The Republican Party took control over Long Island’s two counties after GOP candidate Ed Romaine defeated Democrat David Calone to become Suffolk County executive.
The GOP now is in charge of both Suffolk and Nassau counties with Mr. Romaine’s win. Election data shows that he took 56 percent of the vote.
“We crushed it, baby. We crushed it,” Mr. Romaine said, local media reported. “As your county legislative executive, I plan on bringing all of Suffolk together,” he added Tuesday.
His Democrat predecessor, Steve Bellone, had to relinquish his seat due to term limits.
Voters, he added, are angry over illegal immigration, taxes, and public safety in New York state. “Hard-working people are seeing their taxpayer dollars going for services to foreigners they don’t get,” he said.
“The last time Suffolk had a Republican county executive, I was a teenager,” said former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who ran for governor last year, during an event on Tuesday. “This is an enormous flip of a Long Island suburb from blue to red,” he also said.
He said that “independents and blanks (voters not registered with a party) voting Republican ... you’re even seeing Democrats voting Republican,” reported the New York Post. “The electorate is not happy with what they see coming out of the city. There are issues like the migrant crisis and cashless bail,” he added.
The former GOP lawmaker also said that pro-Hamas sentiment amid the Israel–Hamas conflict is “waking up the electorate” and claimed that “we see pro-Hamas supporters vandalizing property or intimidating Jewish students,” he said.
With Mr. Romaine’s win, it means the GOP occupies all county-wide seats in Suffolk and Nassau counties, including executive, district attorney, and comptroller offices.
He added: “A county executive and county legislator have enormous power to talk to voters, to raise money.”
But outside of Long Island, Democrats and pro-abortion advocates notched several electoral victories on Tuesday, including in Ohio and Kentucky. In Ohio, a state that voted for former President Donald Trump by 8 percentage points in the 2020 presidential election, voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, Edison Research projected.
In Virginia, Democrats won control of both legislative chambers, according to the Associated Press. The result was a rebuke for Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, who campaigned hard for Republican candidates and sought to unify them around his proposal to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Mr. Youngkin poured millions of dollars from his political action committee into the race, and a Republican victory would likely have amplified calls from some party donors for him to step into the presidential race.
And in Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear won a second four-year term, Edison projected, defying the conservative lean of a state that voted for President Trump by more than 25 percentage points in 2020.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, Republican Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves won a second term over his Democratic challenger, Brandon Presley, a former mayor and the second cousin of singer Elvis Presley, according to Edison projections. Mr. Presley raised more funds than Mr. Reeves but faced an uphill climb in a state that voted for President Trump over President Joe Biden by more than 16 percentage points in 2020.
