Former Rep. Pete King talks about how the GOP took back Long Island

Former Rep. Pete King has seen Long Island Republicans, particularly in Nassau County, at their zenith and their nadir. He was a Hempstead town council member in the late 1970s and Nassau County comptroller in the 1980s until his 1992 election to Congress, in the days when then-U.S. Sen. Al D’Amato dominated the island and Republicans easily carried most races. He was there when former Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy captured a longtime GOP seat and Tom Suozzi was elected Nassau County executive, ushering in two decades of a Democratic rise in the region. King spoke with City & State about why the pendulum has swung back to Republicans in recent years as we look back to the past 20 years in Long Island politics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How has Long Island politics changed in the past 20 years?

So it’s been an overall change, not dramatically, but, you know, a significant change in demographics, and that obviously affects the politics. As recently as I guess 2017, 2018, every countywide office except for county clerk was Democratic – county executive, district attorney and comptroller. Town of North Hempstead was Democratic. City of Long Beach remained Democratic and even the town of Hempstead, for the first time in, I guess, 100 years, maybe forever, I don’t know, had a Democratic supervisor, and so that was the most significant change politically. Over the last eight to nine years, the Republican Party organization has dramatically strengthened. People like Joe Margiotta put it together originally. Joe Mondello retained it, and basically what they had done was they had, especially with Margiotta originally, they just coalesced the natural majority coalition that was already there. I mean, whether it was the old timers who had been there forever, who were historically Republican, or the people moving in from the city who had left the city because of Democratic policies and were inclined to vote Republican, they put together a really solid Republican working majority over those years, and not always, but certainly for the most part, it was a Republican county. In one of Reagan’s elections, it was kind of the highest percentage in the country or something, or close to it, the winning percentage. So anyway, that was there. But then that began to slowly but significantly change.

Beginning in 2019, because 2018 was a devastating year for Republicans – 2017 and 2018 were devastating – when we took back the town of Hempstead, now every countywide position is Republican. Each of the towns, including North Hempstead, actually for the first time since 1989, North Hempstead has gone Republican. The city of Glen Cove, even though it has a large Democratic majority, that’s gone Republican. We have the mayor and the majority of the council members. Long Beach, for the first time since 1971, or maybe since ever.

Why did the Republican Party bounce back in Nassau County?

Now this is, I think, largely because of Joe Cairo. He more than anyone realizes this is going to be tough to maintain, so it’s constantly working, because I think at the last count there’s 85,000 more Democrats in Nassau County than Republicans. We’ve had to really work to make sure we get out every Republican vote and convince as many independents and Democrats that Republicans best represent them. They’re working harder than ever. But right now, Joe Cairo has rebuilt it and is holding it together.

But he will tell you that this is not like it was in the ’60s, where the party was pretty much going to stay together anyway. I mean, now it’s constantly working on it, constant attention to detail, constant constituent service, constant polling.

How much have the changing dynamics of the Democratic Party helped the GOP on Long Island?

It has definitely helped us. I mean, these are all estimates and guesses, and somewhat educated guesses. That’s what our polling shows. That’s what we hear anecdotally, and why, if you notice, in Bruce Blakeman’s campaign, he’s campaigning almost as much against (Zohran) Mamdani as he against as he’s against (Kathy) Hochul, which is why Trump embracing Mamdani doesn’t help us at all.

What led to the low point for Long Island Republicans in the first decades of the 21st century?

Part of it was the changing demographics. It could have been partly also the Republicans were taking it for granted and weren’t quite ready for the change that we had to be more aggressive, be more out there than just call it in. Also, you had at the national level, you had the recession, you had the unpopularity of the Iraq War nationally, and then locally, it just seemed like we weren’t able to keep up with that, to stay ahead of that.

Is it a coincidence that the 2022 and 2026 Republican gubernatorial nominees came out of Long Island?

I think it shows that this is where the basic strength, and also the basic strength in swing areas. I mean, Nassau and Suffolk, maybe Suffolk is a little more Republican than Nassau, but they also had Democratic county executives and Democratic DAs, and now they’ve gone Republican. So they are large concentrations of voters in Nassau and Suffolk, and they are the swing voters. So if you can swing voters, that’s like doubling up your vote. So you have two solid, two heavily populated areas, which have gone from Democrat to Republican in the last few years. That gives you a great base to start from, and so that I think is the main reason.

Nassau Republicans have historically been known for having one of the strongest county organizations in the country. Why is that?

Really, this sounds like a cliche, but really strong leadership. This is before my time, but they talk about the guys from the ’30s and ’40s and early ’50s when it was almost entirely Republican, but they still built up the organization. Whether it’s just being active in those communities and just keeping somebody out of central headquarters monitoring everything, and then probably the newer leaders. I say new; it’s old now. But people like Joe Carlino, who (when he was) the speaker of the Assembly, he was the county chairman. Then really fast forward to Margiotta, who was there from I guess ’67 to ’83, and he was again full time. His whole life was being Republican leader, and he would monitor everything. I mean, everything went through Joe Margiotta. I remember when I was hired. I’d been working in the city. I was hired as a deputy county attorney in Nassau County, and I got called to Republican headquarters, met with Joe Margiotta, and no shakedown, nothing like that. But basically saying right now you’re in a position where your job depends on the county staying Republican, and we expect you to face up to that and do what you have to do to get out there, be active in your community, become a committeeman, that type of thing. So that was the type that Joe Margiotta was. Now, I don’t want that to sound sinister. It was just a guy who was there (who) was really on top of it. And fortunately, after that, I mean, Joe Mondello did a good job. I think he tapered off a bit near the end, but he kept the organization going. Now, when I say it slipped, I mean, we slipped again with the demographic changing the way they were in probably any other county. It would have shifted a lot more. I mean, we still had many Republican officeholders, but not like it was before, not like it is now.

What impact do you see people like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having on Long Island?

I mean, Mamdani is probably our strongest asset, and it’s probably even more so in Nassau than Suffolk, because Nassau is right next to the city and we probably have a higher percentage of people commuting to the city. But just being right on the city border, Mamdani is much more visible, much more of a viable threat to us.

Like I remember when we used to run in the – I’m dating myself now – late ’70s, early ’80s, there’s those large apartment houses right on the Queens border up there by Kings Point, and we used to have a Republican candidate stand just on the Nassau side of the border and say, “Elect us, and we’ll keep these monstrosities out of Nassau County.” Now you just can find 1,000 things that Mamdani has said that would enrage a majority of voters in Nassau County – Democrat or Republican. So he is very, very productive for Republicans. But again, we have to be careful. We don’t overshoot the mark. We don’t overplay it. Just really take what he says and apply it to Nassau County, and we’ll do well. And again, how long will that last? AOC is not really threatening. I don’t mean that she would be popular in Nassau, but she has to engage the same level of antagonism as Mamdani does.