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Damage Control
Nassau County, New York, where I currently live, is a purple place: while it has trended Democratic-blue in recent years, it had long been a Republican-red stronghold — the kind of suburbia that the President has warned will disappear if Joe Biden is elected and “those” people get a foothold. If anything historically defines Nassau County, it is that its agricultural past of small-scale potato farming was supplanted in the mid-20th century by a real-estate boon defined by “redlining”, or making sure that “those” people — blacks, latinx, immigrants, the poor — stay within their geographic corrals.
Things have changed significantly in the past 20 years or so. Local Republican government had been dogged by scandals and mismanagement, and on a national level, a Republican regime presided over the 2008 Great Recession, the severest economic downturn since the 1930s. Its residents began voting Democratic. At present two of Nassau’s House districts, the third and fourth, are represented by Democrats. The second district, containing a small slice of Nassau but mostly located in the adjacent county, Suffolk, is represented by a Republican who is retiring: the 2020 race is a close one. But many towns and villages are run by Republicans, and the county is pretty much split down the middle, with 383,709 registered Democrats, 331,282 Republicans, and 36,717 Independents as of 2020. With this kind of demographic, elections can go…
