Long Islanders cast 1,069,237 votes in gubernatorial election, a 50% turnout

ALBANY — Tuesday’s wave of Democratic victories across Long Island did not translate into the highest voter turnout in recent midterm election cycles.

But it might yet.

Long Island saw its second-highest number of votes cast for a gubernatorial race in a midterm election in the last 12 years on Tuesday, as 1,069,237 Long Islanders voters cast their ballot in the race between Gov. Kathy Hochul and Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. 

That’s 15,019 fewer votes than the 2022 election total of 1,084,256.

The final tally for 2026 may change as the Nassau and Suffolk County Boards of Elections count the remaining absentee and mail-in ballots.

There were 5,948 absentee ballots still to be counted in Suffolk County as of Thursday morning, according to the county Board of Elections. And another 13,027 Suffolk County ballots that had been sent out but have not yet been received.

The Nassau County Board of Elections did not provide the number of uncounted ballots.

But 2026 already has the highest total votes in Nassau County for a gubernatorial election and the highest number of votes in Suffolk County for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate compared with the last three midterm cycles.

In Nassau County there were 531,721 votes in the governor’s race, including 266,444 for Hochul and 265,277 for Blakeman. In Suffolk County, Hochul tallied 270,778 votes and Blakeman, 266,738.

That amounted to 50% of active registered voters. Statewide voter participation was 46%, the lowest since 2014 when it was 35%.

The percentage turnout for the 2026 election, which was a historic night for Democrats across the country, was slightly down from the 2022 midterm election in the gubernatorial race between Hochul and then-U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), according to preliminary results.

Nassau and Suffolk counties are voter-rich targets for statewide political candidates, offering more than 2.1 million registered voters out of the statewide total of 12.6 million.

The number of votes cast, and percentage of voter turnout have fluctuated with each cycle.

For example, in 2022, 330,337 Suffolk County voters cast their ballot in favor of Zeldin in his race against Hochul. Combined with 286,147 votes in Nassau County, Zeldin saw a total of 616,484 votes on Long Island.

Hochul received 467,772 votes across Long Island that year.

But on Long Island this election, Blakeman received 531,915 votes, 84,469 fewer than Zeldin, and Hochul got 537,222 votes, 69,450 more than 2022.

Kyle Kondik, director of communications for the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said New York Democrats had a turnout problem in 2022 compared with other states.

"New York was really bad in 2022 for Democrats relative to the nation because Democrats held on pretty well in a lot of places in the country," he said.

It was a sharp change from 2018. That cycle was the highest Democratic turnout in the last four cycles as voters were responding to the first two years of President Donald Trump’s first term.

Rich Azzopardi, the former director of communications for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said Long Island was a key part of Cuomo’s election strategy during his three runs from 2011 to 2018.

"Our coalition was Nassau and Suffolk County, Black and Latino voters in the city and the upstate cities," he said.

And leading into 2018, there was a concerted effort to increase voter enrollment after a dismal 2014, Azzopardi said.

"We also did a massive, massive get out the vote operation," he said. "We sank so much money in the field."

The effort showed in the voter totals.

In 2014, only 323,601 voted for the Democratic candidate and 297,193 for the Republican candidate in the governor’s race in the midterm election across Long Island, or 33% of active registered voters.

In 2018, that jumped to 556,248 for the Democratic candidate and 451,568 for the Republican, which was 52.8% of active registered voters.

That number jumped to 53.5% in 2022, before falling to just over 50% in 2026.