What George Santos told us in 2020, the first time he sought the House

Daily Point

In George Santos' words …

Republican George Santos, who is headed to the House of Representatives after winning in his second attempt to earn the CD3 seat, provided little detail during his recent campaign about his focus and ideas.

While he did not sit down with the Newsday editorial board this year, Santos did meet with us over Zoom in 2020 during his campaign against Democratic incumbent Tom Suozzi.

It was a different time — still relatively early in the pandemic, before a vaccine was available, before former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, before the Stop the Steal rally that Santos attended on Jan. 6, 2021 or the insurrection that followed. Nonetheless, these excerpts from Santos’ comments during the start of his political career shed light on what he cares about and his views on some still-critical issues. They also contain his revelation that he is an “Ikea freak.”

On his background:

Student debt:

On infrastructure:

On the economy:

Immigration:

On getting rid of the SALT cap and the Trump tax cuts:

Climate change:

On his plans:

On why he seeks public office:

Talking Point

Political déjà vu

Seth Cohen was in a hotel in Hauppauge Tuesday night, getting ready to watch results in his capacity as Democrat Bridget Fleming’s campaign manager for her run in CD1. Then, word came down about the Suffolk Board of Elections having issues processing the results.

“Oh God, here we go,” Cohen thought — because he had some familiarity with this kind of mishap.

“I was the Iowa caucus director for the Democratic Party,” Cohen explained to The Point on Thursday. That was back in 2020, when a series of now-semi-legendary foul-ups on various fronts meant that the state party couldn’t report a winner on caucus night, leading to both Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg claiming forms of victory.

Cohen, who spent months working on Fleming’s unsuccessful campaign this cycle, says he had a “very similar feeling to the caucuses” regarding the processing problems.

He said he had “complete confidence” Tuesday that the process was “under control” and the results would ultimately come out, as was true in 2020. But in the moment, the question becomes how long will this all take?

The county election commissioners said in a Wednesday news release that new features like secured Wi-Fi and firewalls meant to protect the board’s systems helped to “overtax and slow the Board’s older operating system, which is pending replacement upon certification of a new operating system by the New York State Board of Elections.”

The county had recently been hit by a cyberattack, detected in September, which jumbled some of the election board’s procedures.

Ultimately the results started coming online a little after midnight, and they weren’t good news for Fleming, who lost her congressional bid to Republican Nick LaLota by more than 11 points. In the interim, though, Cohen said he, like others, was anxiously awaiting results and a light at the end of the tunnel. It had been a 23-hour day, and a long slog of a campaign.

“You’ve been dealing with this kind of unknown for so long,” Cohen said.

Pencil Point

Campaign dirt

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Reference Point

Forever wrong?

A taut election, a fraught vote count, a blown result call.

It’s all so very now. But it also happened back in 1960 when the principals were John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and the prognosticator was a computer called Univac.

Newsday’s editorial board addressed the situation in the presidential election in a Nov. 10, 1960, editorial called “For All the People.”

“When we wrote yesterday’s editorial about the election of John F. Kennedy as President, it was about 3 in the morning, and it still seemed he might win big,” the board wrote. “Univac said so; the trend appeared to be in that direction; he appeared to have a clear-cut mandate from the voters.”

Kennedy ended up winning the popular vote by 0.17% — or, as the board put it, “a margin of only two votes per each precinct.”

But the board’s pique was stirred by Univac, one of the world’s first commercial computers which was being used to predict the winner based on early returns. And when Kennedy opened a big early lead based on voting in large Northeastern and Midwestern cities, Univac went along with what looked like a trend and predicted a Kennedy rout.

But Nixon began closing that gap as returns were reported from the rural and suburban Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states, and the West Coast. Kennedy’s victory wasn’t certain until later on Wednesday. “The one lesson this election has taught us all is that when voting is close, machines are just as fallible as man,” the board wrote of the 1960 race. “Univac and its counterparts on the TV networks made a miserable botch of forecasting the eventual result.”

But there is more to this story. That beleaguered Univac computer had made its debut in the 1952 election between Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson, the first nationwide TV broadcast of a presidential election and the first election night broadcast for Walter Cronkite.

CBS reporter Charles Collingwood was assigned to Univac, and explained to viewers how the “fabulous electronic machine” would be used. But the first few times Cronkite turned to Collingwood for a prediction from Univac, the machine did not respond — no doubt leaving viewers unimpressed.

As it turned out, though, Univac had responded — with a prediction so preposterous that someone held it back. The race between Eisenhower and Stevenson had seemed close during the campaign, but around 8:30 p.m. with only 3.4 million votes counted, Univac had predicted a big Eisenhower win and said the odds were 100 to 1 for a victory by the World War II hero.

When its computer printout was revealed hours later, it read, “It’s awfully early, but I’ll go out on a limb,” and predicted a 438-93 Electoral College win for Ike. The final tally: 442-89.

After midnight, a representative of Remington Rand, Univac’s maker, appeared on the CBS broadcast.

“As more votes came in, the odds came back and it was obviously evident that we should have had the nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place,” he said. “It was right. We were wrong. Next year we’ll believe it.”