ROCKVILLE CENTRE, N.Y. — In what’s expected to be one of the closest House races in the country, Democrats in New York’s Fourth District are saying that the 2024 campaign bears little resemblance to the 2022 campaign in terms of both resources and energy.
On a sunny Saturday morning in mid-October, former Hempstead Town Supervisor Laura Gillen gathered volunteers for a canvassing kickoff event in Rockville Centre, NY, a town in the southwest of Nassau County and near the center of the Fourth District, which Gillen is hoping to represent in Congress next year.
This is the second time Gillen is running for the seat. It’s also the second time she is facing off against Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., who won the race by about 3.5 points in 2022 when Democrats lost several seats across New York state.
This year, however, Gillen and the two dozen or so Democratic volunteers attending the canvass launch emphasized that the campaign she is running in New York’s Fourth this year has little resemblance to the 2022 campaign.
“This race is very, very different, and this campaign is very different than 2022 because it's just a world of difference in terms of resources,” Gillen told Salon. “This race, I got in early, I've been consistently outraising my opponent to have the resources we need to run get our message out there to make sure we have the infrastructure we need to knock on all the doors that we need to tell people what's at the stake in this election.”
According to the most recent Federal Elections Commission filings, Gillen’s campaign has raised some $5.7 million and D’Esposito has raised about $4.1 million. This represents a dramatic shift from 2022, when Gillen raised about $1.7 million for her campaign and D’Esposito raised about $1.3 million.
The resources afforded the Gillen campaign go beyond just the fundraising totals, however. According to Gillen, the current campaign is the “most coordinated campaign” that she’s ever seen the Democrats mount in Nassau County and her campaign has been “working closely” with the state party’s effort, which they have dubbed the “coordinated campaign.”
The aim of the coordinated campaign, according to New York Democrats, was to take pressure off of House campaigns and to help organize a ground operation on their behalf. In New York’s Fourth, it appears to be working. The Gillen campaign says that it has already knocked on 100,000 doors in the district, a district where only 271,000 people voted in 2022.
Pamela Korn, a retired special education teacher from the district, said she has volunteered for Democratic campaigns for decades and had been out canvassing for Gillen 10 or 11 times. She said that the roughly two dozen volunteers who turned out Saturday were typical for a canvassing event, which the campaign has held a few times a week.
Korn said that over the past decade, Nassau County had become much more hospitable to Republican candidates and that the Democrats were caught off guard in 2022, disorganized, and not ready to respond to the Republican messages around crime and immigration.
Following along on canvassing on Saturday, there was an emphasis that Gillen was a moderate Democrat who valued compromise, and campaign literature prominently featured her support for “tackling the border crisis with bipartisan, commonsense solutions” and “investing in public safety.”
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Gillen’s campaign has also attacked D’Esposito for the Republicans' refusal to restore the state and local tax deductions, which had allowed taxpayers to deduct $10,000 of property, sales, or income taxes paid to a state or local government from their federal taxes. The issue is particularly relevant to areas like Nassau County but also served as a way for Gillen to discuss the historically unproductive 118th Congress and its Republican majority.
Following canvassers in Baldwin and Oceanside on Saturday, most voters who answered the door were Democrats. Canvassers were given a list of households to contact via the MiniVAN app, which included information about the residents of the household and their party registrations.
There were no Republicans on the list given to Korn or her canvassing partner, Debbie Simons, an East Rockaway resident who works as a business systems analyst. However, around one in five of the voters set to contact were unaffiliated and a handful of those unaffiliated were vocal supporters of former President Donald Trump.
In general, Korn and Simons said that these voters were polite but that they had some negative experiences with voters who called them “evil” for supporting Democrats or would yell “Trump” through their window while refusing to answer their doors.
It was also relatively common for unaffiliated voters to live in a politically divided household, most often with the women of the house registered with the Democratic Party and the men unaffiliated or with parents affiliated with a party and their children being unaffiliated.
Volunteers for the Gillen campaign also said that the vast majority of the volunteers lived in the district, though there were some New York City residents who came out to the swing district to volunteer, including some groups of New York University students.
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Among Democrats who contacted canvassers, most said that they planned to vote on Election Day and there was a sense of cautious optimism they expressed that they would be able to win back the seat. One unaffiliated voter who said he planned to vote for Democrats across the board described himself as being part of a “silent majority” in Nassau County, noting that Trump supporters tended to be more ostentatious in expressing their political leanings and that many of their neighbors supporting Gillen or Vice President Kamala Harris were anxious about putting signs on their lawns, for example.
According to state elections data, there are about 227,000 active Democratic voters in the district to the Republicans’ 155,000. The election will likely be decided by party turnout and how the 134,000 independent voters swing. Despite the registration gap, there were markedly more Trump signs, at least in the part of the district canvassers visited Saturday.
There are also around 32,000 Haitian Americans in the district, a demographic that might also prove decisive in the race.
D’Esposito's campaign has also been rocked in the past month by scandal after a New York Times report revealed that D’Esposito had hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter as a special assistant in his office, paying her $3,800 a month. D’Esposito also hired Devin Faas, whom he was having an affair with, paying her $2,000 a month.
Gillen expressed disappointment at how the standards for ethics in government in the area have shifted in the Trump era.
“People in this district, people in Nassau County, are very familiar with the historic corruption here. You know, not long ago, the Republican county executive went to jail. His deputy went to jail. His wife went to jail. A neighboring town Republican supervisor went to jail. His town attorney, I think, also went to jail,” Gillen said. “People know corruption is like bread and water to the Nassau Republican Party and this is just another example of it.”
While it’s not clear whether information about D’Esposito’s scandal was getting to voters in the Fourth District, it was clear that Gillen’s campaign is trying to center it in their criticism of D’Esposito.
“He’s taking out money and giving it to his friends and family," Gillen said. "I’m going to hire the most competent incredibly talented people I can to help me in my in delivering services to my residents. That’s what we should be doing with our government offices."
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