Election '96: The Final Tally Is In

If it had been up to the voters in East Hampton Town, Nora Bredes would be going to work on Capitol Hill in January.

According to the Suffolk County Board of Elections, across the entire First Congressional District, from Montauk to Smithtown, the Republican incumbent, Congressman Michael P. Forbes, had a nearly 10 percent lead over his Democratic challenger. Not so in East Hampton, where County Legislator Bredes took almost 53 percent of the 9,204 votes cast, compared to Mr. Forbes's 47 percent.

A recount of the Nov. 5 results showed that this year's Congressional race played out much like the 1994 gubernatorial one, when a virtually unknown Republican, George Pataki, drove the longtime Democratic incumbent, Mario Cuomo, out of office by an overwhelming margin.

In East Hampton, though, Governor Pataki lost.

Thirty-One For Salzman

"If it walks like a duck and looks like a duck, then it must be a duck. If you forget the voter registration rolls, then East Hampton is primarily a Democrat town, the only Democrat town on the East End," said Lona Rubenstein, a campaign strategist who works mostly for Republican candidates.

There are 13,698 registered voters in East Hampton, 4,921 of them Republicans and 4,397 Democrats; the remainder are registered with smaller parties or are unaffiliated. Just 31 of them cast write-in votes for Lorna Salzman, the last-minute candidate of the Peconic Green Party in the Congressional race.

The Greens decided not to endorse Ms. Bredes after she declined to support an immediate shutdown of two small nuclear reactors at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Thiele's Territory

Ms. Rubenstein, who worked this year for Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Republican with a history of crossover support, noted that the Second Election District, on the East Hampton side of Sag Harbor, voted mostly for Mr. Thiele but that his Democratic opponent, a political newcomer, fared far better there than in most other districts.

Melissa Arch Walton, Mr. Thiele's opponent, lives on the Shinnecock Reservation. "Did she do so well there because she is a woman, a woman of color, or a Democrat?" wondered Ms. Rubenstein.

Mr. Thiele was born and raised in Sag Harbor and now lives in Noyac. A longtime Republican who served as standard-bearer of the fusion Southampton Party for years, he has always done well in the Second District, which includes Eastville and adjacent neighborhoods that are predominantly black and predominantly Democratic.

Springs Liked Walton

Ms. Walton took 39 percent to Mr. Thiele's 58 percent there, compared to their overall 31-to-62 percent finish. Her margin of loss was even smaller in the 15th district in Springs, where there are a large number of female voters and more Democrats than Republicans.

There, she took 42 percent compared to Mr. Thiele's 54 percent.

Two minor candidates, Michael J. Bradley of the Right to Life Party and Margaret A. Eckart of the Conservative Party, garnered 5 percent and slightly less than 3 percent respectively.

Nowhere in East Hampton was this year's dominance by the Democratic Party more obvious than in the Town Trustee race. Harold Bennett, the Democratic candidate, was the unexpected winner and will take office in January as a one-man minority on a Republican-controlled board.

Town Trustees

The same thing happened when Tom Lester was elected the sole Democrat in 1991, when the board had been controlled by Republicans for years.

Analysts have credited Stuart Vorpahl Jr., the Independence Party candidate, with helping Mr. Bennett defeat Gregg de Waal, who, as the G.O.P. candidate, was considered the favorite.

Mr. Vorpahl, for example, took 262 votes in Montauk's four heavily Republican districts, where Mr. de Waal had been expected to win big.

Mr. de Waal instead took just 216 votes more than Mr. Bennett in that hamlet and went into the Democratically controlled districts elsewhere in town without the ammunition that Montauk usually represents for his party, said Christopher Kelley, the town Democratic leader.

Vote For President

In East Hampton, the Clinton-Gore ticket won by an almost 2 to 1 margin with 56 percent of the votes, compared to 31 percent for the Republican team.

The 11th District, on the northern end of East Hampton Village, has never been considered a Democratic stronghold, although it has voted for Democratic candidates in the last two elections, Mr. Kelley said. This year, 439 voters went for President Clinton, while 225 voted for the Republican candidate, Bob Dole.

Sag Harbor's Second District, the most Democratic of any in town, tallied an unsurprising 412 to 83 in favor of the Clinton-Gore team. Surprisingly, Montauk's 10th District, the most heavily Republican in town, also went for Mr. Clinton, though by a much slimmer margin of 247 to 231.

Across East Hampton, the votes for Ross Perot came to 1,049, or about 11 percent, consistent with the national percentage.

The overall voter turnout for the Presidential race in East Hampton was 70 percent of those registered, considerably higher than nationally.

It dropped off just a little for each of the races that followed across the ballot. About 61 percent of the voters chose a Trustee.

"You can't get a high turnout like that and get a low Republican turnout. Some Republicans were voting for Perot in protest and plenty of them voted for Clinton," observed Mr. Kelley.