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.”