DeSantis a no-show at Zeldin fundraiser

Daily Point

Florida gov’s Zeldin absence on LI

The widely anticipated appearance of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, at a fundraiser for Lee Zeldin’s campaign for governor might have been Long Island’s political highlight of the weekend — had it come off Sunday as scheduled.

But it did not. Instead, the boldest boldfaced name at the Oyster Bay fundraiser was Dan Bongino, a right-wing commentator and podcaster best known of late for pushing voter-fraud conspiracy theories supportive of ex-President Donald Trump.

Investor and businessman Matthew Bruderman and his wife, Kerri Beth, hosted the $25,000-per-plate event, from which the House-member-turned-statewide-candidate expected to raise $1 million. Bruderman is best known as Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s appointed chairman of the board at the Nassau University Medical Center.

DeSantis’ surprise absence was attributed to his need to attend the funeral in Miami on Monday morning of Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent Jose Perez, who died Saturday. He’d been injured Aug. 2 responding to an alarm call when a pickup truck crashed into his unmarked official vehicle.

Apparently, DeSantis had already been in this part of the country earlier Sunday but flew back home hours before the Zeldin fete. According to an item on the New Jersey Globe political website (written by one-time Gov. Chris Christie associate David Wildstein), DeSantis arrived early Sunday in New Jersey for a fundraising event for his own November reelection campaign.

That was in the seaside borough of Deal, where Zeldin has a scheduled Sept. 4 fundraiser to be headlined by Trump, a potential rival of DeSantis. Trump did not endorse the New York nominee in the gubernatorial primary and may not in the general, either.

The DeSantis fundraiser in Deal had a different host than is scheduled for Zeldin’s visit there — Joe Cayre, who had also been one of Trump’s big regional fundraisers in the 2016 election.

Late last week, supporters of Zeldin’s Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, sought to play up the expected DeSantis event as a tie between two public officials they cast as extremists.

On Friday, Nassau County and state Democratic chairman Jay Jacobs held a press call in which he declared, “Lee Zeldin and Ron DeSantis are not just any Republicans. They are cut from the same cloth of the far right fringe who want to roll back fundamental rights and push an extreme agenda here on New Yorkers.

"Both are pushing an anti-abortion agenda that is far too dangerous for New Yorkers. Both hold views that are completely out of touch with New Yorkers’ priorities and both continue to spread dangerous election conspiracy theories that threaten our democracy.”

The Zeldin campaign is reportedly arranging to draw DeSantis’ support in New York later in the race.

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Talking Point

Looking to November

There are a lot of political crosscurrents poised to meet in the November elections for New York State Senate. Republicans are hoping that midterm dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden plus four years of full Democratic control in Albany will combine to their benefit, with the GOP clawing back seats or even breaking the Democratic upper chamber supermajority. Democrats hope to solidify their hold, pointing to some wins this summer in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal.

Then there’s redistricting, which didn’t tilt the lines as much as Democrats might have hoped. A court-appointed special master saw to that. But there still have been plenty of tweaks to districts across the state that could have an impact on November results.

That includes SD1, which encompasses the easternmost portions of Long Island. The district, currently held by Republican Anthony Palumbo, newly includes Stony Brook University and other left-leaning parts of the Three Village area. And it has lost a chunk of the GOP base in southern Brookhaven such as Moriches.

The district’s Democratic candidate — 22-year-old Skyler Johnson, a recent Stony Brook grad himself — is out with a poll suggesting that he can be competitive against the incumbent. The survey of 644 likely voters in the district found Palumbo at 46% and Johnson at 41%. But after messaging about abortion and Skyler’s young age, the Johnson numbers increased to the point that he was ahead by 1%.

The survey was conducted on landlines and cells by Public Policy Polling from Aug. 15-16, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

A Johnson campaign spokesman says the challenger will be heavily focusing on reproductive rights, going along with the leftward shift of the district: The campaign estimates that redistricting pushed SD1 from around a 1 percentage point margin for Biden in the old configuration to a 5 percentage point Biden margin.

But obstacles remain. Johnson, who works for the nonprofit New Hour, doesn’t have the highest name recognition, and the old SD1 was held for decades by a Republican, Kenneth LaValle. The new district still has a relatively even partisan breakdown and — tellingly — a high number of voters not registered with a party: some 83,000 Democrats, 74,000 Republicans, 5,000 Conservatives, and 68,000 “blanks.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

The weekly deluge

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Quick Points

A host of head-scratchers

• South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said there would be “riots in the street” if former President Donald Trump is prosecuted for his handling of confidential documents at Mar-a-Lago. Was that a prediction or a suggestion?
• Finland Prime Minister Sanna Marin — a 36-year-old leather jacket-wearing woman — is being criticized for a newly surfaced video of her dancing boisterously at a party. Americans were flabbergasted: We’ve never had a president who was 36, a woman, or a boisterous dancer.
• Democrats say they can now see a path to holding on to control of the House in November’s elections. They might be looking through some really high-prescription lenses, but they can see it.
• Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano posed in a Confederate uniform for a 2013-14 faculty photo at Army War College, where he once worked. No, there was nothing illegal about that, but elections are all about choices and that was a bad one.
• A 1985 Ford Escort once owned by Princess Diana sold for $857,000 at auction, which was truly stunning. Princess Di drove an Escort?
• A scuba diver was fined more than $9,000 by a Canadian judge for violating Canada’s Fisheries Act by swimming too close to a pod of killer whales. They also could have fined him for general stupidity.

— Michael Dobie @mwdobie

Programming Point

The Point will be back Tuesday, Sept. 6. Have a relaxing Labor Day.