On a gray October afternoon, inside a small campaign office in Garden City, a group of Democratic candidates gathered not to rally supporters or unveil policy proposals, but to confront something far uglier: a wave of campaign mailers they said were filled with lies. With less than a month to go before Election Day, Nassau County had suddenly become ground zero for a kind of political warfare that felt more national than local. The mailers, glossy and professionally designed, had been arriving in mailboxes across the county for days. Some included photographs that had been cropped or staged to make the candidates look guilty by association. Others printed quotes that the candidates said they had never spoken. And one featured a word no one should have to see on their own campaign literature: “insane.” Standing behind a cluster of microphones, Joe Scianablo, the Democratic candidate for Hempstead town supervisor, did not mince words. “The lies,” he said, “they just have to stop.” Around him, four other candidates nodded. They had come from different towns and different races, but they shared the same sense of outrage. They also shared the same worry: that the people receiving these mailers might not know the truth. That they might see a smiling face on a card, read a shocking accusation, and believe it. And that, the candidates argued, was exactly the point. The mailers were not designed to inform. They were designed to inflame. They were designed to turn neighbors against each other in the closing weeks of an election. And, at least in some mailboxes, they were working.
Sean McCarthy knows what it means to serve. A retired Nassau County police officer who now serves as the police commissioner in Port Washington, McCarthy has spent his adult life in the kind of jobs that require moral clarity, not just physical courage. So when he opened a campaign mailer that accused him of funding an “anti-American antisemitic agenda,” he said he felt a cold knot in his stomach. “It flies in the face of my entire career, standing up for people and trying to root out things like antisemitism and Islamophobia… any kind of discrimination,” McCarthy said. He didn’t have to say that the accusation was absurd on its face; the words hung in the air. McCarthy’s voice carried the weariness of someone who had spent decades in uniform, walking into neighborhoods where trust did not come easily, building bridges between police and the people they served. He spoke of the pride he took in being part of a community that embraced its diversity. And he said the mailer wasn’t just an attack on him—it was an attack on the values he had tried to live by. The implication that he would fund any organization that promoted hate, he said, was not just politically convenient; it was personally insulting. McCarthy said he had spent his career building relationships across lines of race and religion, working with faith leaders, community organizations, and families in crisis. He said the accusation felt like a betrayal, not because it hurt his feelings, but because it cheapened the real work of fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia. He wanted voters to know that the men and women who sent that mailer were not interested in honest debate. They were interested in turning him into a symbol of something he had spent his life fighting against. And that, he said, was exactly why he was standing there, refusing to let the lie stand.
State Assembly candidate Kim Keiserman had her own story. The mailer arrived, she said, on Yom Kippur—the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, a day set aside for reflection, atonement, and forgiveness. For many in her community, the timing felt less like an accident than a taunt. Keiserman, a Democrat running for the State Assembly, said the accusations in the mailer were simply untrue. “The motivation is to divide our community and make us all angry at each other and distract us from the real issues that are facing Long Island,” she said. Her words came out measured, but there was an edge of frustration. For Keiserman, the mailer was not just an attack on her character; it was an attempt to weaponize faith and fear in a district that deserved better. She argued that the people who designed the mailing had no interest in fixing Long Island’s high property taxes, improving school funding, or tackling the affordability crisis that was driving young families out of the region. Instead, they had chosen to exploit cultural divisions in the hope that angry voters would forget what was really at stake. Keiserman said she was not going to let that happen. She called on voters to look beyond the glossy pages and focus on the issues that actually affected their daily lives. She also warned that these tactics were not harmless campaign theater—they had real consequences. When neighbors are told to fear one another, when political opponents are painted as un-American or antisemitic without evidence, the social fabric frays. She added that receiving the mailer on Yom Kippur was especially painful, because the holiday is about asking for forgiveness and being forgiven. To use that day to attack a candidate’s character, she said, felt like a violation not just of political norms but of basic decency. “We are all tired of this,” she said. “But we are not tired enough to stop fighting.”
The most surreal moment of the press conference came when Dean Tarulli, a candidate for State Assembly, described a mailer that featured his own face next to that of Mayor Zohran Mamdani—a politician whose name has become a lightning rod for controversy—with the word “insane” splashed across both images in bold, angry type. Tarulli said he had never even met Mamdani. “No, I haven’t,” he told reporters, when asked if the two had ever crossed paths. He also disputed the quotes printed beneath the images, which he said had been attributed to Hasan Piker, a left-wing commentator known for his sharp criticism of conservatives. “It seems to be directed to target hate towards me, that I’m un-American, that I don’t care about New York,” Tarulli said. He paused, then addressed the most incendiary accusation directly: when asked whether the words “America deserved 9-11” had ever come from him, Tarulli responded, “Never.” For Tarulli, the mailer was not merely a political attack; it was an attempt to paint him as something he was not. The photograph, the tagline, the guilt-by-association—it all felt designed to trigger a visceral reaction in a post-9/11 world where accusations of anti-Americanism carry special weight. He noted that he had spent his career working in and for New York, and that he had no intention of apologizing for who he was or what he believed. He said he had no idea why his picture was used, but he suspected it was because the people behind the mailer were running scared. He pointed to his record in the community, his work with local organizations, and his willingness to listen to voters of every background. “I have never said anything like that. I never would,” he said of the 9/11 quote. “And anyone who knows me knows that.” He urged voters to ask themselves a simple question: if a campaign has to make up quotes and splice together misleading photos to make a candidate look dangerous, what does that say about the truthfulness of the people sending the mailer? The answer, he suggested, was obvious.
Not everyone saw it that way. The New York State Republican Party defended the mailers, with a spokesman pointing to Piker and Mamdani and arguing that “Democrats who lack the spine to stand up to these radicals have no business being anywhere near political power.” The response was swift and dismissive from Jay Jacobs, the chair of the New York State Democratic Committee. “They tried to play the guilt by association game,” Jacobs said. “When there’s actually no connection whatsoever.” He called the mailers a desperate attempt to change the subject from the issues that voters actually cared about. The Democrats, he said, had sent the Republican Party a cease-and-desist letter regarding the mailers—a step he acknowledged both parties have taken in past campaigns and one that is often intended more to make a public statement than to produce a legal outcome. “This is what a political campaign looks like when it runs out of ideas,” Jacobs said. “You fabricate a connection. You twist a photograph. You hope people don’t ask questions.” But for all the back-and-forth between party officials, it was the voters who seemed to have the final word. In interviews outside polling places and community centers, several Nassau County residents said they had become experts at spotting the mailers before they even opened them. “I disregard them,” one voter said. “And I try to protect my energy at all costs,” another added. A third voter was even more blunt: “Absolutely tossing it in the trash.” One voter said she had stopped reading the mailers altogether. Another said he sorted through his mail over the recycling bin. A woman waiting for a bus said she had seen so many attack ads over the years that she now automatically discounts anything with an exclamation point or a dark, grainy photo. These are not voters who are confused about what is at stake. They are not people who will be easily swayed by a glossy flyer that screams “insane” or “anti-American.” They are simply exhausted by the noise—and determined not to let it drown out the issues that matter.
With less than three weeks until Election Day, the candidates who stood together in Garden City were under no illusions. The mailers would keep coming. The attacks would likely get harsher. And the political action committees and party committees behind them would continue to bet on anger and fear. But the candidates also knew that they were not alone. Across Nassau County, voters were doing something more powerful than throwing away their mail: they were paying attention. They were reading, watching debates, checking candidates’ records, and asking the kinds of questions that can’t be answered in a 30-second commercial or a 500-word flyer. They were talking to their neighbors, not shouting at them. They were thinking about the future of their communities—about schools, taxes, public safety, and the simple dignity of being able to live and work in a place that cares for its people. The candidates acknowledged that some voters might not believe them. They understood that in the age of social media, a lie can travel around the world before the truth has time to put its shoes on. But they said they had no choice but to stand up and fight back, because the alternative was to let the mailers define them. They asked voters to do their own research, to go to candidates’ websites, to read their positions on the issues, and to ignore the glossy flyers that arrived in the mail. “We are all tired of this,” one candidate had said earlier, “but we are not tired enough to stop fighting.” It was a good line, but it was also true. The mailers may have succeeded in grabbing attention, but they had also reminded voters why so many people are fed up with politics as usual. The hope among the Democrats who spoke on Tuesday was that this moment of outrage would translate into votes—not just for themselves, but for the idea that campaigns should be about something more than tearing people down. In the end, the mailers might be remembered as a miscalculation: the moment when the attack machine finally went too far, and voters decided they had seen enough. Or they might be just another piece of litter on the road to Election Day. Either way, the people of Nassau County would make the final judgment. And that, as the candidates knew, was exactly how democracy was supposed to work.