Will abortion resonate with NY voters next year?

Daily Point

Calone's abortive $300,000 campaign

Abortion was a big issue that successfully impacted Tuesday’s election results for pro-choice advocates in Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere around the nation, but not so much on Long Island. The lack of impact here left local politicos wondering how much the abortion issue may play out in New York State during next year’s election when voters face a referendum designed to enshrine in the state constitution current laws keeping abortion legal.

In Long Island’s biggest race Tuesday, for Suffolk County executive, Democrat Dave Calone highlighted the abortion issue in video ads against Republican Ed Romaine, which appeared in the final weeks of the campaign. The ads' purpose was to energize female and young voters, especially independents. But Romaine still won by a wide margin.

A Calone insider told The Point the abortion ads reached their intended voter group, but were far from effective in swaying the final outcome. “They did [their] job, just not well enough,” said the insider.

About $300,000 was spent by Calone supporters on video ads for cable TV, streamers and social media that criticized Romaine’s anti-abortion protests decades ago and called him an extremist who couldn’t be trusted. It was about 10% of the total $3 million spent on media by the Calone side during the campaign. Most of Calone’s media buys, including mailers, were aimed at Romaine’s positions on taxes, crime and alleged Brookhaven Town corruption where Romaine has served most recently as town supervisor.

Top local Republicans and Democrats said Long Island voters seemed unaffected by the national abortion controversy ignited after last year’s U.S. Supreme Court overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which had made pre-viability abortion legal. While other states have sought to ban or limit abortion, New York has kept intact its expansive laws allowing abortion. Unlike voters in states where abortion rights have been banned or restricted, Long Islanders seemed to recognize Tuesday that there was no current threat to abortion access here.

“That’s when I knew they were in trouble,” Suffolk GOP chairman Jesse Garcia said about Calone’s ads late in the campaign. Garcia recalled that Gov. Kathy Hochul used abortion as a political anvil without much result against her unsuccessful GOP challenger, former Rep. Lee Zeldin, during last year's gubernatorial race.

“We went into the teeth of abortion in 2022 and it did not move the needle once here in Suffolk County,” said Garcia.

The Suffolk GOP chief, who masterminded Romaine's strategy and ad campaign, said abortion wasn’t something high on his agenda.

“It’s the law of the land” in New York, explained Garcia about the state's laws guaranteeing almost unrestricted access to abortion.

Making it a political issue didn’t seem effective for the Democrats in Suffolk, he said. “That never moved them [Long Island voters] when the Supreme Court took its action in 2022, and it didn’t this year.” He also said that “we did not see any drawdowns in our numbers” among women or young voters because of Calone's abortion ads against Romaine.

However, next year, the abortion issue will be on New York’s ballot with a referendum brought by pro-choice advocates to enshrine current reproductive protections into the state constitution. Those deep into the abortion wars expect to rev up their campaigns regarding this ballot question in 2024.

Supporters of the referendum have pledged to raise $20 million next year, hoping that will also boost overall turnout, particularly among young and female voters. Though it’s not clear how GOP leaders in suburbs like Long Island will handle this referendum at election time, those against abortion vow to be out there fighting it.

"It's worse than Roe v. Wade, because it takes away parental rights," Anne LeBlanc, chairwoman of the Albany-based nonprofit New York State Right to Life Committee, told The Point about next year's referendum. She said anti-abortion forces will particularly emphasize "parental rights" in the dispute over whether teenagers should be allowed to have abortions.

LeBlanc said her group will campaign against the referendum through social media ads and some phone-calling. But she said her group could not afford TV ads.

Coming off Tuesday’s election results on Long Island, it remains to be seen whether any sum of money can make an impact on the issue of abortion here.

— Thomas Maier thomas.maier@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Tough choice

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Reference Point

Sold on the promise of change

In the immediate aftermath of an election, there is a tendency among some pundits to overstate the results, to read too much into a bunch of numbers before history has a chance to take its course.

Newsday’s editorial board found itself at such a tempting moment in 1960 after a contentious presidential election that saw Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts defeat Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. Though the popular vote was extremely tight, Kennedy’s Electoral College margin was substantial, and the board saw significance in the result.

In a Nov. 9, 1960 piece titled simply “President Kennedy,” the board wrote that “the people of the United States yesterday decided to break with the stand-pat past” and noted that JFK’s victory “reflects the concern of the citizens at the dwindling prestige of this country, and embodies a mandate for a new and more vigorous approach to the problems the nation faces, chief among them national defense and foreign affairs. The new broom has been ordered to sweep clean.”

Kennedy’s youth, energy, and soaring rhetoric had energized large swaths of the country during the campaign and were a sharp contrast to the relative solidity of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nixon. Newsday’s board was among those who embraced Kennedy’s promise.

“President Eisenhower took office as a great national hero and will leave it as a much-loved man,” the board wrote, “but for a long time it has been obvious that his approach to world affairs fell short in vigor and decisiveness of what was needed. We have indeed lost prestige; we have indeed slackened our pace.”

Some might detect a modern-day echo of those 63-year-old worries about a lack of vigor and declining prestige. Now, as then, a change in the party that has long occupied the White House often is taken to be “a good and cleansing result,” as the Newsday board put it in 1960, the metaphorical twin of the “new broom” it saw in Kennedy.

But the board’s concluding sentiment, accepted through most of our nation’s history, was a jarring contrast to recent events.

“In America, once the election is over, we are all united in the desire to make this country greater than it is,” the board wrote, “and to move forward boldly into the new era that both challenges us and will offer us the ultimate test of greatness.”

As it turned out, Kennedy indeed was tested. The Cuban missile crisis, the beginning of conflict in Vietnam, the space race, and the continuing plagues of discrimination and poverty were fierce challenges. Whatever one thought about Kennedy’s success in meeting them, the allure of his youthful aspiration was such that the nation was shocked and traumatized barely three years later when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Voters choose their leaders, but their legacies are molded by events that follow. On Nov. 9, 1960, the board said Kennedy had won “in these perilous times.”

Sadly, it was a more prescient judgment than the board intended.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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