Out Of Left Field: What’s the matter with Long Island?

A few days before the Sept. 26 Presidential Debate at Hofstra University a major poll showed that Long Islanders favored Trump over Clinton — 43 to 39.
How concerned should we be about the Trump direction of fellow Long Islanders (in both Nassau and Suffolk) when Clinton leads by more than 20 percent in our state and when Nate Silver’s “538” consistently shows her becoming our next president?
At another critical turning point in our history, Long Islanders became the source of derision for being out of step with most other Americans.  
In 1775, John Adams sarcastically asked whether they were not capable of thinking and feeling like most Americans.
One of George Washington’s first generals warned that it might be necessary to hold Long Island children as hostages to prevent their parents from supporting the regressive and repressive opponents.
Drastic actions toward 2016 Long Islanders will not be necessary and could not be sanctioned by principled people, even though candidate Trump favors torture for his enemies.  
Increasingly, in a bit more than a week, the Hofstra debate has become the turning point that many have anticipated.  
It will produce a “wave” election in which Democrats win the Senate as well as the Presidency and shape the federal courts for decades to come.  
That first presidential debate further escalated the commitment by many prominent Republicans and Conservatives to reform their party and make sure, as one leader said, “that someone like Trump is never nominated again.”   
Here we can draw another perspective from 1775 — it is celebratory of those of us who live in North Hempstead, and is indicative of how our progressive forbears set a better democratic path for other Long Islanders.
Leaders such as Sands, Onderdonk, and others from Great Neck, “Cow Neck” (Port Washington, Manhasset), as well as many patriots living North of present-day Old Country Road railed as early as 1775 against the “Tory” views and affiliations of fellow Long Islanders to their South.
It is no accident that the “Town of North Hempstead” was legally formed by separating it from “Hempstead” to which it had previously belonged prior to 1776.  
The “NH” folks had a different vision of democratic process and goals; they refused to be associated with Long Islanders to the south after the battles for a better society.
The Town of Hempstead now contains a few dozen communities, some with notable diversity, but it has been a conservative fiefdom for centuries!
North Hempstead was on the winning — and progressive side — in the critical formative years of 1775 and 1776. 
Let’s check out the election returns after Nov. 8 to compare the cumulative North Hempstead vote with Nassau’s other two towns, as well as the ten Towns in Suffolk.
Could one conclude that, as a region, the preponderance of folks in North Hempstead are more attuned to reality based judgments and more dedicated to First Amendment principles and the laudable human rights values propounded from Jefferson to Tocqueville to Myrdal to King (and many others interspersed, the true heroes of “American Exceptionalism”)?    
One of my favorite public affairs analysts, Fareed Zakaria, has long been railing against “fact free” political passions.  
This past Sunday, he threw a rationality bouquet to the legions of Republicans and Conservatives who are not only opposed to Trump, but who conclude they must vote for Clinton just to make sure that “the monster” does not slip into the White House.
Fareed said: “Donald Trump is a strange standard-bearer for Republicans. Almost every important conservative publication — National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary — opposes him, as do most leading conservative pundits.”
Even Karl Rove described Trump as a disaster during the first debate: “For much of the evening he was on his heels.  Mr. Trump failed to assure voters that he is up to the job.”  
Rove concludes Trump was “flip and undisciplined,” while Clinton “deftly and relentlessly attacked him as unqualified and unfit for office.”
Those are mild criticisms when you read Wall Street Journal Deputy Editor Bret Stephens’ “Never Trump for Dummies.”  
Stephens calls Trump “un-American, immoral and dangerous.”  
He adds that Trump “is unfit as a person to be president,” and that “He is rotten to the core.”
Do Democrats need to say much of anything when so many members of Trump’s own Party have denounced him in terms that would take a tome to catalog? 
Fareed concludes: “Of the five previous Republican nominees for president, three will not publicly affirm that they could vote for Trump, and I would bet that a fourth (John McCain) will not in the privacy of the voting booth.”
As we approach Nov. 8, lagging Long islanders can be helped to a Clinton “tipping point” by the historically enlightened North Hempstead citizens (who trace a noble democratic heritage to 1775 and 1776).