handled Mamdani.

Jacobs, who also serves as chair of the state Democratic Party, famously distanced himself from the mayor-elect in the fall, declining to offer an endorsement after Mamdani became the Democratic nominee. And he’s hardly the only local Democrat who falls into that category: “Mamdani’s reckless agenda filled with unachievable promises and contempt for certain groups threatens NY’s economy and safety,”Gillen said this fall.

Democrats based in New York City contend this is exactly what their counterparts on Long Island should not be doing.

“When the leading Democrats in the county are telling everyone that the Democratic Party sucks, it’s hard to convince voters to vote for your party,” said state Sen. Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris, who heads the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. “They should start looking inside themselves and start trying to make a positive case for Democrats, or I think they can expect this to continue.”

Unlike in Nassau, Long Island’s neighboring Suffolk County showed significant signs of the pendulum swinging back to the left this November. Democrats grew their share of the vote by 10 or more points in four of the five top town races, and they flipped seats in places like Shelter Island and Riverhead.

Democrats haven’t been completely without hopeful signs in Nassau either.

They won a victory last month in a newly-drawn county legislative district, denying Blakeman’s allies a supermajority and giving them the ability to put their foot in the door during budget talks. In 2024, Tom Suozzi broke the Republicans’ hold on four congressional seats by winning a special election. Gillen won another seat later that year, thanks to a two-point victory in a district that favored Democrats by 11 points as recently as 2020.

But even the good Democratic vibes in the 2024 congressional races underscored a long-standing issue in the county — winning back the seat in Suozzi’s special election would not have been necessary if local Democrats had done opposition research into the now-disgraced former Rep. George Santos before the 2022 election.

The failure to do so illustrates another reality in the area. After decades of controlling Nassau, Republicans built a well-oiled machine.

“The relative strength of the organizations — it’s just not even close,” said Levy, who likened the GOP’s political operation to that of former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. “At a time when all over the country, political organizations are shrinking in influence for a variety of reasons, Nassau still has an old-fashioned Daley machine-like operation that can get a vote out in ways that the Democrats can’t.”

Democrats didn’t do much to end that structural disadvantage when they won power in 2017.

“Arguably the Democrats could have, should have done more to leverage the patronage opportunities to raise money and create more foot soldiers to work politically,” Levy said. But any steps they made in that direction were halted when the political winds started to shift: “Anything that happened before the pandemic almost doesn’t count.”

Jacobs, who said his party was outspent by a more than four-to-one margin in the county executive’s race, didn’t disagree with the characterization.

“They raised and spent $15 million. That’s an extraordinary amount of money,” he said. “That was supplemented by both county mailings and town mailings that, in my judgement and other peoples’ judgement, were campaign-like pieces paid for by the taxpayer.”

That onslaught of ads built off years of tying local Democrats to policies like bail reform or high-density housing or candidates like Mamdani, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Kathy Hochul. The Democratic brand “is really doing poorly” in the area, Jacobs said.

“People — even at the doors when you’re collecting petitions, even when they’re Democrats — are upset with our party,” he said. “That’s been driven by a really well-funded consistent campaign by Republicans to set the narrative that all Democrats are either wild extremists themselves or so afraid of them that they bend to whatever the far left in our party wants. Neither of which is true, but too many people believe it.”

Nassau Republicans, meanwhile, aren’t shying away from a president whom the opposition characterizes as an extremist.

“In a county with 110,000 more Democrats, to win by 35,000 votes is something that is very special,” Blakeman said. “You have to be true to your values, and not a phony.”