Elections past, present and future
Elections are about the future, it’s been said.
But when they are over, it’s also necessary to look back to figure out what went right (for the winners) and wrong (for the losers) and what we all should learn from the voters as we move forward.
Newsday’s editorial board has been engaged in plenty of forward and backward looking since Election Night turned what had been looking like a red wave into a mauve ripple – except on Long Island, which experienced its own version of a crimson tide.
The board calls it “LI’s homegrown red wave” in an editorial and says that the issues raised by Rep. Lee Zeldin in his unsuccessful but regionally energizing gubernatorial campaign must be addressed by victorious Gov. Kathy Hochul and her fellow Democrats. Primary among the issues singled out by the board is public safety, where “even small offenses and signs of disorder could cost them support if they go unaddressed.”
Our columnists, meanwhile, have been conducting post-mortems. William F.B. O’Reilly, a consultant to Republicans who worked on Mike Lawler’s successful upstate campaign to defeat House Democratic campaign chief Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, says part of the GOP’s success in flipping four NY congressional seats was court-ordered redistricting that created “healthy competitive races” in New York. “It gave us a snapshot for how elections can look when partisan gerrymandering is removed from the equation,” O’Reilly writes. “The nation could use lots more of these.”
Dan Janison analyzes how Hochul and her fellow Democrats nearly blew the gubernatorial contest. The campaign seemed AWOL for weeks, he notes, an impression visually echoed in the lack of lawn signs amid the thousands of Zeldin signs blanketing Long Island and Queens. Hochul, Janison writes, “looked like a shaky relief pitcher on the verge of blowing a five-run lead in the ninth.”
The Point also dug deep into its archives seeking answers to the mystery of Republican George Santos, who won the CD3 seat but, as we noted yesterday, is a bit of a cipher. Santos did not sit down with the editorial board for an endorsement interview before this election but he did in 2020, his first bid for the seat. In that transcript, we learn that he wants to make the electric grid more reliable, devise a “tax incentive to decongest the roads,” and is an Ikea fanatic.
In keeping with the theme, The Point also looked back – way back – to 1960 and a historic election with some modern themes. The nation was divided, the vote count was tight, the early evening forecast was wrong, and the culprit was …. a Paleolithic computer called Univac. Newsday’s editorial board at the time, as obsessed with election analysis as the current one, concluded, “The one lesson this election has taught us is that when voting is close, machines are just as fallible as man.”
Which, as it turned out, was also a look to the future.
- Michael Dobie
