First-term Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito and Democratic challenger Laura Gillen agree on one thing: Control of the U.S. House of Representatives extends across their Long Island district.

Republicans know D’Esposito’s re-election will help them maintain their narrow control of Congress, while Democrats view Gillen as one of their best chances to flip a seat from red to blue. Both parties have sent heavyweights to the southern half of Nassau County, hoping that a victory in the House will propel their party’s agenda through Congress and transform Long Island’s 4th District into a microcosm of national struggles for reproductive and transgender rights.

Nationally, Democrats are pledging to restore access to reproductive health care and threatening that Republicans will further limit it if they win. In New York’s 4th Congressional District, polls show a majority of voters support abortion rights.

D’Esposito says he is a champion of women, promising in an ad that he will “never” vote for a national abortion ban, while Gillen says his support for Republican Party leadership suggests the opposite. The question itself is on the ballot in the form of Proposition 1which would enshrine abortion rights and anti-discrimination protections in the state constitution — and has reinvigorated a fierce cross-party debate.

Nassau County voters are well aware that the fight is happening in their backyard. Olga Young, a Gillen supporter in Hempstead, told Gothamist she fears growing restrictions could eliminate access to abortion for victims of rape or incest.

“It’s crazy,” Young said. “The government should have nothing to do with this.”

But Barbara Truglio, a D’Esposito supporter, said she thought the topic was blown out of proportion. “I think the abortion issue, everyone has made a big deal out of it just to be so political,” she said.

Gillen made the topic personal, describing an experience nearly 20 years ago when her doctors discovered that her third child, a girl, had no heartbeat. Gillen was in her second trimester and was scheduled to undergo an abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E.

“This is a life-threatening procedure,” she said during a roundtable discussion in her campaign office in Freeport. “We need doctors who know how to do these things and we need doctors to know that if they go through training to learn how to do these procedures, they’re not going to go to jail for it, because this procedure has me saved his life.”

It is now illegal to provide certain forms of abortion-related care in 41 states, including 13 with total bans on the procedure, according to compiled data by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization. States with the most restrictive abortion laws now have fewer doctors work, and maternal mortality rates are increasing.

New York is one of 10 states considering an amendment to protect abortion access this election, as Democrats across the country sound the alarm on reproductive rights in the wake of the The United States Supreme Court’s reversal in 2022 of Roe v. Wade. The New York ballot measure would grant constitutional protections against discrimination on several fronts, including pregnancy status and gender identity.

The latter has become a hot spot in the competitive Long Island district. Some of the measure’s most vocal opponents are D’Esposito’s biggest supporters, who have switched over to the Republican Party. national campaign against transgender rights, covering the neighborhood with signs telling people to vote no to “protect girls’ sports.”

“We can’t keep them in our headquarters because everyone wants them,” D’Esposito said of the signs.

That message, which suggests the amendment would change the makeup of children’s sports teams, has been debunked by legal experts, including the New York City Bar Association. The measure only codifies existing protections against discrimination, and nothing in this measure would change laws relating to children’s athletics.

Gillen in turn criticized Republicans for making false claims about Proposition 1.

“It’s not about who will play on which sports teams, no matter how many times they say that,” she said. “They can read the text. That’s not what it’s about.

This is not the only national debate resonating in this race. On immigration, D’Esposito and Gillen are striving to appear the toughest on border security and are trying to associate themselves with what they see as failures of federal policy.

Spotlight on the country

The last Newsday/Siena College Poll gives the advantage in the race to Gillen with 12 points ahead of D’Esposito. But the feeling on the ground is of a much closer race, where both candidates believe they have a chance of winning if they can gather enough party loyalists.

Perhaps that’s why their biggest campaign events aren’t designed to attract a handful of moderate or unaffiliated voters, but rather to energize their respective bases. Former President Donald Trump held another rally in the 4th Congressional District last month, and House Speaker Mike Johnson visited several times to defend D’Esposito.

At the local level, Nassau County’s vaunted Republican machine is steadily strengthening its base, seeking to prove it can hold on to this swing district despite its failure in the last February special election. They gather weekly in a parking lot behind a TD bank in Franklin Square, directly across from the Nassau County Republican Party headquarters. A life-size inflatable elephant serves as the backdrop for a small stage where county party chairman Joe Cairo rallies with candidates before fanning out across the district with campaign signs.

On a recent Saturday, many voters in attendance said they worked for the town of Hempstead and Nassau County, which are controlled by Republican elected officials. Many wore T-shirts for the local chapter of CSEA, the Civil Service Employees Association, a major public employee union that supported D’Esposito in the race.

CSEA member Barbara Truglio said she is tired of seeing negative ads on television about race. She has opposed critical coverage of D’Esposito, including a recent The New York Times story that found it hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work in his district office while also hiring a woman with whom he was having an affair.

“We’re just going to destroy him and his family?” » said Truglio.

She rejected how Democrats presented the risk to women’s health care and blamed their party for problems at the U.S. southern border. She also suggested that voters will make their decision based on where they get their information.

“We have media, newspapers, radio stations that do not hear the other side. So people really don’t know what’s going on in the world. They ignore it,” Truglio said. “And that’s how they’re going to vote, just with their ignorance.”

The competition has always been close, even when the candidates faced each other two years ago. D’Esposito, a retired NYPD detective, beat Gillen in 2022 by 3.5 percentage points. At the time, D’Esposito was on the Hempstead Town Council, while Gillen was the Hempstead town supervisor, putting the two at odds on local issues. She describes him as her “number one obstructer in chief.” He calls her a “far-left progressive.”

Voters in the district have tended to the right in recent elections. While President Joe Biden won the district by more than 14 points in 2020, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin beat Gov. Kathy Hochul two years ago by nearly 6 points.

These margins allowed Democratic leaders to come out in force. In the space of a week earlier this month, three major House leaders came out to support Gillen on the campaign trail.

“This is one of four seats we need to win to flip control of the House of Representatives,” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told the crowd at a get-out-the-vote rally in Hempstead. “No pressure on you all, but we have to win one of the four seats.”

As they filed out of an auditorium at Kennedy Memorial Park, voters said they felt that pressure on the ground in their communities, where their neighbors were putting up yard signs for Trump and other Republicans.

“It makes you sleep with one eye open,” said Anayo Michelle, a Gillen supporter and Democratic voter in the district, who described her background as African, Latino, African American and Caribbean.

Michelle said she struggled to understand how some of her neighbors could support Trump and other Republicans when the party spreads debunked lies on Haitian immigrants and denigrates Puerto Rico like a “floating island of waste”.

She said the prospect of change is “exciting, but scary.”

Olga Young, a Hempstead community leader, said her support for Gillen was intended to ensure that Vice President Kamala Harris could be effective in the White House if elected president. “It has to have the support of Congress, and so this requires all of us to do it,” Young said.

For voters on both sides of the race, the national attention is a new phenomenon for the district — brought on after victories in that district helped give Republicans majority control.

Former Republican Rep. Peter King, who represented a neighboring district for nearly three decades, said all the recent visits from House Democratic and Republican leaders are a sign that this district is the new battleground.

“Whether the Democrats or Republicans in Washington like it or not,” King said, “Long Island is the center of the world.”