Longtime chairman appointed to ambassador’s post
An era in Nassau County politics came to an end last week when Joseph Mondello, longtime chairman of the county Republican Party, was nominated by President Donald Trump to be the next United States ambassador to the Caribbean nation of Trinidad-Tobago.
The appointment was no surprise. According to published reports, Mondello, along with several other future nominees, had attended an seminar designed to train people for such positions. Mondello said that he does not anticipates any problem gaining approval from the United States Senate, even though delays in such appointments are common.
“Being asked to serve as the President’s personal representative to one of our nation’s most important trading partners—the nation the third-highest GDP per capita in the Americas after the United States and Canada—is an extraordinary privilege,” Mondello said in a statement. “I look forward to the upcoming United States Senate confirmation process and then to meeting the many challenges that I am sure I will face as I enter this new and exciting chapter in my public service career.”
Former Senator Alfonse D’Amato and Rep. Peter King (R–Seaford), the dean of the New York Republican Party congressional delegation also praised Mondello’s leadership.
Mondello, 80, has served as chairman of the Nassau County Republican Party since 1984, replacing Joseph Margiotta. In addition, he had the thankless task of serving as chairman of the New York State Republican Party in the mid-2000s, at a time when New York consolidated its position as a one-party state. He is the longest serving county chairman in the entire state.
Born in Brooklyn in 1938, Mondello is a native of Levittown and both an Air National Guard airman and a United States Army corporal. A graduate of Hofstra University and the New England School of Law, Mondello, an attorney by training, served as a Town of Hempstead councilman and later, as its town supervisor. He was later reelected by wide margins in 1987, 1989, and 1991.
Mondello became chairman in 1984 on the heels of a scandal which resulted in Margiotta’s conviction for federal mail fraud and conspiracy charges. Despite those circumstances, the Nassau GOP remained strong, with Thomas Gulotta serving as county executive from 1987 to 2001. When the court-mandated Nassau County legislature came into being in 1994, Republicans immediately commanded an 11-7 seat advantage.
Nassau: Red To Blue
Today, Nassau County remains a two-party county. The county legislature is in Republican Party hands and Jack Martins lost his bid to succeed his fellow Republican, Edward Mangano, as county executive by a slim 10,000-vote margin to the current executive, Laura Curran. Still, the Nassau County of today is a far cry from the entity of the early 1980s. The county, as with the rest of the New York City area, has undergone enormous demographic changes over the past four decades and this, combined with liberal predilections of younger voters, has transferred Nassau from the Republican red column to Democratic Party blue. Into the 1990s, New York State itself was a two-party state, with D’Amato as an incumbent senator and George Pataki unseating Mario Cuomo in the 1994 gubernatorial campaign. However, in the late 1990s, the county’s exploding deficits resulted in the election of Thomas Suozzi, a current Democratic Party congressman from Glen Cove, as county executive, ending the GOP’s 30-year dominance of that position.
On a national level, Nassau County, since 1968, provided the muscle that allowed such Republicans as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to carry the Empire State in presidential contests. In 1980, for instance, Nassau County provided Reagan with a 333,567 to 207,602 landslide margin that helped him take New York’s then-41 electoral college votes in his victory over President Jimmy Carter. In 1988, George H.W. Bush carried Nassau by a solid 337,430 to 250,130 total over Michael Dukakis, while losing the state by a 52-48 percent deficit. That year, however, marked the final time a GOP presidential nominee won the county. In 1992, Bill Clinton defeated President Bush by a 282,593 to 246,881 total, with H. Ross Perot garnering the rest of the votes.
National affairs are out of hands of any county chairman, whose job it is to elect all the local officials they can. Still, the organization Mondello presided over is in historic decline. In the 1980s, Nassau County was reliably Republican. In 2016, there are 369,720 registered Democrats in the county and 320,719 registered Republicans. The county’s one-time prominence in state and national Republican Party politics looks to be over. In 1972, for instance, Richard Nixon held a rally at the Nassau County Coliseum, which drew 18,000 supporters. Since 1988, no Republican Party presidential nominee, including the current president, a New York native, has bothered coming to Nassau County during a fall campaign.
As soon as appointment was announced, speculation centered on longtime aide, Joseph Cairo, as becoming Mondello’s successor.
Mondello has disclosed his finances to the U.S. Senate in anticipation of being approved for the ambassadorship. He has reportedly disclosed close to $2 million in earnings from real estate, a Garden City law firm and work for the Republican party.
