(excerpt from cityandstateny.com by Sahalie Donaldson)
Pressing forward in the red wave that coursed through Long Island during the 2022 midterm election, Jack Martins, a former state senator and mayor of the village of Mineola, is returning to the state Senate after six years.
He’ll be doing so alongside two other Long Island Republicans who flipped seats hoping to give the GOP more of a say by dismantling Democrats’ supermajority in Albany’s upper legislative chamber. That success comes in addition to the party’s clean sweep of the area’s four hotly contested congressional seats. As it stands, seven of Long Island’s nine state Senate seats will now be held by Republicans – four more than won in the last midterm cycle in 2018.
While Long Island has historically been a largely Republican voting bloc dubbed the “Long Island Nine,” Democrats uprooted the political precedent in 2018 when they flipped a number of the seats. The party’s unprecedented success in Long Island was a big part of why Democrats won back control of the Senate – and expanded it in 2020.
Martins, having beat Democratic state Sen. Anna Kaplan in a marquee race for New York’s 7th Senate District, will be returning to a very different Albany then the one he left in 2016. Democrats still control every legislative chamber, though Republicans' success on Long Island and in other suburban, more moderate areas suggest that the balance of power may be shifting. Martins had run and lost his previous bids for Congress and Nassau County Executive in 2008 and 2017 respectively.