Laura Gillen should have won a congressional seat in 2022—but the New York Democratic Party was in shambles. This time, her creepy ex-cop opponent is going down.
Supporters at a rally for for Lauren Gillen, Democratic congressional candidate in New York, in Hempstead, New York, in October 2024.(Adam Gray / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Freeport, New York—My train to NY-04 Long Island Democratic candidate Laura Gillen’s Latino canvass kickoff on Saturday got in a couple of minutes late. As I walked over, I was worried. A block away, I saw no one going in or out of the building where the event was being held. The windows were dark.
That’s because it was a packed house, and I barely fit in the door (though at least a dozen people streamed in after me). Harlem Representative Adriano Espaillat was at the podium, telling the crowd of a couple hundred, “The road to the majority for the House starts right here.”
“Hakeem Jeffries, our speaker, starts right here!”
“Yes we can!” turned into “¡Si se puede!” turned into “When we fight, we win!” and into “We’re not going back!” It was a mash-up of the excitement of 2008 and 2024. This was a Latino outreach event, but it was hugely multiracial. A Black woman approached me certain I’d come on her bus from New York City. (If only; I took the LIRR.)
Espaillat was preaching values. “Very often people make us think out there that the Democrats have no values. We have values! We have the American values. A woman’s right to choose. A worker’s ability to be part of a union. A good public education system: Yes, we need a strong border, but we need to greet that mom who walks 2,000 miles to knock on our door…. That’s our values. We have a big-tent approach to politics. Our strength is our diversity.”
Then we went back to the 1960s. “The whole world is watching! Europe, Africa, and Asia are watching!”
When Gillen took the stage, she followed up: “People are coming from all over New York State and beyond to make sure we flip this seat. Each and every one of you will help us make sure we have a win,” Gillen told them.
“The American dream is out of grasp for so many people,” she said. “We need an America based on love and compassion, not hate.” Then the chanting began: “We are not going back!” Gillen added: “We need to make sure we are living in 2025, and not under Project 2025.”
This is a 2022 rematch, one of at least five races New York Democrats fumbled only to see their party lose control of the House. That year, Gillen, a Democrat who’d unexpectedly won a Town of Hempstead executive seat in 2020, squared off against a GOP Hempstead executive, Anthony D’Esposito, and was expected to win. She lost by 10,000 votes.
But today, much-maligned New York Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs is ebullient standing next to Gillen. “This incredible team has already knocked 235,000 doors,” he told the audience. “And when we fight we win!… ¡Si se puede!”
The district had already had Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and Representative Tom Suozzi rallying union members and Attorney General Letitia James canvassing Black churchgoers (she also rallied union members on Saturday morning). Representative Ritchie Torres visited heavily Jewish Five Towns and Representative Nydia Velázquez had the great timing of coming the day Trump’s comic insult dog, Tony Hinchcliffe, called Puerto Rico “a floating isle of garbage.” I heard about that in every corner of the room. Freeport is 45 percent Hispanic.
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“It’s a very different race from 2022,” Gillen told me later. “We had fewer resources. We are doing constituency-driven organizing…. Labor has been great. They’ve been with me since the beginning. Labor is the backbone of the community.”
Gladys Linares didn’t volunteer for Gillen until this year. “I voted for her of course! I’m a lifelong Democrat!” But this year, she went on, “it matters. I have a daughter. I have a son. Everything matters. Given that I was born in Puerto Rico.
“People are fired up, but you don’t have to be Puerto Rican to be fired up.”
So this year, Linares became a road warrior, knocking doors in her Long Island neighborhood. “I’m from Bellmore,” she explained. “Not everybody there looks like me. So I started out there, in my neighborhood, and my knees were knocking. The first door I knocked on, they were like, ‘Thank you! We just didn’t know!’ There used to be more Trump signs, flags. But there’s more of us than them, I think, to be honest.
“And you know that silent majority they talk about? Women? I’ve encountered that four times. On four doors! One was like literally with her daughter, standing behind her husband, saying, ‘Shhh, shhh, but yes!’ And sometimes you feel bad because you should have your voice.”
“I’m torn about this,” I confess to Linares. “I’m like, OK, get them to vote for Kamala and Laura but also get them to leave their husbands!”
“But we’ll conquer that later on, right?” she asks me.
“Oh, right,” I tell her. I have a vision of me and Gladys Linares coming out here next weekend and driving up to these women’s doors: “You good?” we’d ask. “You wanna come with us?”
Gladys continues: “Another time a gentleman opened the door, ‘She better not be a Democrat,’ he said about his wife. And I can see her back in the kitchen saying, ‘We got this.’ It’s out there. It’s real. It’s unfortunate. We would think in our partnerships, in our marriages, we could say, ‘I disagree with you.’”
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“I also talk about healthcare. I lost my job, during Covid, I got breast cancer, I had to go on Medicaid. Where would I be? Laura’s proposing a buy-in for Medicaid [which would allow people who earn over the income threshold to enroll by paying premiums]. Which would be so important.”
I asked how her health was now.
“I’m 100 percent great,” she told me. “Thank you for asking.”
Next, I run into some Swing Left volunteers out from New York City for this canvass day. “Democrats ran a really lazy campaign, and that’s how D’Esposito got in!” says Claire Cohen of nearby Baldwin Harbor. “Lee Zeldin [the Republican candidate for governor on 2020] shouldn’t have gotten close to being governor! D’Esposito is a corrupt cop!” Cohen is driving a Swing Left posse around to canvass here.
D’Esposito got dirtied in the last few months by some of his old-fashioned crony hiring, and also his terrible record on reproductive rights. (When your fiancée is mad about your hiring your mistress, even if you also hired your fiancée’s daughter, you’ve got trouble.) He shouldn’t have won in the first place—Dobbs came down in June of 2022—but New York Democrats sucked that year.
By the way, here is D’Esposito’s response on the hiring scandal: “We do not comment on personnel matters. Congressman D’Esposito remains focused on fighting for real issues that impact Long Islanders, like securing our borders and ending the affordability crisis.”
Sean Patrick Mahoney, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2022, you’ll recall, helped bump Hudson Valley’s Mondaire Jones out of his district. That year, Mahoney was suddenly forced to raise money for his own seat; both men lost. This year, money is flowing to Gillen, and she’s on the DCCC’s important “Red to Blue” list, which she was not in 2022.
Right next to Mahoney, though, in my pantheon of 2022 New York bad guys, was Jay Jacobs, a man many hold responsible for losing the Democrats the House majority. Jacobs is trying, in his way, to make up for it. When I tried to sign up for this canvassing event through Mobilize.us, because I didn’t have campaign contacts yet, I wound up getting 11 phone calls from the New York State Democratic Party and half a dozen texts. I apologized for wasting their time; I just wanted to talk to canvassers. They were perfectly lovely about it. But the calls kept coming. It’s not efficiency of effort but it’s effort. I appreciated it.
Jacobs was standing next to Gillen when her campaign manager pulled me outside for a few minutes to talk to her. I just smiled at him—I didn’t want to ruin Gillen’s day by telling Jacobs what I think of him. At any rate, he quickly walked away.
When I walked back inside, the hundreds of canvassers had left for their doors.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.