By Michael Gormley, Associated Press Writer

Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi has been the go-to guy for two New York governors and on short lists for U.S. Senate, lieutenant governor, governor and attorney general. After Tuesday’s election, he’s desperately clinging to a narrow lead in his bid for a third term in his county job.

He wasn’t the only incumbent office holder in for a surprise during this off-year election cycle:

Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi

— Westchester County Executive Andy Spano, a Democrat, sought a fourth term and lost.

— New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, was shocked by a narrow win over a vastly outspent opponent.

— The only incumbent in the 23rd Congressional District dog fight, a five-term Republican assemblywoman, couldn’t even finish the race.

— Republicans also seized majorities from Democrats in the legislatures in Dutchess, Nassau and Orange counties, while taking a majority in the Poughkeepsie Common Council.

Rising taxes, high unemployment, a lingering recession and politicians in charge to blame all of it on can do that.

“The public’s in a bad mood,” Suozzi said Tuesday night.

Next year’s election will be far more packed with incumbents, most of them bigger targets with bigger names and longer tenures, for voters to consider sending a message. Every New York state legislator, all statewide jobs including governor, 29 congressional seats and both U.S. Senate seats will be up for grabs.

“Right now, what we have is an anti-incumbent rip tide, not a partisan wave,” said Bruce Gyory, the political consultant. He said Tuesday’s results have some of the earmarks of 1978, when hard fiscal times under Democratic Gov. Hugh Carey led to a Republican wave in New York, just years after the immediate post-Watergate era put droves of Democrats in office.

“Rarely do you see this anti-incumbent rip tide without a partisan wave,” he said. Like in the recession of the mid 1970s, voters were ignoring traditional labels: “It was just anger.”

And in increasingly blue New York, boosted by the fervor over Barack Obama a year ago, most incumbents now are Democrats.

State Republican Chairman Ed Cox says he saw the same thing in the early 1990s, the mid 1980s and mid 1960s. Most famously in New York, such a wave helped little known state legislator named George Pataki defeat Democratic icon Mario Cuomo in New York’s governor’s race in 1994. The groundswell was called ABC — Anyone But Cuomo.

“This is a wave coming our way,” Cox said.

He notes Republicans bucked a 2:1 Democratic enrollment advantage in Westchester County to take the county executive’s post as well as a string of town supervisor jobs. Cox sees it as a Republican force now, rather than an anti-incumbent wave. He notes Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef won a fifth term and Erie County elected a bloc of Republican legislators to support the Republican county executive.

“This has just been what I hoped it would be, and Westchester is our model,” Cox said.

“It was a very good day for the Republican Party to get back up off its back,” said Assembly Republican leader Brian Kolb of the Finger Lakes region. “But I definitely think there is anti-incumbency out there … people are really angry.”

“If the Republicans were in power, they’d be feeling it,” said Robert Bellafiore, former press secretary in the Pataki administration, now a consultant. “This was a referendum on incumbency … People want to see solutions, otherwise politicians will pay, because people are tired of paying.”

Some Democrats see the same message.

“The message from New Yorkers is, ‘If you’re in, you’re out,’” said Democratic Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester County, a likely candidate for attorney general next year.

But incumbents who can effectively make the case that they, too, are disaffected by the political establishment may now have a better shot, he said.

That could breath life into people like Democratic Gov. David Paterson, at odds with the Legislature and his own party from Manhattan to Washington; Republican candidate for governor Rick Lazio, who is quietly building a grass roots campaign; and Democrat William Thompson Jr. who shocked the pollsters when he came within 5 points of beating Bloomberg. Now Thompson, considered a possible challenger to Democratic state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli next year, is the face of what voters can do to even the most powerful incumbent in New York.

It could also be a further boost to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a front-runner in polls for governor next year, who can show a record of slapping around wrongdoers in corporate board rooms while staying out of the scandal-and-gridlock partisanship of Albany while Paterson has had to cut spending and threaten layoffs amid blowback by powerful labor unions.

“Doctrinaire liberals and doctrinaire reactionaries are going to have a very hard time over the next year,” Brodsky said.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.