How Long Island voted: Blakeman lost support in GOP strongholds, Hochul gained in Democratic areas

Four years ago, Gov. Kathy Hochul won election in spite of Long Island, losing here by 14 points as Republicans hammered her on law-and-order issues.

This year, she may carry the region outright amid a statewide rout of Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. Her colossal change of fortunes comes not from total Island turnout — nearly equal to 2022 — but from the distinct voting shifts, informed by national trends, that played out repeatedly on the most local level, according to a Newsday analysis of county elections board data.

Democratic strongholds with large immigrant populations, notably around Hempstead and Freeport in Nassau and Brentwood in Suffolk County, again overwhelmingly went to Hochul. The percentages masked that the governor, a frequent critic of the Trump administration's enforcement tactics, consistently picked up an extra 100, 200 or 300 votes in these communities' individual election districts, as turnout there surged.

Blakeman, meanwhile, couldn’t do the same in the most reliably GOP areas. Precincts in Massapequa may look the same dark shade of ruby red as when Hochul's 2022 opponent, Lee Zeldin, won them, but with dozens and dozens of fewer votes for Blakeman.

Perhaps most critically, around those extremes, Hochul turned scores of 2022 red districts to pink this year and flipped numerous pink districts to light blue — and not because she drew markedly more support.

In the working class hamlets of Selden and Terryville in central Suffolk, and Hicksville in Nassau, Blakeman bled the level of support that went to Zeldin, then a congressman from Shirley.

As recently as 2024, these same areas gave President Donald Trump nearly 60% of the vote.

But in the last two years, the President has failed to lower the costs of groceries and other staples and his war against Iran has spiked gas prices yet again — factors, according to polling, that were central to the nationwide wave that led to Democrats seizing control of Congress.

"It comes down to one word: Trump," said political consultant Michael Dawidziak.

Blakeman got nearly 87,000 fewer votes on Long Island than Zeldin. Hochul gained about 66,000 votes. In unofficial results, the governor bested Blakeman on Long Island by four-tenths of a point out of nearly 1.1 million votes cast.

"It was a rebuke that obviously had national implications," Marc Molinaro, an upstate Republican who ran for governor in 2018 and served one term in Congress, told Newsday.

ICE'S impact

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have made their highest concentration of arrests in Hempstead village. Brentwood and Central Islip aren’t far behind.

Voters in those areas nearly doubled their support of Hochul from 2022. Examples that were duplicated over and over again include: Hempstead's ED16, where Hochul netted 69 more votes while Blakeman lost six from Zeldin's total. And in two Brentwood districts, Hochul boosted her 2022 totals from 169 to 381 and from 299 to 592.

"Voters in those communities came out as if their lives depended on it, which literally they did," Suffolk County Democratic Party Chairman Rich Schaffer told Newsday Friday.

Blakeman last year entered Nassau into a cooperation agreement with ICE (though a law signed by Hochul later banned such pacts) and had been a vocal supporter of Trump’s immigration policies, which polls showed had grown increasingly unpopular locally.

"What this shows for them is there is power in this collective," said Ahmad Perez, the founder of the Islip Forward immigration advocacy group. "We do not have to be passive recipients of someone else’s good intentions."

Suffolk County Republican Committee Chairman Jesse Garcia said he believes individuals in Brentwood "want violent criminals off the streets," but that national Republicans did not do a good job messaging on the issue.

"I give credit to the Democrats for polarizing that issue and unfortunately national Republicans gave them an opportunity to do that," Garcia said.

"Democrats this year were motivated by the federal issues," State and Nassau County Democratic Committee Chairman Jay Jacobs acknowledged, but he added that Hochul's performance in these key areas was no accident.

"We worked it hard, the county party and the state coordinated campaign, to communicate with those voters, knocking on doors and using phone and text messaging to get people out," he said.

'A good candidate four years ago'

Blakeman matched or bested Zeldin's numbers in GOP areas like the heavily Jewish Five Towns of southwestern Nassau, where the county executive, who is Jewish, once lived and remains popular for his staunch support of Israel.

In one district in the heart of Cedarhurst, Zeldin beat Hochul by 316 votes and Blakeman beat her by 364.

But in many other Republican bases across Long Island, Blakeman couldn’t fight the national economic riptide that hurt his party, experts said.

In Massapequa, both Blakeman and Zeldin took individual districts by 25, 30 or even 40 percentage points. But in one precinct, for example, Zeldin won by 374 votes while Blakeman won by only 261.

Rich Azzopardi, a longtime spokesman to former Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and a Long Island native, said he didn’t think Nassau and Suffolk voters made any distinction between Hochul’s two Republican challengers. Rather, it was all about Trump.

"Blakeman probably would’ve been a good candidate four years ago in a different environment," Azzopardi said.

In 2022, then-President Joe Biden’s midterm election, inflation dragged down Democrats nationally but New York went even redder due to local Republican’s success in tying pandemic-era crime increases in New York City to state Democrats’ cashless bail policies.

"From 2021 to 2024 there was a strong red wave going because people were going against the progressive policies out of Albany," said Dawidziak, who mostly works on GOP campaigns.

But Blakeman and Republicans tried to use the high cost of living against Hochul, which Dawidziak said "was a loser for them because people blame the affordability crisis on the Trump tariffs and the Iran war."

Key flips

Hochul flipped some parts of Suffolk County that went strong for Zeldin in 2022 and even stronger for Trump two years later.

A look at individual precincts tells a more complicated story. In Brookhaven's ED95, in Selden, Hochul received six fewer votes than she did in 2022 in losing the district to Zeldin by 61 votes.

But Blakeman received 105 fewer votes than Zeldin, allowing Hochul to win it — a pattern repeated throughout the area.

In one Babylon Town election district in Copiague, Hochul gained almost 70 votes while Blakeman lost 64 votes compared with Zeldin's tally.

On Tuesday, a Newsday reporter at Penn Station met Janet Bullard, an MTA employee from Copiague. She said she cast her ballot for Democrats down the line, starting with Hochul, in protest of Trump.

"To be honest, I hate her," Bullard said of Hochul. "But I'd rather vote for Gov. Hochul than vote for the Republican."

Former Nassau County Legis. Denise Ford, of Long Beach, belonged to both major parties during her time in office. She said independent and Democratic-leaning friends and family had no problem backing Republicans for county legislature seats or town supervisor posts "but just could not bring themselves to vote for Blakeman because of his close association with Trump and being a MAGA person."

Jacobs credited Hochul and Democrats' downballot candidates, but also didn't deny the overwhelming factor behind their success.

"It was a total rejection of Trump, and it was a total rejection of Blakeman," he said.