A sneak peek into battle of TV ads in CD3

Daily Point

Let the ad wars begin

As promised, CD3 Democratic candidate Robert Zimmerman will emerge Friday with his first television ad, which will be going up on cable in a six-figure ad buy, sources told The Point.

Zimmerman narrates the ad, which The Point obtained.

“I’ve been fighting for Democratic values since I was 19,” Zimmerman says, over images of a newspaper article about the candidate and photos of him with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, former Sen. Hillary Clinton, and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It also shows a clip of Zimmerman on Fox News, criticizing former President Donald Trump.

The 30-second ad highlights Zimmerman’s focus on voting rights, abortion rights and an end to gun violence. At the ad’s close, it notes recent endorsements by Hillary Clinton and the AFL-CIO.

“When Democrats stand together and fight together, we deliver real results,” Zimmerman says. “I approve this message because for me, it’s about turning our Democratic values into action.”

Zimmerman’s ad comes on the heels of the start of a television campaign by fellow CD3 candidate Josh Lafazan, who similarly highlighted gun violence and reproductive rights in his own ad.

With just over a month to go until the congressional primary, expect the ad war to ramp up quickly in the weeks to come.

— Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Talking Point

Keeping up with election rules

New York election law has long been full of strange quirks, including the ability to receive an absentee ballot and then decide to go to the polls and vote as usual on the machines instead.

That used to provide voters with some optionality, but it was erased in a host of election changes made by state lawmakers in 2021 in an effort to simplify procedures and hopefully speed the count.

The absentee ballot change went into effect this year, and some Long Island voters in June's primaries got caught in the middle. In Suffolk, 209 people received absentee ballots but then decided to vote at polling places anyway, according to Anita Katz, the county’s Board of Elections Democratic commissioner. They were told they couldn’t vote by machine but rather had to do so by affidavit ballot, which means signing an affidavit oath along with your vote, to be reviewed later.

In Nassau, which keeps this statistic slightly differently, 27 people returned an absentee ballot to the BOE and then showed up at the polls and filled out an affidavit. Those who simply requested an absentee and did not return it had to fill out an affidavit as well, but that number was not tracked, says Nassau BOE Democratic Commissioner Jim Scheuerman.

More than 200,000 Long Islanders voted in the June 28 primaries, so the few hundred affected don’t amount to much confusion. That could change, of course, in the November general when more people are expected to vote, and some of them may be less plugged into wonky electoral rules and procedural details.

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

On common ground

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Reference Point

The day there was no holding the mayo

It’s not every day an editorial writer gets to write a line like this:

“The proximate cause of last Thursday’s massive tie-up on the Long Island Expressway was a bald tire on a mayonnaise truck.”

And it certainly would be cause for celebration — or at least a frisson of joy — if one had occasion to pen a phrase like “cleaning up the oleaginous cargo took five hours.”

But it sadly is pretty much every day that one could begin a story — on the pages of the opinion or news sections — with an account of heavy traffic on the LIE.

That was the case on July 21, 1986, when Newsday’s editorial board used the condiment catastrophe as the jumping-off point for an editorial titled “The Long Island Expressway’s Profound Mess.”

“Mess” describes the roadway for the 36 years that have passed since the mayo muck, and most likely for the previous 36 years along the portions of the LIE that existed in those days. In fact, the only word in the headline with which most drivers would quibble nowadays is “profound.” There is nothing philosophically profound about the traffic on the LIE.

The Hellman’s highway hell of 1986 led the board to decry “the administrative, bureaucratic and legislative mess that passes for transportation policy in the State of New York” — a policy it blamed for taking five hours to get traffic moving around the site of the spillage. At the time, the state Department of Transportation was touting a new strategy of deploying crews along the LIE to respond quickly to emergencies and creating an Incident Management Team to coordinate among the many agencies with some hand in mitigating traffic.

It all sounded great. In fact, the team — including the Nassau and Suffolk police departments and two state departments — met just a few hours before the accident to confirm their coordination. “But later in the day,” the board huffed, “those same departments couldn’t route traffic around an obstruction or clean up a hazardous mess quickly.”

The board made a pitch for tougher state laws to help truck inspectors keep trucks with bald tires off the roads and — make yourself a BLT with mayo if this sounds familiar — condemned the condition of Long Island’s roads. It cited a recent study that found that the $1.3 billion due to be spent on LI roads in the 1990s “won’t even come close to meeting the region’s needs.” The actual figure needed, the study said, was $5.3 billion.

“What happened on the LIE last week was just a symptom of a much deeper problem,” the editorial board wrote. “Beyond the angry, frustrated motorists lies the fact that Long Island and the state lack a coherent transportation and highway policy …”

And here we are. Motorists are still angry and frustrated, the roads are still in bad shape, money for repairs and repaving still is insufficient, and it still takes too much time to clear an accident. But give the authorities credit: Whether through providence or planning, for 36 years they’ve kept a tight lid on mayonnaise spills.

— Michael Dobie @mwdobie and Amanda Fiscina @adfiscina