Staten Island, NY – After a long week of casting ballots and voting for the island’s next borough presidents and councilmen, Staten Island has officially elected their new candidates. No surprise that nearly all of the elected were Republican as the borough is majority red, but there was one Democratic nominee voted in. Kamillah Hanks was elected as the new North Shore City Council.
“The Democrats are here and I am so proud to stand here with the slate of a lifetime,” Hanks told SILive.com. “We’re fighting for the underdog,” she continued. “We’re fighting for people within the equities disparities, to level the playing field to fight for the people who can’t fight for themselves because we understand what loss is. And because we understand what loss is, that’s kind of what makes us Democrats.”
Kamillah Hanks expressed her dedication to serving the North Shore community for over 20 years before being elected into office. As for the newly elected borough president Vito Foseella, he joined the race quite late but managed to claim victory. Fossella was formerly the borough president back in 1997 and managed to take the seat again in 2021. “Fortunately, the good hard-working taxpayers… Those are the people who stood up today and said we’re not going to take it anymore. We’re mad as hell and we’re going in a better direction,” Fossella said in a speech.
According to SILive.com, Fossella was endorsed by former president Donald Trump and spoke of the former president’s congratulations on the victory. With that the crowd went wild and started chanting Trump’s name, which Fossella recorded to send back to him. However, Democrat nominee Mark Murphy felt differently about the decision to put Fossella back in office.
“I really think this country is moving in a very, very dangerous direction. And we need to bring back sane and reasonable people and bring back the real ideas,” Murphy said in his concession speech.
Leticia Remaouro, a conservative candidate, expressed gratitude to the crowd in her concession speech although she lost the election for borough president. “We did it! We made history. I’m the first woman to make it to the general election,” she said.
As for Ron Castorina Jr., he took victory in his win as the next Supreme Court Judge. Castorina expressed being gay didn’t stop him from being a conservative. “You can be a gay Republican and you can still be conservative, and you don’t have to be gay the way that they want you to be.” (A little puzzling as to what he meant by that)
Conservative Staten Islanders hope this majority red election will influence the candidates running for mayor, seeing as how Mayor Bill de Blasio handled a lot of situations in NYC, sometimes poorly. “Hopefully the candidates [for mayor] observed what the past mayor did to see if they can make a better change to what they did, or maybe they can bring something different and maybe have a better impact for Staten Island,” said Andrew Garcia, Staten Island resident.
