Last year, the mayor of East Hampton and his team of like-minded board members ran unopposed in East Hampton Village’s latest election, securing another four years in office. Looking ahead to Nov. 4, the current supervisor of East Hampton Town will, apparently, run unopposed, too; only one Republican candidate is actively campaigning for November, against a full slate of Democrats standing for town board.
The days when local politics here on the South Fork were local politics and primarily centered around local issues — a highway bypass, beach driving rules — are gone. Community decisions about things like school budgets or signage regulations become fraught with all the baggage and rage of the culture war being fought in America in 2025. Today, sadly, we recognize that a thin, red, Trumpian line has been drawn through all of American life and all responsible adults must choose which side they are on. But still, we do feel sympathy for the sentiments expressed by James (J.P.) Foster, the lone active G.O.P. candidate for town board, when he told The Star last week, “Local politics should not be viewed through a national lens on any level. I wish we had the Beach Party and the Seashell Party, but the town is too big for that.”
Setting aside nostalgia for the days when local politics didn’t divide so starkly into blue/red camps, the fact is that single-party rule is simply a bad way to make important decisions. It has become a cliche to refer to Abraham Lincoln’s famous “team of rivals” in his cabinet, but Lincoln was wise. A diversity of opinions is necessary for democracy as a check and balance. Decisions made without healthy debate tend to go awry.
“Running unopposed is a strong vote of confidence in the work we’ve done and the values we stand for,” Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez told The Star not long ago. But without a potentially dissenting voice, even information can be one-sided. That is to say nearly all communication coming from Town Hall now has to be run through a public information officer who answers to the supervisor. The town is staunchly “blue,” and while we have endorsed Ms. Burke-Gonzalez in the past and are likely to do so again, we cannot agree that one-sided elections are salutary for democracy.
If any independent candidate wanted to run this year as a third-party choice, for example as a bolder defender of the environment and a warrior against rampant overdevelopment, they would need to hop to it. Petition signatures need to be filed between May 20 and 27 in order to secure a spot on November’s ballot.