The presidential race pervades the cocktail parties of the wealthy who visit the Hamptons, the summer haven of Manhattan’s rich, and the workplaces of the permanent residents who serve them. The conversations rarely overlap.
Stars of Wall Street and Hollywood who enjoy the beaches, hedge-rowed estates and $100,000-a-month rentals talk about income inequality and expanding economic opportunity. Residents who provide the seaplane set with everything from lobster to massages rail against over-regulation and worry about the country’s direction.
For the past two weeks, the nation’s conversation has been dominated by the party-nominating conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia. If there’s common ground in the Hamptons, it’s that many voters are dissatisfied with both candidates -- Democrat Hillary Clinton, the former New York senator who vacations in the Hamptons and has deep ties to Wall Street, and Republican Donald Trump, the Queens-born billionaire real-estate developer who shuns the playgrounds of New York’s wealthy for Mar-a-Lago, his own seaside resort in Florida.
“You have two very flawed candidates running against each other, so there’s a lot of reasons not to vote for each of them,” said Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Group Partners LP, during a July 15 party thrown by Stephen Scherr, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Bank USA, the company’s consumer division.
“A lot of working people feel their life is not as good as it was,” said Wien, an 83-year-old sporting yellow linen slacks on his evening’s first social stop.
“We don’t really know how the local people feel,” said his wife, Anita, who is chairwoman of the Observatory Group macroeconomic consulting firm.
Republican Retreat
Republican domination of the Hamptons has faded, mirroring lost influence throughout New York, said Damon Hagan, the party’s leader in Southampton. Democrats have registered city-dwelling part-timers as local voters, a tactic that Hagan said “has stifled the voice of the local community.”
The two sides rarely discuss politics with each other.
“You have a dichotomy between the super-rich and the full-timers,” said Steven Gaines, a Sag Harbor author whose “Philistines at the Hedgerow” recorded the Hamptons’ transformation from a stretch of farms and fishing villages to a haven for the wealthy. “You want the guy who mows your lawn to show up.”