Friday, January 17, 2025
At the Nov. 20 meeting of the League of Women Voters of East Nassau, attendees were treated to an in-depth analysis of last month’s presidential election and what the results could mean for the future.
The league is a nonpartisan, grass-roots organization that works to protect and expand voting rights throughout the country. Its East Nassau chapter encompasses Wantagh, Seaford, Levittown, Merrick, Bellmore and East Meadow. Joining the meeting were members of the Central Nassau chapter, which includes Baldwin, Freeport, Uniondale, Oceanside and West Hempstead.
Ann Leiter, president of the Central Nassau chapter, said the organization encourages people to get out and vote, and also aims to educate voters on political topics. Leiter added that she hoped attendees would leave the meeting, which was held at the Levittown Public Library, with a better understanding of what happened on Election Day.
“I would like them to have a broader sense of the objective details of what happened,” Leiter said. “It was a good opportunity for them to air out their individual concerns.”
Rosanna Perotti, professor of political science at Hofstra University, spoke at the meeting. Her presentation about the election touched on voter turnout, the candidates’ policies and economic trends.
The turnout for the 2024 election, Perotti said, was similar to 2020’s, but this time with a clear advantage for Republicans. Citing reporting from The New York Times, she said that counties with the largest Democratic margins in 2020 delivered roughly 2 million fewer votes for Vice President Kamala Harris than they had for Joe Biden, while Republican counties added around 1.2 million votes to Donald Trump’s total this year.
“I think it’s extremely important, when you start analyzing the election, to look at who actually came out and what was happening there,” Perotti said.
In Nassau County, Trump became the first Republican candidate since George H.W. Bush, in 1988, to garner more votes than his Democratic opponent, receiving 52 percent to Harris’s 47 percent.
The main reason why a majority of voters across the country chose Trump was simple, Perotti said: the economy. Reporting from exit polling surveys, she said, made that clear, and the economy was followed in importance by immigration. Harris’s campaign, Perotti added, focused more on cultural issues, such as abortion rights.
“Harris talked a lot about reproductive rights and about abortion, and those things were important in Senate races,” Perotti said. “They don’t appear to have been quite as important, from some of the things that I’m looking at, in the presidential contest.”
Nonetheless, across the country, abortion rights continued to have strong support. Legislation protecting women’s health care choices, Perotti said, passed in seven out of the 10 states where they were on the ballot. In New York, the Equal Rights Amendment, which will add protections against discrimination to the state Constitution — including in the areas of pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes — won approval with nearly 57 percent of the vote.
In the 2020 election, Perotti said, 65 percent of voters age 18 to 29 voted Democratic, and 35 percent favored Republican candidates. That margin shrank this year, with Harris receiving 55 percent of the young vote, to Trump’s 43 percent. And within that age group, there was a gender gap, Perotti noted, with young women more likely to vote for Harris, and young men, with or without a degree, preferring Trump.
According to a study by Tufts University, a majority of young women voted for Harris, but 56 percent of young men voted for Trump, an increase of 15 percentage points over 2020. The main issues for young men, Perotti said, appeared to be immigration and the economy, while young women were more concerned about health care, and specifically abortion rights. Even in her own classes, she said, she noticed that younger men were more vocal in their support of Trump, which made for some tense discussions.
“There is a message of being left behind, of not being noticed, that was really powerful to young men,” Perotti said, “and a message of relatability and a tribal message that really seems to have resonated with them.”
She concluded by highlighting several concerns about the election results, which included accountability for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, opposition to vaccines, climate issues, immigration and single-party control of the government.
Peggy Stein, a member of the league’s East Nassau chapter, said she hoped attendees whose favored candidates lost would understand that that didn’t mean they should give up hope.
“They still have to be involved,” Stein said. “You can’t just say, ‘Well, I didn’t get what I wanted.’ We have to be ready to go forward, and we have to do what’s best for the country.”
