Should Nassau Legis. Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington) win the special state Senate election in the Seventh District, he would be the first Long Island Democrat to win a Senate seat in more than two decades.
The last Democrat to win a Senate seat locally was Carol Berman, who represented the 9th Senate District from 1978 to 1984. However, Berman and her predecessor Karen Burstein, who was elected in 1972, represented a district that straddled the Nassau-Queens border.
Rick Brand
In reapportionment, Berman sought to make the district all Nassau. It did, but it also became more Republican -- and she lost her bid for re-election in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's presidential landslide. The victor over Berman was Dean Skelos, now the Senate's deputy majority leader, who is in charge of the GOP campaign effort in the special election.
In Suffolk, no Democrat has won a state Senate seat in more than a century, when Edwin Bailey of Patchogue in 1902 won a single term. He lost in 1904 -- in Republican Theodore Roosevelt's landslide victory. Bailey not only represented all of Suffolk -- but Staten Island as well.