First-term Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito and Democratic challenger Laura Gillen agree on one thing: Control of the U.S. House of Representatives runs through their Long Island district.
Republicans know that re-electing D’Esposito will help them retain their narrow control of Congress, while Democrats see Gillen as one of their best chances to flip a seat from red to blue. Both parties have sent heavyweights to the southern half of Nassau County, hoping a victory in the House will propel their party’s agenda through Congress — and turning Long Island’s 4th District into a microcosm of national fights over reproductive and transgender rights.
On the national level, Democrats are running on their commitment to restoring reproductive health care access, and on the threat that Republicans will further limit it if they win. In the 4th Congressional District in New York, polls show a majority of voters support abortion rights.
D’Esposito says he’s a champion of women, promising in an ad that he will never “ever” vote for a national abortion ban, while Gillen argues that his support for Republican Party leadership suggests otherwise. The issue itself is on the ballot in the form of Proposition 1, which would enshrine abortion rights and anti-discrimination protections in the state constitution — and has invigorated a fierce debate along party lines.
Nassau County voters are well aware that the fight is taking place in their backyard. Olga Young, a Gillen supporter in Hempstead, told Gothamist she’s worried that increasing restrictions could eliminate abortion access for victims of rape or incest.
“That’s crazy,” said Young. “The government should have nothing to do with that.”
But Barbara Truglio, a D’Esposito supporter, said she thought the topic was blown out of proportion. “I think the abortion issue, everybody’s made such a big thing out of it just to be so political,” she said.
Gillen has made the issue personal, describing an experience nearly 20 years ago when her doctors discovered that her third child, a girl, did not have a heartbeat. Gillen was in her second trimester and needed to have an abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E.
“It’s a life-risking procedure,” she said at a roundtable at her campaign office in Freeport. “We need doctors who know how to do these things and we need doctors to know if they train to learn how to do these procedures, they won’t go to jail for it, because that procedure saved my life.”
It is now illegal to provide some forms of abortion care in 41 states, including 13 with a complete ban on the procedure, according to data compiled by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization. The states with the most restrictive abortion laws now have fewer doctors working, and maternal mortality rates are rising.
New York is one of 10 states considering an amendment to protect abortion access this election, as Democrats across the country raise the alarm over reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. New York’s ballot measure would grant constitutional protections against discrimination on multiple fronts, including pregnancy status and gender identity.
The latter has become a flashpoint in the competitive Long Island district. Some of the loudest opponents of the measure are D’Esposito’s biggest supporters, who have taken up the GOP’s nationwide campaign against rights for transgender people, covering the district with lawn signs telling people to vote no to “protect girls’ sports.”
“We can’t keep them in our headquarters because everyone wants them,” D’Esposito said of the signs.
That message, which suggests the amendment would change the makeup of children’s sports teams, has been debunked by legal experts, including the New York City Bar Association. The measure only codifies existing non-discrimination protections, and nothing in it would change laws related to kids’ athletics.
Gillen in turn has criticized Republicans for making false claims about Proposition 1.
“It’s not about who gets to play on what sports teams, no matter how many times they say it,” she said. “They can read the text. That’s not what it’s about.”
It’s not the only national debate reverberating in this race. On immigration, D’Esposito and Gillen are striving to seem the toughest on border security and trying to associate each other with what they frame as federal policy failures.
National spotlight
The latest Newsday/Siena College poll gives the advantage in the race to Gillen with a 12 percentage point lead over D’Esposito. But the feeling on the ground is that of a much closer race, where both candidates believe they have a shot of winning if they can turn out enough of their party’s faithful.
That may be why their biggest campaign events are not designed to appeal to the handful of moderate or unaffiliated voters, but instead to energize their respective bases. Former President Donald Trump held another rally in the 4th congressional district last month, and House Speaker Mike Johnson has made multiple trips to stump for D’Esposito.
Locally, the vaunted Nassau County Republican machine is regularly pumping up its base, seeking to prove they can hold on to this swing district despite falling short in the most recent special election back in February. They gather weekly in a parking lot behind a TD Bank in Franklin Square, just across the street from the Nassau County Republican Party’s headquarters. A life-size inflatable elephant serves as backdrop to a small stage where the county party chairman, Joe Cairo, rallies with candidates before fanning out across the district with campaign signs.
On a recent Saturday, many of the voters in attendance said they worked for the Town of Hempstead and Nassau County, which is controlled by Republican elected officials. Many wore t-shirts for the local chapter of CSEA, the Civil Service Employees Association, a major union for government workers that has backed D’Esposito in the race.
Barbara Truglio, a CSEA member, said she was sick of seeing negative campaign ads on TV about the race. She objected to critical coverage of D’Esposito, including a recent New York Times story that found he hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work in his district office while also hiring a woman with whom he was having an affair.
“We’re just going to destroy him and his family?” Truglio said.
She rejected how Democrats have framed the risk to women’s health care and blamed their party for issues at the U.S. southern border. She also suggested that voters will make up their minds based on where they get their news.
“We have media, we have newspapers, radio stations that don’t hear the other side. So people really don’t know what’s going on in the world. They’re ignorant to it,” said Truglio. “And so that’s the way they’re going to vote, just with their ignorance.”
It’s always been a tight contest, even when the candidates faced off two years ago. D’Esposito, a retired NYPD detective, defeated Gillen in 2022 by 3.5 percentage points. At the time, D’Esposito was on the Hempstead Town Council, while Gillen was the Town of Hempstead’s supervisor, putting the two at odds on local issues. She’s referred to him as her “number one obstructer in chief.” He blasts her as a “far-left progressive.”
Voters in the district have been trending rightward in recent elections. While President Joe Biden won the district by more than 14 points in 2020, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin beat Gov. Kathy Hochul there two years ago by nearly 6 points.
Those margins have brought Democratic leaders out in force. In the span of a week earlier this month, three top House leaders came out to support Gillen on the campaign trail.
“This is one of just four seats that we need to win in order to flip control of the House of Representatives,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told the crowd at a packed get-out-the-vote rally in Hempstead. “No pressure on y’all, but one of four seats we need to win.”
As they streamed out of an auditorium at Kennedy Memorial Park, voters said they were feeling this pressure on the ground in their communities, where their neighbors post yard signs for Trump and other Republicans.
“It makes you sleep with one eye open,” said Anayo Michelle, a Gillen supporter and Democratic voter from the district who described her background as African, Latino, African American and Caribbean.
Michelle said she struggles to understand how some of her neighbors can back Trump and other Republicans when the party spreads debunked falsehoods about Haitian immigrants and denigrates Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
She said the prospect of change is “exciting, but it’s frightening.”
Olga Young, a community leader in Hempstead, said her support for Gillen is about making sure Vice President Kamala Harris can be effective in the White House if elected president. “She has to have the support of Congress, and so that takes all of us to do that,” said Young.
For voters on either side of the race, the national attention is a new phenomenon for the district — one brought on after wins there helped deliver majority control to Republicans.
Former Republican Rep. Peter King, who represented a nearby district for nearly three decades, said all the recent visits from Democratic and Republican House leadership are a sign that this district is the new battleground.
“Whether Democrats in Washington or Republicans in Washington like it or not,” said King, “Long Island is the center of the world.”
By Brigid Bergin , gothamist.com , News ,
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, Gothamist , Abortion rights battle in House race makes Long Island ‘the center of the world’