SUBURBAN SIGNS — Both parties are already looking to next month’s gubernatorial elections in Kentucky and Mississippi and Virginia’s state legislative races for clues about the 2024 presidential election landscape.

But some of the most revealing contests are taking place off the national radar on New York’s suburban Long Island.

Local races across Long Island will serve as key tests heading into 2024 after Democrats took an especially severe drubbing there last year — the party lost each of the island’s four congressional districts.

“There is a sense that this really can be that canary in a coal mine kind of race as to whether or not the tide is shifting back,” said Jon Kaiman, a Democrat who was the North Hempstead supervisor until 2013 and is now trying to bring the seat back into the party’s column Nov. 7.

The municipal races will test whether suburban frustration over Democrats’ handling of issues such as public safety has begun to ebb after two years of dominating elections.

They will also provide Democrats with a chance to test the messages they’ll deliver in 2024 — including just how much of a political liability Rep. George Santos, the notorious fabulist who represents northwestern Long Island, might be for the Republicans who stood with him in 2022.

The races will give a sense of “whether the local winds, which have been more for the Republicans, are still at the same intensity,” said Larry Levy, executive dean at Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies. “Since Long Island is a typical, almost a quintessential swing suburb, it could be a bellwether for the nation.”

Historically, there hasn’t been a better testing ground for the potency of political messaging in New York than Long Island with its nearly 3 million people. Nearly every major shift in the state’s electorate in even-year elections in recent decades has been prefigured by swings in populous Nassau or Suffolk counties the year prior.

Candidates of both parties say this year will be no less of a bellwether.

“What we do in one election cycle echoes into the next election cycle,” said Suffolk GOP chairperson Jesse Garcia. “We took a huge step in ’21, and it was a record-breaking performance in ’22. I’m cautiously optimistic that the continuation of that building and energy is going to capture the county executive’s office for the first time in 20 years for Republicans.”

Suffolk County will have its first open race for executive in 12 years as Democratic incumbent Steve Bellone hits his three-term limit. The recent Republican strength in the county of 1.5 million residents has led to a sense that the GOP is poised to continue their gains, but Levy said the county executive contest is “a closer race than you would expect.”

If Republican Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine pulls off a win over Democratic former prosecutor Dave Calone and Republicans hold the line elsewhere, Democrats would be seated in just three of the top 28 executive and legislative offices on the island. They held 18 of the jobs just two years ago.

Democrats see the best opportunity to make up lost ground in Kaiman’s race against Republican Supervisor Jennifer DeSena in North Hempstead. DeSena won her first term in 2021 when she helped flip control of a town that Democrats had dominated since the 1980s.

There are also 37 county legislative seats on the ballot on Long Island that can help measure the political tides. In 2021, Democrats held 10 of the 18 legislative seats in Suffolk County; now Republicans hold 11. In Nassau County, Republicans also increased their county legislative majority.

Republicans are using some of the same messaging that has worked effectively for them in recent elections — a focus on crime and the economy in one of the most heavily taxed and expensive places to live in the country.

State Democratic Committee chair Jay Jacobs, who is also the Nassau County chairperson, was optimistic that “crime and bail reform” are not “weighing down the Democratic brand the way they did in ’21 and ’22.”

Democrats are also stressing their tough-on-crime bona fides. In his first ad, Calone, a former federal prosecutor, highlights that he “helped prosecute an Al-Qaeda terrorist” while at the Department of Justice and notes his willingness to criticize fellow Democrats “when they haven’t kept us safe.”

There are also new issues that should play a big role in 2024 that have begun to emerge in this year’s campaigns.

For Democrats, that includes Santos, who was viewed favorably by only 7 percent of his constituents. Much as Democrats tied every Republican to Trump in 2018 and Republicans tethered New York City socialists to Long Island moderates in 2022, Democrats will make sure that voters know the names of every Republican who stood with Santos in his campaign last year.

The long list of the Republican’s scandals is guaranteed to be fresh in voters’ minds this election season. Santos is due to make his next court appearance on Oct. 27, all but guaranteeing he will be the top story in the area when early voting polls open a day later.

But the GOP has also been given a political gift from a higher level of government, thanks to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s unsuccessful plan to force higher-density zoning into suburbs.

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— House GOP votes Jordan out as its speaker pick: In a shocking turn, Jim Jordan lost an internal GOP vote today that was intended to show confidence in him remaining as his party’s speaker designee. The Ohio Republican is now no longer his party’s pick to lead the House. The GOP’s secret ballot vote took place just after Jordan’s third failed bid on the floor to become speaker. The House GOP will now break for the weekend and return for a candidate forum on Monday evening.

— White House to Congress: We want $106 billion for the wars and the border: The Biden administration asked Congress today to approve a massive $106 billion package of emergency aid for Israel and Ukraine, as well as funds for the southern U.S. border and other humanitarian needs. All told, the request includes $61.4 billion for Ukraine, including $44.4 billion to provide Department of Defense equipment for the country, to replenish weapons stocks and to continue providing other military support. The administration is also asking for $14.3 billion for Israel and $9.15 billion for the State Department to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. Republicans have been skeptical of the need to pass additional funding for Ukraine. And administration officials are effectively daring them to vote against those funds by tying them to money to shore up Israel’s defense system.

— Kenneth Chesebro pleads guilty in Georgia: Kenneth Chesebro, the attorney who helped orchestrate Donald Trump’s effort to recruit false electors to subvert the 2020 election, pleaded guilty today in a Georgia court to his role in the scheme. Chesebro’s plea, to a single felony count of conspiring to file false documents, is the first criminal consequence for any of the figures most closely associated with Trump’s bid to upend Congress’ proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021, in part by transmitting certificates from the false electors to then-Vice President Mike Pence. Chesebro’s guilty plea comes a day after another former Trump attorney, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors.

DEBATE COUNTERPROGRAMMING — Donald Trump announced today he will be holding a rally in Hialeah, Fla., on the day of the third GOP presidential debate in neighboring Miami, writes the Messenger.

Both the rally and the debate will happen on the evening of November 8. Earlier in October, Trump urged the RNC to cancel the third debate and all future ones “to refocus its manpower and money on preventing Democrats’ efforts to steal the 2024 election.”

TRUMP’S FLOOR — What is Donald Trump’s “floor” in the Republican primary? Depending on the mood that day, the ambient temperature and humidity of the air or the alignment of the planets, the number usually falls somewhere between 30 and 35%, writes pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson on Substack.

It is hard to imagine him getting less than that, come hell or high water. That means that, with Trump running near 60% in a lot of national polls, somewhere between 25 and 30% of Republican voters are who we might call “Trump And…” voters. Anderson moderated a focus group last week for The New York Times with eleven of these voters. If you’re someone who is desperately hoping that Donald Trump is not ultimately the Republican nominee, click for the biggest glass-half-full takeaways Anderson has coming out of a review of the available polling data and focus group findings…

PEACE PROSPECTS LOW — Egypt’s leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is forging ahead with a peace summit in Cairo on Saturday that he hopes can avert the Gaza crisis from escalating into a broader regional war, but his key problem is the all-important trio who won’t be there: the U.S., Israel and Iran, writes Jamie Dettmer.

Leaders of a dozen countries, including top officials from Turkey, Qatar and Europe, are converging on Egypt for the conference, but the absence of the big three at the heart of the conflict makes it highly unlikely the summit can pull anything out of the hat.

Iran is the heavyweight player looming over the conflict. Tehran is both an ally of Hamas, whose militants killed more than 1,400 people in Israel in the attack of October 7, and of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which many observers fear is poised to enter the war against Israel from the north.

Only increasing the fears that Iran is fomenting a destabilizing proxy war across the Middle East, Tehran-backed militant groups launched a series of rocket and drone attacks on U.S. garrisons in Syria and Iraq this week, while pro-Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen launched three cruise missiles thought to be targeting Israel. The missiles were intercepted by a U.S. warship patrolling the Red Sea.

Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters: “Right now, this conflict is contained between Israel and Hamas, and we’re going to do everything we can to ensure deterrence in the region, so that this does not become a broader conflict,” he said.

A major diplomatic breakthrough looks like it would need a broader vision for peace, however. Walid Jumblatt, a hardened Lebanese political veteran who leads the Druze minority, pointed out the people who really mattered would not be round the table in Cairo. “They are non-players,” he said. “They don’t have any influence. The three players are Israel, Iran and America.”

‘THE MACHINE BREAKER’ — What does it mean to be an ecoterrorist? According to the United States government, if you’re caught sabotaging a pipeline or part of the electric grid or a gold mine, you can be thrown in jail for up to 20 years under terrorism enhancement statutes. But according to Stephen McRae, whose motto is “down with the megamachine” his hatred is for machines rather than people. And that’s a critical distinction. McRae — targeted by the FBI for many years — was first acquainted with journalist Christopher Ketcham in 2016, as they discussed among friends McRae’s goals of taking down the industrial state. Years later, Ketcham, who spent many hours with and learning about McRae, has a profile of him and their relationship out in Harper’s Magazine.