Lee Zeldin and his boss-- undermining AmericaWhen I lived there is the 1960s, Suffolk County was still to some extent a rural backwater. It was still the biggest potato-growing county in the U.S., although Idaho was coming on strong. I was once dragged in front of a grand jury in Riverhead, the county seat and, judging by the cast of characters and their values, I could have easily have been in Kansas.
How smart could Lara Trump be? After all, she married the dumbest member of the Trump clan, their Fredo. Lara Yunaska was born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1982, and has only ever lived in Manhattan and North Carolina... but she's been to the Hampton's frequently enough to have a general idea where Long Island is.
I went to college at Stony Brook University in Suffolk County. Before I started school there, Democrat Otis Pike was the congressman. And when I graduated in 1969 he was still Suffolk's representative in Congress, a job he kept for another decade. I was never a big fan. He was too conservative and way too militaristic-- and at the height of the Vietnam War. When he retired he was succeeded by a far right crackpot, William Carney, best known for having been the first member of the Conservative Party to serve in the House.
I was born in Brooklyn. When I was two, my parents, about to have a second child, decided to move to Long Island, where the schools were supposed to be better. I think that's part of what built Long Island-- a euphemistic way of talking about "white flight." First stop was Valley Stream, basically a walk from the Queens County line and then after a few years to Roosevelt, habit deeper into Nassau County.
Early this morning, Peter King-- first elected to Congress from the south shore of Long Island in 1992-- announced, on his Facebook page, that he won't be running for reelection. The announcement didn't say anything you wouldn't expect from a lock-step Trump enabler.
Yesterday we took a look at some of the prospective 2020 Democratic congressional primaries in New York City, based on a NY Times piece by Shane Goldmacher. I promised to finish up today with a look at the two possible Long Island primaries. I'll describe both.
New Dem Kathleen Rice and progressive Siela BynoeKathleen Rice was one of the key instigators in the New Dem mini-rebellion against Nancy Pelosi late in 2018. Seth Moulton gets almost all the blame but it really was Rice who acted the part of the poisonous viper slithering around hissing in peoples' ears. You've probably heard a lot about Moulton getting a primary challenge but much less about Rice's.
Alexa Sheryll is Duwayne Gregory's campaign manager. Their primary is a week from Tuesday, June 26. Alexa explained this week that she's heard that "a lot of people don’t know exactly where the money they give to campaigns goes. "As DuWayne’s campaign manager," she said, "I can tell you exactly where your donation goes... With our campaign, money isn’t going to some shadowy super PAC fund. It’s going directly to our efforts to bring real leadership to NY-02." She pointed to three priorities they need to fund between now and the 26th:
According to a Gallup survey released a week ago, Trump's overall jon approval is 38% and his disapproval is 56%. What does that tell us for the midterms 9 months from now? Not all that much, primarily because despite Trump's overall poor showing, it's in states that senators and governors are elected and in congressional districts where House members are reelected, not nationally.
