East Hampton’s Democrats are basking in the afterglow of an election in which voters returned the supervisor and two incumbent town board members to Town Hall, maintaining the Democrats’ 5-0 supermajority on the board. Meanwhile, all nine of the Democrats’ candidates for town trustee were victorious in the Nov. 5 election, and, while absentee ballots have yet to be counted, the party’s candidate for town justice, Andrew Strong, is within 116 votes of overtaking the long-term incumbent, Justice Lisa R. Rana. The board of elections’ unofficial count has Ms. Rana holding a 2-percent lead over Mr. Strong, 3,012 votes to his 2,896.
On the other side, the EH Fusion Party, a coalition of independent and Republican candidates along with a faction of Democrats calling themselves the East Hampton Reform Democrats, had little to cheer on election night. Its candidates’ argument that the town board was “stuck” and had failed on multiple fronts had little, if any, impact on an electorate that tilts heavily toward Democratic Party registration.
That its candidates for supervisor, town board, and trustees had lost their respective races by wide margins does not convey the scale of their defeat. Only in three of the town’s 19 election districts, all of them in Montauk, typically a stronger area for Republicans, did a Fusion Party candidate for supervisor or town board best an incumbent. In District 10, Bonnie Brady, a candidate for town board and a resident of that hamlet, won 213 votes to Councilwoman Sylvia Overby’s 159. Ms. Brady won 139 votes to Ms. Overby’s 124 in District 18, and 104 to Ms. Overby’s 89 in District 19. Ms. Brady did not win in the hamlet’s fourth election district, and her 84-vote lead over Ms. Overby in the other three districts was not enough to make up for significant deficits elsewhere in town.
And Councilman David Lys won more votes than his Fusion Party challengers as well as Ms. Overby, not only in Montauk but in all 19 election districts. (All vote totals referenced in this article do not include absentee ballots, of which 666 were returned to the board of elections and are to be counted on or after Monday.)
Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, according to the Suffolk County Board of Elections’ unofficial total, won 3,832 votes to David Gruber’s 1,561, or 71 percent of the vote. The margin was lopsided in nearly every corner of the town, including majorities of 75.1 percent in East Hampton, 71.1 percent in Amagansett, and 69 percent in Springs.
Like Ms. Brady, Mr. Gruber fared better in Montauk, a possible consequence of the Fusion Party’s stance in opposition to the proposed South Fork Wind Farm, which is strong among the hamlet’s commercial fishermen. There, he won 330 votes of 889 cast, or 37.1 percent of the hamlet’s vote.
In Wainscott, where many residents have mobilized to oppose the wind farm developers’ preferred landing site for the transmission cable — an ocean beach in that hamlet — Mr. Gruber still managed to win only 53 of 142 votes cast for supervisor, or 37.3 percent. The numbers suggest that some voters in the town’s easternmost and westernmost hamlets responded positively to the Fusion Party’s position on the wind farm, but the impact was limited.
A celebration at Rowdy Hall in East Hampton has become something of a tradition for Democrats in recent years, cautious optimism turning to jubilation as party officials, for whom the restaurant serves as election night headquarters, monitor returns via the board of elections website.
That night, shortly after it was clear that the Democrats were scoring multiple lopsided victories, Mr. Van Scoyoc told The Star that his opponent “sought out what the issues within the town are that are most pressing, and having identified those, he sought to capitalize on them.”
Some of the issues the town confronts “are very difficult problems that have no easy solutions,” he said, “and many of them have been around for some time. As I like to say, all the easy problems were solved before I took office.”
“I think that saying that the town board is stuck and has done nothing is just not true,” Mr. Van Scoyoc continued, “and I think that our record over the last two years demonstrates that while some of these pressing problems may remain, we’ve made significant in- roads toward addressing them, and plan on continuing to do so.”
Cate Rogers, chairwoman of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee, said this week that the election “was about our vision for the sustainable future of East Hampton. I am thrilled the community continues to support our vision for renewable energy, watching our water. . . . Of course we have a lot more work to do, but I feel good that the community supported that instead of . . . the regressive forces that wanted to turn back the clock in many ways in this election.”
“It felt good,” Ms. Rogers added, “that the community also supported our idea that a campaign is about information and not shenanigans.”
Ms. Overby won a third term with 30.79 percent of the vote in the four-way contest. Mr. Lys, who was appointed to the board in January 2018 and won a special election that fall to complete Mr. Van Scoyoc’s term on the board, won 34.92 percent of the vote. Ms. Brady, who is executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, won 18.73 percent of the vote, and Elizabeth (Betsy) Bambrick won 15.56 percent.
At Rowdy Hall on election night, Ms. Overby agreed that the Democrats’ opponents “had points” in their argument. “That is what you do,” she said. “You have to represent everybody in the town, and I want to hear what they have to say. I’m hopeful that in the future they become much more involved in what’s going on locally, instead of pointing fingers at what’s wrong. . . . We can all point fingers at what’s wrong, but finding a solution is what we really need to get done.” She said that completing the hamlet studies and achieving the goal of meeting the town’s energy needs through renewable sources are her top legislative priorities.
Mr. Lys, who will now serve his first four-year term, said that voters “saw that my track record over the last 21 months was successful enough that they wanted me to help lead the town.” He said that meeting the needs of the next generation is a priority, “because the next generation is the one that’s going to lead us.”
