The afternoon sun fell across a town where the political map had been redrawn in a single night, and Mount Pleasant Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi, a Republican who had spent decades at the center of local power, did not pretend otherwise. In a reflective interview with The Examiner, Fulgenzi all but conceded his re-election defeat, speaking not with anger but with the weary acceptance of a man who had seen the wave coming and still could not quite believe it had swallowed him. With most votes counted, Democrat Tom Abinanti, a former assemblyman with years of experience in Westchester politics, held a lead of roughly 1,934 votes, commanding 62.5 percent of the vote to Fulgenzi’s 37.4 percent. The Republican supervisor’s running mates faced similar headwinds: Anna Nelson, a Democrat seeking a Town Board seat, and Frank Hrotko, a Democrat running for highway superintendent, both held strong leads over Republican incumbents Gail Wind and Richard Benkwitt. For Fulgenzi, the message from voters seemed clear. “I think it appears to be pretty much an anti-Trump vote,” he said, though he was careful not to blame the president alone. He had always believed Mount Pleasant was different, a place where voters judged him on roads, taxes, and quality-of-life issues rather than the noisy battles of Washington. “But locally, I’m just surprised. I guess we didn’t get our message out. And unfortunately, I think that a lot of the misinformation that was spread against me was very unfair.” There was no bitterness in his voice, only a kind of sadness—the sadness of a man who had given decades to a town and now felt misunderstood by it, its voters carried away by forces he could not control and did not fully understand. At 72, Fulgenzi had been in public life longer than many of his constituents had been alive, and he spoke less like a defeated partisan than a civic elder trying to make sense of a changed landscape.
As the scope of the Democratic victory became clear, The Examiner asked Fulgenzi a political question that has haunted suburban Republicans since the last presidential election: Would local GOP officials be better off distancing themselves from President Trump? Fulgenzi did not hesitate. “Yes, I think so,” he said. He then went further, acknowledging that he had never been a loyal soldier to the president. “I don’t align myself with everything Donald Trump does,” he said. He cited Trump’s perceived arrogance, his tariffs, and the president’s approach to foreign policy as areas of genuine disagreement. But Fulgenzi was careful not to reject the president outright, noting that he supported some of Trump’s efforts to reduce government spending. What bothered him most, he said, was the way local Republicans are often unfairly associated with the national party label, no matter how independent they are in their own communities. In Mount Pleasant, Fulgenzi had built a reputation as a pragmatic administrator rather than a partisan warrior, and he had long taken pride in not viewing local issues through a red or blue lens. That reputation, he believed, had earned him support from Democrats over the years, which made the election result all the more confusing. He did not see his loss as a repudiation of his record so much as a casualty of a larger, more divisive political climate. “He has a certain arrogance that I do not appreciate,” Fulgenzi said of Trump, in a moment of unusual candor for a sitting Republican official. The implication was unmistakable: In a town where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly two to one, being tied to the president was a liability no amount of local good governance could overcome. He acknowledged that the Republican brand had become toxic in suburban New York, and that even popular local officials were not immune from the fallout.
Fulgenzi also spoke about the local controversies that may have contributed to his defeat, including the long-simmering Clay Bird Lane issue. He placed much of the blame on former Councilman Mark Saracino, his Republican running mate in 2023 who resigned in protest in late June. Fulgenzi insisted that his administration had been addressing the problem in coordination with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, but that Saracino had made it look as though officials were doing nothing. The controversy, he suggested, was less about the actual condition of the road than about political theater—a charge that local Democrats would likely dispute. Fulgenzi also pushed back against the notion that Mount Pleasant had been overdeveloped during his time in office. He specifically defended the Amazon distribution facility, pointing to its nearly $2 million contribution to the Mount Pleasant school district, and he praised the Toll Brothers project as another example of development that helped keep property taxes in check. “Any project that we did work on, whether it was through the IDA or through the town board, was all meant to help control taxes in the town,” he said. To him, the Democratic promise of greater affordability was easy to make but difficult to execute. “I have never had anybody tell me how you do that,” he quipped, suggesting that his critics had offered no realistic alternative. For Fulgenzi, the development decisions were not about pleasing developers or enriching insiders; they were about ensuring that Mount Pleasant could maintain its services and schools without overburdening homeowners. He worried that the incoming Democratic majority would learn, perhaps too late, that governing a town means making choices that not everyone will like. He hoped they would be able to keep taxes under control, but he clearly harbored doubts. He recalled specific achievements with pride, and argued that critics had ignored the tangible benefits of projects that generated revenue and jobs while keeping the town solvent.
Mount Pleasant has been a Republican stronghold for generations, but Fulgenzi knew better than most how fragile that dominance had become. He first won a seat on the Town Board in 1989, served from 1990 to 1993, returned in 2007, and became supervisor in 2014 after Joan Maybury resigned. For much of that time, Republicans controlled town government almost by default, but the voter rolls told a different story: Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a wide margin. Fulgenzi had always believed that his personal relationships and nonpartisan approach allowed him to overcome that deficit. “I don’t think I would have won if it was just Republicans voting,” he said. “So I’m assuming that a certain amount of Democrats supported me.” That support, he believed, was what made Tuesday night’s sweep so devastating. It was not simply that Republicans lost; it was that they lost across the board, erasing the careful coalition Fulgenzi had spent years building. Councilman Joe Bonanno, a Democrat who won a Town Board seat in 2025, had signaled that a breakthrough was possible, and many local Democrats saw his victory as the beginning of the end of Republican rule. With Abinanti, Nelson, and Bonanno all in place, Democrats would hold three of the five town board seats, replacing Fulgenzi and Wind while leaving Republicans Danielle Zaino and Thomas Sialiano in the minority. Fulgenzi, however, did not believe that the Democratic sweep would permanently alter the town’s political character. He saw the result as an anomaly driven by Trump’s divisive personality rather than a fundamental shift in local values. In his view, the margins were less a verdict on Mount Pleasant’s direction and more a reflection of a national mood that had trickled down to every corner of Westchester County. He said his long career had been defined by working across party lines, and he believed that was why he had survived for so long in a town that leaned Democratic.
One of the more striking moments in the interview came when Fulgenzi discussed his Democratic opponents, not with venom but with a kind of bemused respect. He said he was particularly surprised by Abinanti’s apparent margin of victory, noting that the former assemblyman had twice lost Democratic primary challenges to MaryJane Shimsky for his former 92nd District seat, in 2022 and 2024. Abinanti represented the district for a dozen years before losing to Shimsky in 2022, and Fulgenzi seemed to suggest that a candidate who could not win his own party’s primary was an unlikely instrument of his downfall. Nelson, too, drew a pointed but not unkind observation from the supervisor. “She’s a nice lady, but no involvement in the town up until the past year or so,” he said. There was a trace of resentment in the words, a sense that newcomers were taking over a community they had only recently discovered. Still, Fulgenzi made clear that he had no intention of disappearing from public life if the results held. At an age when many men would be content to retire, with the sort of energy that has kept him active in the Mount Pleasant Industrial Development Agency, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Lions Club, he was already thinking about what came next. “I enjoyed work all my life,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to be sitting around or going fishing and stuff like that. I may be looking for something else to do if the votes hold up the way they are. So I may find another job somewhere.” It was a statement that captured his identity: a lifelong public servant who measured his worth in accomplishments and obligations, not in moments of rest. For Fulgenzi, retirement was not a destination but a void he intended to fill, whether through another job, continued civic involvement, or simply showing up at town meetings to see how things were being run.
In the end, Fulgenzi’s words were less a concession speech than a benediction. He thanked the community that had given him a career, acknowledged the voters who had chosen a different path, and expressed hope that the new leadership would succeed. “I only hope that if the votes hold up and they take over, that they will do everything that they’re saying they promise to do, helping the town move forward,” he said. “I only wish them the best because this is my home and my life here, and I would hate to see it go in the wrong direction.” The sentiment was genuine, even if the hope felt guarded. He promised to be a watchdog, not a spoiler: “I will not be a thorn in anybody’s side, but I will watch what’s going on.” Meanwhile, his defeated running mate Gail Wind said she wanted to wait until all the votes were counted before commenting. That count would not be a simple process. Following Tuesday’s countywide voting-machine scanning malfunction, the Westchester County Board of Elections was scheduled to manually tally thousands of secured emergency paper ballots under bipartisan oversight. It was an ironic end to an election that Fulgenzi believed had been shaped by misinformation: even the counting of votes would require extra care and scrutiny. For Mount Pleasant, the transition promised to be orderly but uncertain. Democrats would inherit a town government that Republicans had run for decades, and they would do so under the shadow of a national political climate that had proven unforgiving to the old guard. Earlier in the day, The Examiner had published reaction from Mount Pleasant Democrats, who detailed their own analysis of the election results and laid out their vision for the town’s future. Fulgenzi, ever the pragmatist, seemed ready to accept the verdict, even as he worried about what came next. He planned to stay in Mount Pleasant, to keep his home and his life there, and to watch the new leaders with the same careful eye he had always turned toward local government. He had said the election was “pretty much an anti-Trump vote,” but by the end of the conversation, he sounded less like a partisan analyzing a trend and more like a homeowner watching strangers take the keys to a house he had built with his own hands.