The unexpected squeaker in Suozzi/Mangano race

As of Monday, Thomas Suozzi, Democrat from Glen Cove, was still the county executive. He apparently squeaked by in last week’s election. With 235,985 votes cast, Suozzi was a mere 237 votes ahead of Republican challenger Ed Mangano, a 14-year county legislator.

All of this could change, of course. Absentee ballots are yet to be counted. Who knows what could happen? We won’t know for sure for a while.

The big question is, what the heck happened to Suozzi? A few years ago, he was king of Nassau, popular to the point of being seemingly invincible. But last Tuesday he teetered on the verge of defeat to a virtually unknown candidate.

To my mind, it is simplistic to say that voters were angry at government. Yes, many residents were mad as hell over property taxes, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. But Suozzi has fought the battles that the tax-PAC crowd has wanted him to fight. He has sought government consolidation where and when he could. He’s reduced the county work force by a thousand. He’s not a Big Government kind of guy. So where did he go wrong?

For starters, he has never made it a secret that he doesn’t really want to be county executive. He really wants to be governor. Midway through his last term, Suozzi ran an unsuccessful primary race against Eliot Spitzer, the Democrat who went on to win the 2006 gubernatorial race and subsequently crashed and burned in one of the nation’s worst political sex scandals in recent memory. This year, Suozzi wouldn’t say what his future political aspirations are, but you never really believed that he wanted the county executive’s job for long.

Mangano, meanwhile, ran a grass-roots campaign that gave you the sense that he wanted to win — he wanted to govern the county where he lives. He put up handmade signs. He got out to disaffected communities — in particular, Latino communities. He did the things that good politicians do if they really want to win.