On an unseasonably mild November day when the temperature hit a record 70 degrees on Long Island, both campaigns for Suffolk County executive were hoping that the warm weather would also heat up the voter turnout, which historically is very cool in an off-year election like this one.
With hours still to go before the polls closed, there were some encouraging signs that slightly more voters than expected were trooping to the polls but it was too soon to tell what the final tally would be. With the sun still shining, neither candidate was having a picnic. They were still trying to close the sale, one voter at a time.
Suffolk County Treasurer Angie Carpenter, the Republican nominee, was going from booth to booth at the Peter Pan Diner in Bay Shore with a pot of fresh coffee in each hand, engaging in some last-minute retail politics on her behalf, along with offering the customers a choice between caf and decaf.
The manager Georgia Lentzeres was amused to have her help out, saying that “Angie’s been a customer here for 30 years!”
Carpenter told the Long Island Press she’d been a supermarket checker but never a waitress. At one point as she was talking to two people by a television monitor, her image came on screen in a news report about the campaign trail. Asked how it felt to see herself up there, she laughed, “It is very weird!”
How convincing she was at the diner remains to be seen. Troy Quinn, who runs a chimney sweep business in Mastic, was seated with his partner Vito Malvone. Quinn thought she was a “nice person” and might support her, especially when it came time later to take his mother to the polls. An older man seated with his wife chatted amiably with Carpenter but after she moved on, he admitted that he’d already voted the straight Democratic Party line.
Carpenter was in the heart of the district she’d represented in the county legislature before she became county treasurer, her “home territory.” And she exuded confidence and energy. She’d been up since 4 a.m., went to the Babylon Village train station at 5 a.m. and, as she said, she’d had “no nap yet.”
Earlier that day, in what had become a tradition for her, she had lunch with the same friend she’s had lunch with on every Election Day since she got into politics. If she wins the election, she’d set a new tradition as the first woman county executive.
At the Babylon Village train station her Democratic challenger Steve Bellone, the Babylon town supervisor, was chatting up the drivers parked in their vehicles waiting for commuters to get off the east-bound train. One woman told Bellone she was picking up her son from New York University who was taking the LIRR from the city just so he could vote for him.
Bellone had started the day at the Ronkonkoma train station where he’d launched his race nine months ago. He said this race has not been traditional in any way, in part because he thought his Republican opponent would be the incumbent county executive, Steve Levy, not the treasurer, Angie Carpenter. He said he was encouraged by the weather, and the turnout he’d seen so far in his hometown was “heavy.”
“This is my home,” Bellone said. “This is the perfect place for me to end my campaign.” He expected the returns to come in “very late,” considering the trouble the board of elections had with the new system last November.
So that means his two daughters, aged two and three, would be in bed long before they knew whether their dad was going to get a new job.
“We’ll be celebrating with them tomorrow hopefully!” Bellone said.