Abortion rights battle in House race makes Long Island ‘the center of the world’

Republican Representative 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 D’Esposito’s re-election will help them maintain 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 sent heavyweights into the southern half of Nassau County, hoping a House win would propel their party’s agenda through Congress — and turn Long Island’s 4th District into a microcosm of national struggles over reproductive and transgender rights.

Nationally, Democrats are banking on their pledge to restore access to reproductive health care and the threat that Republicans will further curtail it if they win. In New York’s 4th Congressional District, polls show a majority of voters support abortion rights.

D’Esposito says she is a champion of women, vowing in an ad that she would never “ever” vote for a national abortion ban, while Gillen says her support for the GOP leadership suggests otherwise. The issue itself is on the ballot in the form of Proposition 1that would enshrine abortion rights and protections against discrimination in the state constitution — and has sparked a heated debate along party lines.

Nassau County voters are well aware that the fight is in their backyard. Olga Young, a Gillen supporter from Hempstead, told Gothamist that she is concerned that the increased restrictions could eliminate access to abortion for victims of rape or incest.

“It’s crazy,” Young said. “The government should have nothing to do with it.”

But Barbara Truglio, a D’Esposito supporter, said she thought the topic was blown out of proportion. “I think the abortion issue, everybody made such a big deal out of it just to be so political,” she said.

Gillen personalized the issue by 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 was scheduled to have an abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E.

“It’s a life-threatening 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’re not going to go to jail for it, because that procedure saved my life.”

It is currently illegal to provide some forms of abortion care in 41 states, including 13 with outright bans on the procedure, according to the data. compiled data by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization. The states with the most restrictive abortion laws now have fewer doctors work, and maternal mortality rates are rising.

New York is one of 10 states considering an amendment to protect access to abortion this election, as Democrats across the country sound the alarm on reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal in 2022 of Roe v. Wade. The New York ballot measure would grant constitutional protections against discrimination on several fronts, including pregnancy status and gender identity.

The latter has become a flashpoint in Long Island’s competitive district. Some of the strongest opponents of the measure are D’Esposito’s biggest supporters, who have taken up the GOP position. campaign at national level against transgender rights, blanketing 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, suggesting the amendment would change the makeup of children’s sports teams, has been debunked by legal experts, including the New York Bar Association. The measure only codifies existing protections against discrimination, and nothing in it would change laws related to children’s athletics.

For his part, Gillen blasted Republicans for making false claims about Proposition 1.

“It’s not about who gets to play on which sports teams, no matter how many times I 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 trying to look the toughest on border security and trying to associate each other with what they see as federal policy failures.

National refractories

The most recent Newsday/Siena College Poll gives Gillen a 12 percentage point lead over D’Esposito in the race. But the feeling on the ground is that of a much tighter race, in which both candidates believe they have a chance to win if they can turn out enough of their party faithful.

This may be why their biggest campaign events aren’t designed to attract a few moderate or unaffiliated voters, but 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 several trips to D’Esposito’s stump.

Locally, Nassau County’s vaunted Republican machine is regularly rousing its base, looking to prove it can hold this swing district despite not running out of steam in the most recent special election in February. It gathers weekly in a parking lot behind a TD Bank in Franklin Square, just across the street from the Nassau County Republican Party headquarters. A life-size inflatable elephant serves as the backdrop for a small scene where county party chairman Joe Cairo meets with candidates before parading around the district with campaign signs.

On a recent Saturday, many of the voters in attendance said they work for the city of Hempstead and Nassau County, which is controlled by elected Republicans. Many wore T-shirts for the local chapter of CSEA, the Civil Service Employees Association, a major union for government workers that supported D’Esposito in the race.

CSEA member Barbara Truglio said she is tired of seeing negative ads on TV about the race. She objected to critical coverage of D’Esposito, including recent coverage The New York Times story that found him he hired his longtime fiancee’s daughter to work in his district office while he hired a woman he was having an affair with.

“Are we going to destroy him and his family?” Truglio said.

She rejected how Democrats framed the risk to women’s health care and blamed her party for problems at the US southern border. She also suggested that voters will make up their minds based on where they get their news.

“We have the 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 are ignorant,” Truglio said. “And so they will vote, only with their ignorance.”

It was always a close 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 Hempstead Town Supervisor, putting the two at odds on local issues. They refer to him as “the number one obstructionist in chief.” He criticizes her as a “far-left progressive”.

Voters in the district have trended right in recent elections. While President Joe Biden won the district by more than 14 points in 2020, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin defeated Gov. Kathy Hochul there two years ago by nearly 6 points.

Those margins gave Democratic leaders a boost. Within a week earlier this month, three top leaders in the House of Parliament came out to support Gillen in the election campaign.

“This is one of the four seats we have to win to relinquish control of the House,” House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told a crowd at a packed rally in Hempstead. “No pressure on you, but one of the four places we have to win.”

As they left an auditorium in Kennedy Memorial Park, voters said they were feeling that pressure on the ground in their communities, where their neighbors are posting yard signs for Trump and other Republicans.

“It makes you sleep with one eye open,” said Anayo Michelle, a Gillen supporter and Democratic voter in 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 support Trump and other Republicans when they spreads debunked falsehoods about Haitian immigrants and denigrates Puerto Rico as a “floating garbage island”.

She said the prospect of change is “exciting, but it’s scary.”

Olga Young, a Hempstead community leader, said her support for Gillen is about making sure Vice President Kamala Harris can be effective in the White House if elected president. “They have to have the support of Congress, so it takes all of us to do that,” Young said.

For voters on both sides of the race, the national attention is a new phenomenon for the district — one brought on after victories there helped secure majority control for Republicans.

Former Republican Rep. Peter King, who represented a nearby district for nearly three decades, said all the recent visits by Democratic and Republican House leadership are a sign that this district is the new battleground.

“Whether the Democrats in Washington like it or the Republicans in Washington like it or not,” King said, “Long Island is the center of the world.”