How did George Santos, a Republican newly elected to New York’s Third Congressional District, on Long Island, get away with running for office with an almost completely fictitious résumé? The answer is a combination of Democratic complacency, Republican extremism, and media decline in a House district that I know intimately.
On Election Night, Republicans swept all four of Long Island’s House seats. Democrats didn’t realize the severity of the loss, however, until
The New York Times revealed that Santos had lied about his education, work experience, philanthropic pursuits, and finances, among other things. This was no familiar case of a politician embellishing around the edges: Santos appeared to have made himself up. On Monday, he
admitted that he’d engaged in serial falsehoods, but said that he intended to join the House majority anyway.
I represented parts of Long Island in Congress from 2001 to 2017, including, in my final two terms, most of the current NY-3 (gerrymandering has carved up the district three times since 2000). I also chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. I’ve shaken a lot of hands in NY-3.
The district has a bit of glamour, here and there, if you look closely enough. Sean Hannity and Billy Joel are neighbors on Centre Island, which juts like a fishhook into the Long Island Sound and can be reached only by bridge (or, if you’re those two, helicopter). Their disparate political attitudes reflect the ideological diversity of the area, which swings gently from red to blue and back again.
But by and large, the district is as normal as Santos is extreme. It’s a place of strip malls and nail salons, good pizza and chain restaurants, white picket fences and PTA meetings. It begins at the outer edges of Queens, crosses the upper-middle-class communities of North Hempstead and Oyster Bay, and finally plunges down to contain America’s first suburb: Levittown. The district is
about 66 percent white, 19 percent Asian, 11 percent Latino, and 3 percent Black.
In every poll in every election I ran in, voters were left-of-center on social issues, right-of-center on taxes and spending, and concerned about preserving their quality of life. They hovered quietly near the center, and they were more likely to watch the local-news affiliates to check weather and traffic than to be glued to Fox News or MSNBC. The people I represented did not treat partisanship like a sport or an essential aspect of their personalities.
That seemed healthy, but their mellowness could sometimes border on apathy. My town-hall meetings were always sparsely attended. Typically, fewer than a dozen constituents would show up, despite my staff’s best efforts to get the word out.
Voter disconnection must be part of the explanation for why Santos won. Voters in NY-3 say they value integrity and honesty, and I believe they do. But they weren’t on the lookout for a huckster politician; they didn’t think that could happen here, because it hadn’t before.
Moderate Democratic candidates have fared well in the region since 2000. Had Joe Biden run in the redrawn NY-3 map in 2020, he would have won by 8.5 points instead of 10.5, according to
Politico. This year, most political observers viewed the district as naturally Democratic, especially against a Republican who’d lost his last election. That’s what I mean by Democratic complacency: the complacency of the establishment.