You’ve probably never heard of Glen Cove, N.Y., a small city of 28,000 people on the North Shore of Long Island. But you need to hear about what’s happening there. Little Glen Cove will be a major political battleground this month. An election is approaching that will test local conservatives’ attempts to overthrow a brand of local machine politics viewed as obsolete in most of America.
Nassau County’s Republican political machine is a historical anomaly, but a powerful one. It has been dominated since 1983 by county GOP chairman Joe Mondello. He derives his power from the legions of government patronage jobs he is able to dispense. Government jobs and contracts are given with strings attached, and taken away from those who are disloyal.
I’ve had my own run-ins with this system of government-by-spoils, as Michael Barone has chronicled in the Washington Examiner. The machine beat me every time.
When I ran for Congress on three different occasions in New York’s 4th Congressional District, they worked to keep me off of primary ballots. They threatened Republican and Conservative Party members who would have otherwise supported me publicly, intimidating them with potential loss of government jobs and contracts. In the end, the bosses steered the Republican nomination each time to hand-picked candidates who ran inferior campaigns and lost winnable general election races. The machine’s concern is not so much to win as to make sure no Republican takes office who isn’t beholden to them.
My own experience is insignificant compared to the destruction Mondello and his team have wrought upon the local Republican Party and the County government. Their vast pay-to-play empire has made multimillionaires of the most senior bosses. They have fostered a culture of sycophancy around them.
Good government is not even an afterthought for this crowd, and the result has been the most expensive local government in the country. A fiscal crisis has even saddled the county government with its own financial control board – paradoxically, Nassau is one of the nation’s wealthiest counties, yet it cannot balance its budget.
But back to Glen Cove: The new challenge to Mondello’s authority began there in 2013. Republicans unexpectedly won a city council majority for the first time in a generation. Under the circumstances, the race had not been on the bosses’ radar, and several independent-minded Republicans were elected to the council.
In 2014, Councilman Efraim Spagnoletti made the mistake of endorsing my candidacy for Congress. He was immediately ostracized, instructed to stop attending Nassau GOP leadership meetings. He and another Republican councilman, Tony Gallo, then drew the machine’s ire again by resisting efforts by Mayor Reggie Spinello to fill a city council vacancy with a Mondello ally, without any deliberation. They argued for a more open vetting process of a number of capable prospects who were interested in serving, regardless of whether they were party insiders.
The appointment was tabled, but Mondello would not be thwarted so easily. He set out to teach these officials a lesson.
Spagnoletti and five other non-machine Republicans are now being targeted in the Sept. 10 primary by a slate of Mondello-backed city council candidates. Gallo, meanwhile, went on offense, opting to challenge Mayor Spinello in the primary. If these anti-Mondello Republicans manage to hang on, Glen Cove will become a rare enclave for honest Republican and conservative officeholders in the county.
In New York, candidates are permitted to run on multiple party ballot lines. So, in addition to the Republican primary, the two slates will face each other in primaries for the Conservative Party and Independence Party nominations. But Gallo, Spagnoletti and the other independent Republicans will have to run as write-in candidates in those elections – much as I did when I ran for Congress. That’s because New York’s complex election laws do not allow Republicans seeking third-party lines to have their names printed on the ballot without permission from the third party’s leaders. And Mondello’s machine controls the county Conservative Party’s leadership, because they owe their municipal government jobs to him. Thus, the names of Gallo and the others won’t be appearing on the Conservative Party ballot.
Gallo won more votes in 2013 than any other candidate in Glen Cove, and the bosses are so afraid he will replicate his past electoral dominance that they got the local Democratic Party to cross-endorse Spinello, a social and fiscal liberal who belongs to the Independence Party.
So we now have the spectacle of Nassau County’s Republican chairman running a primary against the only Republican running for mayor of Glen Cove and endorsing the nominee chosen by the Democrats.
Sept. 10 will mark the first Republican primary in Glen Cove’s history, and the only Republican primary anywhere in Nassau County. The bosses are hoping for low turnout so that their foot soldiers can decide the election with as little public input as possible. If enough voters stay home, it might be the last time for a very long time that Nassau’s Republican voters actually get to choose their own party’s nominees.
Frank Scaturro, a partner at FisherBroyles LLP, is a former Counsel for the Constitution on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Republican and Conservative candidate for the House of Representatives in New York’s 4th Congressional District. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
